Sermon Notes for July 20 on sighs too deep for words

July 20 Rom. 8:12-27. Mt. 13:24-30, 36-43

We always think of prayer as talking to God and seeking a response. Here, prayer exists within the divine life itself.At its best, Sunday worship together is a long prayer service to touch different parts of our condition. We enter worship bowed down by troubles, personal or in the family. It could be worry about a declining spouse or an adult child afflicted with mental illness.In a way, Sunday worship also helps us to listen in to the divine conversation aobut the state of our lives. In the face of trouble the spirit responds with Sighs too deep for words. In the face of tragedy, even the divine is at a loss for words.

Sighs too deep for words hits any minister between the eyes as we struggle to use our frail vessels of words to carry some of the riches an depths of our faith.I always think of Thomas Long’s story of a minister coming back from a shortened vacation to be with a family whose uncle had died too young. with his cheap suit flapping in the breeze, he carried his prayerbook to his chest like a life preserver, Dear God what to say, what to say.

My mother asked me to lead the service for my brother.That was difficult, but I think it made things a bit more bearable in time.

Unlike those who wish or need to perceive only blessings, and perceive them even when imagined, Paul faces suffering squarely.the Spirit is the spirit of life. The spirit is the being free to be in the family of God (last will and testament?) Both NT ;passage this morning deal with the end.Paul sees the Christ as the beginning of the labor pains for all of creation.

Later in life, Augustine the theologian and bishop of a town in North Africa was faced with folks who wanted the church to be utterly pure. He seized on our gospel reading and linked it to the church itself as a body of people all mixed together. Thomas Long (Princeton, now Emory) got me looking at the parable of the wheat and weeds in a presentation he made before his book on god and human suffering was published..Life, in his view, is filled with wheat and weeds that grow together as the sheer fact of human life. We pray,  since we live in a world mixed with weeds and crops, suffering and joys all the time and often mixed together.Part of the story that intrigues me is that the weed, darnel, resembles wheat, so that if you try to extirpate it, you will get wheat too. I think of the old gardening motto, the way to distinguish a valuable plant from a weed is to pull on it. An old reading book from youth came back to me where a boy tended a new garden and carefully weeded out some of his plants as well. if it comes out with little effort, it is a valuable plant: think of the roots on dandelions. Part of its lesson for me is to expose   our willingness to see others as weeds and ourselves as valuable, but things are so mixed up within and without that one cannot go about with weed killer without harming the valuable product. We have not developed moral engineering that makes roundup resistant valuable plants. this parable frees us from our tendency to judge others as worthy or not, and to remind us that god is responsible for sorting us out. As the old Thanksgiving hymns ays, all the world is god’s own field.