Divine Decryption: A Homily for the Ninth Sunday After Pentecost (A)

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 26 July, 2026, the Ninth Sunday After Pentecost (A).  Readings for this Sunday:  Genesis 29:15-28; Psalm 105:1-11, 45C; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52.

"The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (Mt 13.33).

Often after the Eucharist, our choir sings a piece that begins “Seek ye first the kingdom of God” which uses Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount.   Today I want to talk about how, in our gospel reading, the Kingdom of Heaven, or the things of God if you will, seem hidden but are revealed in surprising ways to ordinary people.

First, let’s talk about things that are hidden.  How many of you, I wonder, do shop online?  Do you trust making purchases over the internet?  I shop online a fair bit, and while I am sometimes nervous about hackers and data leaks, I I trust (or maybe just hope) that my credit card information is protected.   Big online business platforms - credit cards, PayPal, and such - use a process called encryption to protect us by hiding our personal and financial information from unpleasant and dishonest people.  Encryption just happens to be from the Greek word kruptos, meaning concealed or hidden.  And, wouldn’t you know it, in the original Greek of Matthew’s gospel, when the woman in the parable puts the yeast in the flour, the word used is egkryptō, which can mixed but also has the sense that she hides the yeast in the flour.

Why is this worth mentioning?  There’s a difference between the two words that shapes our expectations of what comes next.  If you’re falling a recipe that says to mix so much yeast into so much flour, that seems normal.  However, if you’re told to hide so much yeast in so much flour, isn’t that a strange way to phrase the recipe?

In today’s series of short and pithy parables, Jesus is using unusual language and surprising outcomes to say something about how the kingdom of heaven seems to be concealed until it is discovered in surprising and bountiful ways.   Jesus tells his disciples that the parables are keys to understanding “the secrets of the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 14.10), and in today’s short parables secret, hidden things are revealed, or decrypted, if you will, to those willing to seek them.

Thus in today’s parade of parables, a tiny seed becomes a mighty habitat for birds, a little yeast makes many loaves, a treasure is hidden in a field, a pearl is priceless only to the one who knows its true value, and an abundance of fish are found by those who know how to catch them and who know what to look for.  Taken together, these little gems of stories tell us that God is present and at work in ways that bless and enrich us, but to share in those blessings and to share them with others, we need to seek God out and cooperate with God in God’s work.

Another thing worth noting is that the scenes and the people in the parables are generally ordinary - a flock of birds chattering in bushes, a woman baker at work, a merchant, a fisherman.   These are ordinary treasures for ordinary people - we are a long way removed from Indiana Jones territory.  So I think we can say that in telling these little stories about largely ordinary things, Jesus is talking to us and to people like us.

And really, what could be more ordinary than the daily labour of baking bread?  It’s often said that Jesus knew his audience and spoke to them accessibly.   I like to think that Jesus included this parable for the women he saw in the crowd, just as could speak to farmers and fishermen.   Yeast, or leaven, was common in the ancient world.  It was used to raise the heavy, round barley loaves that were a staple most days, except for Passover, when Jews ate unleavened or flat bread to recall the flight from Egypt. Since there was no refrigeration or preservatives, a woman of the house would bake a few loaves as a daily chore.  So, a woman baking a few loaves of bread, what could be more familiar to Jesus’ audience?

Except that this woman is not just baking for a single household.   The parable states that she “hid” the yeast in three measures of flour.  How much was that?  According to some authorities, a measure of flour in the ancient world was between 40-60 pounds.   So the woman is baking for a crowd, enough bread to feed a hundred or more people!   And that idea of abundance fits the logic of these parables, that the things of kingdom of heaven may seem ordinary but, when revealed, rich and abundant and of benefit to many.  

I am sure that Matthew wanted us to connect the yeast parable with a miracle that he describes in the next chapter, the feeding of the multitide, which we will hear as next Sunday’s gospel (Mt 14:31-21).  In that story, Jesus is speaking to a large crowd and everyone is hungry.  All he has are five barley loaves and a few fish.  He looks at the five thousand hungry folks, looks at the food, prays a prayer which is probably “Father, you got this”, and there’s more than enough food for all.   This miracle is what the parable of the yeast points to.  This miracle is the kingdom of heaven in action.

This is how the kingdom of heaven works, and it’s not just Jesus who makes it happen.  Any ordinary group of folks who go into a church kitchen and cook for strangers is the yeast at work.    Anyone who offers rest and shelter for the tired, the weary, and the stranger is a sheltering mustard tree.   Anyone who chooses to follow Jesus in a violent and vengeful world has found the treasure in the field, has bought the priceless pearl.   Anytime we are open to God’s power working in us, we are opening ourselves to the transformative power of the kingdom of heaven.

Here’s a final thought.   If these parables tell us that the kingdom of heaven ais about us discovering the truly valuable things in life, then we can take comfort in knowing that God knows our true value and that God values us far more than we can imagine.  In our second lesson, we heard Paul say that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.   Each of us is a treasure found and claimed by Jesus, and each of us, in the secrecy of our own private, humble lives, can be a gift that can show the kingdom of heaven and the love of God to those around us. 

Wheat Or Weeds? A Homily for the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, and St Luke's, Creemore, on Sunday, 19 July, 2026, the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost.  Texts for this day:  Genesis 28:10-19A; Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. (Mt 13.26).

 

Do you talk to your plants?  What do you say to them?

I talk a bit to my plants because I feel affection for them.   I feel proud of the sunflowers that I started from seeds, and which are now as tall as I am, and I say “way to go!”.   I feel distressed when I see some wilted because I’ve neglected to water them and I say things like “have a drink, guys, you’ll feel better.  Sorry I forgot you”.  I see the black eyed susans about to open and I say “that’s it, almost time to shine”.

Maybe if I had planted a whole field, like the man in the parable from today’s gospel, I wouldn’t have time for such sentiment.    I’ve known farmers who were hard-eyed business people, just as capable of reading a spreadsheet as they could read the weather.    I’m just a guy with a little garden,  and I grow plants not because I want to make money from a harvest, but simply because I love them.   And really, the parable isn’t about plants, it’s about us, and how the good and bad seed grows in all of us.  Because in the parable, the owner of the field represents God, and the plants represent us, who are loved by God the gardener, and the hope of the gospel is in what God will do about the gardens of our own souls.

“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field”.  Whenever we hear Jesus talking about “the kingdom of heaven”, we know that he is trying to say something about how his father’s will and desire for us work.  Jesus tells his disciples that the parables are keys to understanding “the secrets of the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 14.10), but the parables aren’t that hard to understand. 

 Last Sunday we heard a parable where Jesus talked about a man scattering seed lavishly and he said that the seed was “the word of the kingdom”.   The parable points to the generosity of God.  The seed is distributed far and wide, in the same way that Jesus here speaks to such “great crowds” that he has to use a boat as a pulpit.  So the message wants to be broadcast as widely as the sower spreads the seeds.

If the seed is “the word of the kingdom”, then the plant that grows from the seed would seem to represent the values of the kingdom of God: God’s love, God’s justice, and mercy, put into action by those who love God, like those in the Beatitudes who “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Mt 5.6) and those who “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Mt 6.33).y to 

In last week’s gospel, the parable of the sower and the seed, the emphasis seemed to be on the quality of the soil.   Those who were indifferent to the kindgom of God, or who had short term enthusiasm, were rocky and poor soil, but those who truly hear and understand are good soil.   That explanation might make some of us feel pretty smug.   After all, we’re here in church, we give via PAR, we try to be good people, so we must be pretty good soil.   But .. if that’s so, where did the weeds come from?

“[W]hile everbody was alseep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away” (Mt 13.25).  So these weeds aren’t dandelions or all the other unwelcome plants that stubbornly return to our gardens year after year.   This weeds are sabotage.  They are hostile to the plants and they are hostile to the values of the kingdom of heaven.    In other words, we are back to Paul’s discussion of the pervasiveness of sin that we’ve been hearing recently in our second readings from Romans.

When I preached on Romans recently, I said that Paul’s description of sin is like a garden that becomes infested with weeds.   Some say weeds are just plants that are in the wrong place, but weeds can also infest and starve those plants that we’ve nurtured, watered, and talked to.  I once saw an experienced gardener almost reduced to tears when she realized that her newly designed beds were being choked with bindweed, a particularly aggressive weed.   

It’s hard to pull up bindweed without damaging the plants we want to keep.  In today’s parable, some commentators identify the weeds as darnell, sometimes called false weed”.   The farmer in the parable knows that the weeds can’t be removed without damaging the wheat.  He is patient.  There will be a time, he says, when the wheat can be safely gathered and the weeds can then be burned.  But now isn’t the time.  For the time being, wheat and weed must remain intermixed until God’s good time, even though the instinct of the servants is to go out and pull up the weeds, thus wrecking the crop.

I said earlier that in this parable, we are the plants, but which plants are we?   Are we wheat?  Are we weeds?  Or are we both?  This week I read a lovely meditaton on this gospel reading by the Rev. Ben Dehart, and I’ll quote a bit of it.

The field is the world, Jesus says. All of it. But the world is not only out there. It runs through the church. The pew. Down the middle of you. The line between the wheat and the weed is not the line between you and everyone else. You have found the weed in yourself before. The thing you have prayed over and pulled at, and it comes up green again every spring. Start pulling and you take up half of yourself with it.

The temptation to go pull weeds anyway is very strong.  We live in a hyper-polarized age where our politics and our discourse seems to be about labeling the other party as evil and refusing to see our own flaws.   As Jesus said, take the plank from your own eye before you go after the speck in someone else’s eye.

To return to the imagery of our parable can’t weed ourselves if we are part wheat and part weed.   As Paul says in Romans, if we know what we should and shouldn’t do, and repeatedly do the opposite, then we are enslaved to sin and the only one who can rescue us is Jesus (Rom 7:15-21).

In today’s lesson from Romans, Paul writes that the world itself, all of creation, is suffering and longing for it’s renewal:  “creation itself will be set free” (Rom 8:18-23).   One of the disciplines and virtues of the Christian faith is patience, to know the difference between what we can change and what God, in God’s good time will transform into something better.    A planet burning and overheated groans for its rescue.  The hungey, homless, and ignored groan for a greedy society to truly see them.   And we, in our own confused, hurting, and secret lives, long to be healed and restored. We do what we can do in our time, but we wait for God to ultimately restore creation.

We are wheat, and we are weeds.  And we are loved by our creator and gardener, loved far more than we can possibly love the plants in our own care.    That mighty and loving gardener will not give up on us and he will give us the time and the grace to grow into the likeness of Christ. to transform from weed into golden wheat.   And so, as Ben Dehart writes beautifully, God the gardener will let the wheat and the weed in us grow, “Not because he can’t tell them apart [but] because he will not give up on the weed”.    

Might As Well Face It, We're Addicted To Sin: A Homily for the Sixth Sunday After Pentecost

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, and Good Shepherd, Stayner, the Sixth Sunday After Pentecost, 5 July, 2026.  Readings for this Sunday: Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Psalm 45:11-1; Romans 7:15-25A; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.   Romans 7:19-20

Today I want to talk about how we can understand Paul's talk about sin in Romans by thinking of the addictive behaviours that our society tries to lure us into.

One of my favourite summer pasttimes is watching baseball.   Preferably a Jays game, but any team will do, really.   I love the geometry of the field, the colours, and above all the drama and rhythm of the game itself.    But one thing I don’t enjoy is the rise of the sports gambling commercials and the way that revenues from betting seem to be taking over the sport, despite the fact that gambling is an addictive and ruinous pasttime.

I have no desire to bet on sports, or on anything else, really, and I watch those commercials with a bit of a sneer.  I’m like the Pharisee looking at the tax collector and saying “I thank God that I’m not like that sinner”.    But, if I’m being honest, I know that I have my own addiction issues.

My son taught me an acronym, TSLAMP.  Time Spent Looking At My Phone.   Y screen time numbers are way higher than I’d like them to be.  Our phones and the apps they provide can consume vast amounts of our time because they are designed to be addictive.  Likes and clicks fuel social media, providing their little dopamine rewards so our brains are actually rewired to want more affirmation, more likes to our posts, higher friend counts.    Our phones make online shopping easier, but they encourage so called “retail therapy”.   Excessive screen time shortens attention spans, makes us less social, and deprives us of sleep.

We could blame all this on the tech companies, but really we live in an addictive culture, of which online gambling and social media may just be symptoms.  We know how powerfully addictive drugs, nicotine, and alcohol can be.  Calorie and sugar rich foods and drinks are addictive and lead to poor health outcomes.   Pornography, especially in its online forms, is likewise powerfully addictive, distorting sexual behaviour from adults to teens.   Whatever the cause, I think it’s fair to say that addictions have a destructive impact on our mental and physical health, on our relationships and families, and on our society.  All these come from somewhere, they don’t just exist.  They enrich those who make and sell them, and so they are tolerated even when we know they are harmful.

So while I am saying that we live in an addictive society, I don’t say this to be a scold, nor do I mean to be a sociologist, though I will say that if we put more resources into addiction treatment and made it harder for people to make money victimizing others, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.   Rather, speaking as a priest and as a preacher, I am saying that if we recognize that we live inanaddictive society, the we can better understand the condition that, we call sin, and we can better understand Paul’s point in Romans if we see sin as profoundly addictive.

Sin is a primary theme of Paul’s writing, and particularly in Romans, which we have been sampling of late in our second readings.   You many have noticed that Paul talks about sin in the singular.   Not sins, as in various misdemeanours that we might avoid through greater willpower, but sin as a condition that ensnares and entangles us, like weeds choking a garden.

When Paul says that “the evil I do not want is what I do”, he isn’t talking about a momentary temptation to do a bad thing.   We wouldn’t say that the drug addict stealing money for another fix, or the sports fan spending the grocery money on a betting site, is something that can be fixed by just being stronger.   Sin for Paul is an inbuilt inclination to destructive behaviour. 

Another way to put it is that Paul sees sin as slavery, and he sees Christ as the only one who can liberate us from sin.   In 12 step programs and AA, liberation is described as a higher power.  Several times in my military service, I counselled young soldiers who needed AA but couldn’t find make themselves believe in or trust this higher power.  I would always ask them why they needed to go to AA in the first place, and they’d say it was because of the booze.  So I’d say, then you accept that alcohol has power over you?  Yes, they’d say.  So it seems to me that only an even higher power will save you.   And that is Paul’s message in a nutshell.

Sometimes religion is seen, unhelpfully, as a way of keeping track of our misdemeanours, and hopefully keeping them to a minimum, by submitting ourselves to discipline.   And yes, there is a discipline that is part of our Christian faith, which is why we think of self control as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  The gifts of the Spirit are part of Jesus’ willingness to come to our aid, because Jesus recognizes our burdens and he understands our entanglement in sin.  When Jesus says in our gospel reading that his yoke is easy and his burden is light, he is speaking to the truly burdened - those crushed by all forms of oppression - to those crushed by violence, imperialism, poverty, hunger, and all the addictive things that exist out there.

Thinking of sin this way helps us to resist the temptation to see the sinner as the problem.  The problem is sin, in all its forms, and the answer is the kingdom of God, the justice of God, and the solidarity of God in Christ who stands with the burdened. 

Today Jesus’ invitation comes to the those ashamed of the images on their computers, to those desperate for attention on social media, to those whose brains and bodies are taught to crave harmful things.  Jesus comes to break the chains, open the doors, and free us from our burdens. Jesus wants to free us from all those things that ensnare and entangle us.  Addiction is part of sin, and sin is hard to say no to, unless we first let Jesus say yes to us.  And Jesus will always say yes to each of us, because Jesus loves us and wants us to be free, to love him, to love one another, and yes, even to love the true and hurting selves beneath our addictions to sin.

In a few minutes we will together say our prayer of confession.   I encourage you to pay a little more attention to the words, for yourself and for all those pin your lives who are hurting.   And as I pray the words of absolution, I encourage you to hear them for what they are, as words of freedom and release from the captivity of our addictive sins,