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, 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 g 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.    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 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,

Creator of All: A Homily for the National Indigenous Day of Prayer

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on  21 June, 2026, the Fourth Sunday After Pentecost and the National Indigenous Day of Prayer.   Readings for the NDIP:  Isaiah 40:25-31, Psalm 19, Philippians 4:4-9

John 1:1-18

 Every year the plough is obliterating the last traces of our  predecessors on this soil. Every year the axe lays low some invaluable witness to the ages which have elapsed since populous villages of another race were scattered far and wide through our now lifeless forests. We are fast forgetting that the bygone ages even of the new world were filled with living men.  

Those words were spoken in 1852 by one Captain Lefroy, who was a member of a professional and learned society, The Canadian Institute,that had been newly founded by Sir Sandford Fleming.   Lefroy’s thoughts, given almost 175 years ago, remind us that the indigenous heritage of this part of Ontario has long been known, at least through the efforts of a few, mostly amateur researchers.

Dedicated amateur researchers continue to remind us of our links with our indigenous past.  Last Sunday Joy and I were at St Luke’s for their late morning service, following which we heard a fascinating presentation by their parish historian, Dorothy Shropshire.  Dorothy and her late husband Jim have spent years studying the Petun people, who lived in the area known today as Bluewater and Clearwater Township.   Dorothy spoke knowledgeably about the various Petun sites on the hills and and riverbanks around Creemore.

You won’t find any Petun peoples nearby today.   In the 1600s the Petun nation was ravaged by disease and by proxy wars among the local tribes competing for the lucrative fur trade with the Europeans.    The surviving Petun peoples fled this area.  Today they are called the Wyandot, and they live as far away as Montreal and Kansas.

Today, which we observe in the Anglican Church of Canada as the National Indigenous Day of Prayer, is about remembering the past, but more importantly its about reconciliation in the present and new relationships in the future.   The Petun may be gone from this area, but indigenous people in their many cultures, languages, and places, are a vital part of our country and of church.

We may not have an indigenous community close by, but today gives us many opportunities to think about the First Nations people we do occasionally see on our streets and in our church.   The readings we’ve heard today from the First Nations Version of the Bible remind us of the story of Pentecost and how the Holy Spirit desires to communicate the good news of our faith to all peoples in their own languages.   Our first two readings, from isaiah and Psalm 19, help us to see with fresh eyes how the natural world is a gift from God the Creator, an insight which is a great gift of indigenous spirituality to our church.   

There are many rich themes to explore here today, but the one I think I can do best in the space of a summer sermon is found in the First Nations translation I read from just now, where we hear how John the Baptist came “Into the wilderness of the Land of Promise (Judea)”.  Promised by whom?   Now we can see what the translators and editors of the First Nations Bible were trying to do.   Renaming Judea as “Land of Promise” takes us back to the story of Genesis and the coveanant promise that God makes with Abraham.

Several Sundays ago we heard in the first reading how God says to Abraham “To your offspring I will give this land”, and Genesis mentions in passing that “At that time the Canaanites were in the land” (Gen 1.6).   One of the more unpalatable aspects of Genesis is that the Canaanites are basically an indigenous people, pagans and heathens, who have no right to their and deserve to be dispossessed by God’s people.

Fast forward to the 1500s and 1600s, the so-called Age of Exploration, and the same story of dispossession played out and became part of early Canadian history.   Those 19th century amateur scholars like Captain Godfrey were uneasily aware of “our predecessors” who were being erased.   Today we are, with the help of indigenous Canadians, rethinking this history and trying on new names, so we now think of “Indians” as “The First Nations” or “indigenous”, and we sometimes, think of ourselves as “settlers”.  And, today, we’ve heard new names for the divine, such as “Creator Sets Free” for Jesus, “Great Spirit” for the Holy Spirit, and “Creator” for God the Father.

THis week in our bible study, we asked whether it might change our spirituality as Christians if we were to think of God more often as “Creator”.  We agreed that if the term “Creator” becamse habitual, then we might think about one another differently because we are all created by the same God and created in the image of that God, and we enjoy earth, creation, as a gift given to all of us.   And if we are all created, and all given the same gifts of this earth to share, then surely that commonality as children of the Creator is greater than any of our differences?

This wonderful and mysterious relationship between difference and unity is at the heart of our Trinitarian faith, as the American monk Curtis Almquist beautifully explains:

We are distinct persons, all of us, and yet our essence is the same. We are all children of God. We all need water and food, shelter and rest, love and safety, education and encouragement, health and hope to be alive and thrive. … We must be in relationship with one another. We have been created by a God in relationship – a Trinity of Persons – who invites us all to be in personal relationship – relationship with one another and in relationship with all that God has created – because this is the essence of God, to be in a circle of  relationship with all whom God has created

Being in relationship - genuine, authentic, loving relationship - takes time, patience, and effort.  Our church has slowly learned to work on its relationship with our First Nations and Inuit fellow Anglicans as we’ve listened to their stories and made steps towards reconciliation.  Our country likewise continues to  work slowly towards better relationships with indigenous Canadians over things like land claims and resource rights.  And, when as with the 51st state talk from certain Americans, we suddenly feel a new appreciation for the First Nations and what it means to be threatened with conquest and dispossession.  Our natural reacgtion to such talk is to think "This land may be your land, this land may be my land, but it's not your land, Uncle Sam!"  But, when we we sing how this land is your land and this land is my mind, as we think about what Canada means to us today, that "us" includes French and British, First Nations and Inuit, all the various communities of newer Canadians in the sports bars and in sthe streets cheering their World Cup teams, and yes, during this Pride Month, gay and straight and trans, because my dear friends and fellow saints, this land belongs to all of us, because it was given to all of us by our Creator God.  May we learn to live together on this land.