What Love Looks Like

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

—Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

Hope

Hope has two beautiful daughters.
Their names are Anger and Courage.
Anger with the way things are and
Courage to be sure they do not remain the same.

—Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is an unnatural act.

—Philip Yancey

Forgiveness is not just an occasional act:
it is a permanent attitude.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.

—Dag Hammarskjold

Forgiveness is the final form of love.

—Reinhold Niebuhr

Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life.

—George MacDonald

Forgiveness is the remission of sins. For it is by this that what has been lost, and was found, is saved from being lost again.

—Saint Augustine of Hippo

For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

—Jesus Christ in Matthew 6:14

Believing in Whom?

Tell us straight that you do not believe in the Gospel of Christ; for you believe what you want in the Gospel and disbelieve what you want. You believe in yourself rather than in the Gospel.

—Augustine of Hippo (354-430), from his Confessions

Hope, anger and courage

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.

—Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

A Mixed Body

In tomorrow's Gospel reading Jesus tells his followers that

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.

Jesus did not mention just any weed. He actually mentioned Tares, which refers to the "bearded darnel" or lolium temulentum which was a grass that looked like wheat until the ears appeared. In other words, the weeds and the wheat looked alike until you saw their fruit. This fits Jesus' teaching elsewhere that you know someone by the fruit they produce, with good trees producing good fruit and bad trees producing bad fruit. The real downside to the Tares is that the seeds were a poison and so if you wait until the harvest you will have poisoned your field for next year.

So as he always does in his gardening stories, Jesus turns good gardening advice on its head to show us the world as God sees it. As God sees the world, we leave the weeds and wheat together until the end of time. Let the plants grow until they have time to bear their fruit and then be judged not for the company they keep, but for their own actions. Elsewhere Jesus tells of the good fruit of the kingdom as being things like caring for widows and orphans in their distress, visiting those in prison, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and so on. These are not how one earns one's way to heaven, but they are instead the fruit of someone who sees others and their needs the way God sees them and then reaches out in love to make a difference.

The grace in this parable is that humans are not to judge. We are not to try to weed our churches until they are purified bodies with no weeds among the wheat. Instead we are to be patient and wait as God is patient and waits and we are to remain a mixed body of wheat and tares, not knowing which is which and often being wrong if we tried to guess. We trust that this mixed body is what God called us to be.

Though the parable leaves no room for a tare to become wheat, Jesus other teaching does allow for that possibility. And so we hope that the tares will come into a relationship with God which will transform them into wheat between now and the judgment. And so we keep the threshold of the church low, not looking to block certain types of people, but welcoming all into our mixed body where we all work together toward the coming kingdom. We also pray for the parts of ourselves that remain weeds will be dealt with between now and the judgement. We don't expect to find perfect people in any church where we are allowed to worship as none of us is perfect.

A sermon on this passage is in our archives here: Wheat Among the Weeds that tells how Augustine of Hippo used this passage and some similar teachings to deal with some real problems in the church of North Africa in the 300s.

peace,
Frank+
The rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

Praise and Silence

What are you, my God? What are you, but the Lord God himself? You are the highest, the most righteous and the most powerful being. You are the most merciful, and yet the most just. You are the most mysterious, and yet the most present. You are the most beautiful, and yet the strongest. You are stable, yet incomprehensible. You are unchanging, yet changing all things. You are never new and never old, yet you are constantly renewing all things. You are always working, yet always at rest. You create great riches on earth, yet you need nothing yourself. You support, nourish and protect all.

You love, and yet you are without passion. You are jealous, and yet have no fear. You recoil at our sin, yet you do not grieve. You are angry, yet remain serene. You alter your plans in response to our actions, yet your law and purpose remain firm. You take as you find, yet never lose. You have no needs, yet you rejoice in all goodness. You have no envy, yet you require us to multiply the talents you have bestowed. You pay debts, yet owe nothing; you forgive debts, yet lose nothing.

What shall I say, O my God, my life, my holy joy? What can any man say when he speaks of you? Silence offers the greatest eloquence, yet woe to him who does not sing your praise.

—Saint Augustine (354-430)

The sense of being unfinished

O God, our hearts are made for thee,
and they shall be restless until they rest in thee!
—Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

We’re aware of something we need or lack most of the time.  We’re not complete.  We’re not fully human. 

This sense of being unfinished is pervasive and accounts for a great deal that’s distinctive in us humans.  We then attempt to complete ourselves by getting more education or more money, going to another place or buying different clothes, searching out new experiences. 

The Christian gospel tells us that in and under and around all of these incompletions is God: God is who we need; the God-hunger, the God-thirst is the most powerful drive in us. It’s far stronger than all the drives of sex, power, security, and fame put together.

—the Rev. Eugene Peterson (1932- )

As if there were only one

God loves each of us
as if there were only one of us.

—Augustine of Hippo (354-430)