Seventh Sunday after Trinity by Fr Jack
Genesis 28.10-19
St Paul to the Romans 8.12-25
St Matthew’s Gospel 13 24-30,36-43
’Oooh heaven is a place on Earth’, so sang Belinda Carlisle.
We’ll sort of. In fairness, it might be somewhat unfair to expect pop singers to also be rigorous theologians. That is, after all, not their job.
But Belinda isn’t far of course. Heaven is not a ‘place’ in any simple sense of that word; or on earth; but it is amongst us.
A group of us have just returned from a Northern Saints Pilgrimage to some of the holiest sites in England. The great shrines of the Anglo Saxon saints on whose shoulders we stand to celebrate the Eucharist this morning.
Some people speak of holy places as ‘thin places’ where the veil between heaven and earth seems especially thin.
But that isn’t to say that you have to get in a minibus to chase God, like a bunch of twitchers chasing an elusive migrating bird. God isn’t just out there or in the unworldy. God and God’s grace is utterly intertwined, revealed, and met in the stuff of life.
This is shown in today’s Scriptures. We’ll come to that in a minute. It is also a core strand of the way we Christians live. We believe that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ. The eternal became temporal. The being beyond all existence became stuff, in the flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth. This same God continues to choose stuff today to bring us His life and grace: Bread and Wine, His Body and Blood. Human love, the sacrament of marriage. The water of the font - an everlasting inheritance in Baptism. This approach that God takes, and the theological orientation it requires of us means that we can say: God is not far away, we just need to open our eyes. God is here, because God chooses to be here. God desires us to know God’s love.
So, turning to today’s readings… we find that in Jacob’s ladder today. The first lesson. Jacob is surprised, because of course God does this thing, not Jacob. It doesn’t happen because Jacob is clever, or highly trained, or super human. But because Jacob personifies God’s people (Jacob is also called Israel, just to drive this point home), Jacob personifies all of the Jewish people, and in that sense all of us - and heaven is opened and angels ascend and descend before this every-man, on this little patch of earth. This bit of ground is not special either, neither the stone. That’s the whole point: because this patch of earth is every patch of earth, and this Jacob is every person, so it is a doorway to heaven. That’s the whole point: heaven and earth gloriously intertwined. It is true not because of us and anything we do, but because God desires it, and it is so. How wonderful. Literally.
St Paul writes in the same theological landscape to the Romans today. The whole of creation, he says, is groaning, heavily pregnant, with the Kingdom of God, eager and waiting for that Kingdom of glory and hope to be brought to birth. A kingdom of glory, freedom, hope, joy (he says) of which Jesus is the King, and the first example (the first fruits), and into which we (by the Holy Spirit) are growing, and becoming and revealing.
What a vision of life? … ’What did you do today, dear?’
Oh I did my tax return. I went to work or school or the shops, or I waited for BT to come.
No…. What did you do today, dear?
I looked for the Kingdom of God in my midst. I desired God’s coming, as God desires me to recognise His presence in our midst…
What did you do today, dear?
I sought the Kingdom, and I sought to share my seeking with everyone around me. Hold that thought.
Let’s bring in today’s Gospel and see where it takes us. You can read the parables in several different directions. The Church Fathers and Mothers loved playing with the multiple layers of imagery and analogy in Jesus’ parables.
So, one track (amongst several) to take with the wheat and the tares today is an image of the world with God the sower, sowing the wheat of His kingdom in the world, also (as we know) full of tares. Even here and now the Kingdom is amongst us, even amongst the tares of greed and violence and pride and destruction, sickness and worry and difficulty. These tares are real in our own lives and the world at large. And we of course work and pray for the day when we are free (as St Paul told us today) of war and injustice, sickness and death, and all that is not the Kingdom. But in the meantime we also rejoice in the signs and reality of the Kingdom in our midst, wheat amongst the weeds.
And this is where the rubber hits the road for us.
What did you do today, dear? Well, in (not apart from - remember the incarnation. God is not in a box over here, but here to be recognised in all of it) in everything I did today, dear, I sought to recognise and join in with the Kingdom of God. In how I did my shopping, how I swept the balcony, how I joined that zoom call, how I was at school or work or home, not alongside but IN everything else I did, I was spotting the signs of the Kingdom. The signs of God’s life, and rejoicing in them so joining in with them. All that Scripture tells us the Kingdom is: forgiveness, mercy, love, service, beauty, humility, excellence, sacrifice, joy… all these are Jacob’s ladder moments, all these works of the Spirit bearing witness to what is really going on in the universe (because surprise, surprise my tax return isn’t really the main thing).
So, Belinda Carlisle, heaven is not a place on earth, it is always more than we can imagine or desire, but it is also here and now AND hereafter and always.
And we Christians have a job to do, for our own good, and on behalf of all creation. Our lives are spent looking for and becoming part of the signs, the wheat of this Kingdom, in our midst. Our lives are spent opening our eyes in places and people that might SEEM nothing special, except that God is here, and we are standing in the midst of angels singing (not Belinda Carlisle) but heaven’s song: Holy, holy, holy.