RIP Lindsey Graham (Reflections on Pentecost 8, Year A 2026)

 

“Let both of them grow together until the harvest…” (Matthew 13: 29a)

The South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham passed away last week and the media has been full of tributes to the senator’s storied career. You may have divined that the late senator and I might not have been in agreement on some issues; nevertheless, the reminiscences of his senate colleagues seem to suggest that—politics aside—old Lindsey was a pretty good dude. Republicans and Democrats alike testify that he was mostly friendly and apparently blessed with a tremendous sense of humor which made him great company. I certainly admire the fact that he served in the United States Air Force, and after tragically losing his parents at a very young age, he took charge of his little sister and raised her himself. That’s pretty impressive and certainly worthy of praise. We all have our opinions and we don’t all get along all the time, but rarely do we encounter anyone who is 100% saint or 100% jerk. We’re all a mixture of wheat and weeds.

As a pastor who does a lot of neighborhood funerals, I’m always amazed when I pray over the remains of talented, intelligent, sweet, caring, sensitive people are also alcoholics or drug addicts or who have taken their own lives. Why is it that those who have been blessed by God with so many gifts also cause the ones who love them so much pain?

Shakespeare famously wrote, “The evil that man do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones[i],” but, in my experience, the opposite has been true. It seems people are far more forgiving, far more ready to give the benefit of the doubt, far more willing to cling to the virtuous wheat of our lives and cast the uncomfortable weeds into the fire.

I think that’s the takeaway from the Gospel Lesson for Pentecost 8, Year A in the RCL (Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43). If we take this reading on its face, we may superficially summarize it as “Someday there will be a Day of Judgment and good people like me will go to Heaven, and bad people will go to Hell.” I think we need to dig a little deeper into the text. Smart Bible scholar guys think Matthew, our Gospel writer (whoever he was), was writing to a community of early Christians who were living under some real nasty persecution[ii]. Some members of the community might’ve felt the pressure to abandon this Christianity stuff and accommodate themselves to the local culture. You know. They chose to go along to get along. You can’t really blame them, can you? I mean, if someone told you to abandon your faith or lose your life or go to jail or get fired from your job, what do you think you’d do? We all think we’d choose martyrdom, but if it came right down to it…?

Scholarly dudes[iii] point out the parable of the wheat and the weeds appears in Matthew and also in the gnostic gospel of Thomas. Thomas, which may be an older source, doesn’t include any explanation, so we wouldn’t be blamed if we guessed that Matthew made up the gloss in verses 36-43 to speak to his own community. You can imagine the burning question this nascent church had about its members. “If someone denies the faith, do they go to Hell? If that coward turned his back on our community, should we ever let him back in? Are there people in our church we can’t trust?”

Matthew uses the parable of the wheat and the weeds to remind his folks that there will always be good folks and not so good folks living together, but it’s not our place to say who is worthy and who isn’t. Any crusade to root out the slimeballs from the devout is only going to ruin the community. Playing ecclesiastic gestapo is the surest way to destroy a church.

I don’t think the parable need be only about the community of believers. The wheat field could relate to our own lives. Each of us has good and bad growing side-by-side. We know Luther’s doctrine of simul justus et peccator—simultaneously righteous and sinner. Even Luther himself had his own emotional weeds growing among the wheat of his intellect and compassion. He was a gifted teacher and theologian who deeply cared for the souls of his people. He could be extravagantly generous and at the same time short-tempered, caustic, stubborn, and obnoxious when people didn’t see things his way.

The parable encourages us to be a little more charitable in our judgments, but it also offers us the promise that a day will come when God will erase every flaw sown by our sinful nature. Someday our guilt will be absolved, our sin forgotten, and our defects burned away. Every cause of shame and everything we hate about ourselves will no longer burden us. It will all be forgiven when we enter into the Father’s glory.

I may not have agreed with Lindsey Graham’s politics, but when the day comes when I meet him, I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.

Peace be with you, my friend. Please come and see me again.

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[i] That’s in Julius Caesar Act 3 sc. 2 for you Shakespeare geeks.

[ii] See Griffith-Jones, Robin, The Four Witnesses (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2000).

[iii] I’m relying here on one of my favorite “go-to” sources: Funk, Robt. W. et al, The Five Gospels (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1993).

Who Will Say What Needs to be Said?

 What follows is not a reflection on the Bible or a sermon. It's just something which has been on my mind, and I needed to say it. 

When I was a kid, we said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school. We followed the Pledge with the singing of a patriotic song like “God Bless America” or “America the Beautiful,” and we all knew the words by heart. I read Captain America comic books and watched Combat and The Rat Patrol on TV. I was proud of the way Americans—my own father included—had fought victoriously against the evils of fascism. I believed that the Americans fighting in Vietnam were battling for a virtuous cause against the forces of oppression. I saw public service announcements urging us to donate to Radio Free Europe or join the Peace Corp so the benefits of American democracy could be shared with everyone all around the globe. Our nation was on a moral mission, and it meant something to be an American. Something noble. We were the Good Guys.

Never, in those innocent days, would I have imagined America would be the aggressor. I believed we’d live up to our moral responsibility to openly oppose totalitarian regimes, to uphold international law, and to be an open hand of mercy to smaller nations struggling out of the swamps of poverty. Never could I imagine that my country—whose ideals I’d been taught in school—would sow economic chaos around the world, show a callous and depraved indifference to human suffering by cutting off life-saving food and medical aid, cozy up to ruthless dictators, abandon our friends in their time of need, insult allies who’d come to our own aid, murder foreign nationals on the high seas without proof of their committing any crime, invade the territory of a sovereign nation and overturn its government, and start a war without first being attacked. Never could I imagine the United States would change from being the defender of democracy to the world’s bully.

But here we are. My question is: Where will we go from here? A time will come, whether it be by an impeachment and removal or simply by the expiration of his term of office, when Donald Trump will be no more. What will the United States do then? As a Christian clergyman I believe absolution requires contrition. Will the next American president have the moral courage to apologize to the world for the damage we have done?

I say “we,” because I believe our nation bears a collective guilt which can’t simply be blamed on one man. After the shameful attack on the U.S. Capital on January 6, 2021—an attack instigated by the defeated president himself—it should have been unmistakably clear to anyone with eyes that there was no depth of perfidy to which Trump was unwilling to sink in order to retain power, continue to profit off his office, and perpetuate his self-delusion that he was qualified to govern this nation. We saw in that moment who he was and what he was capable of doing, and yet we returned him to office four years later. Since then, many of the representatives we have elected have become his myrmidons and have done virtually nothing to halt his rapine and criminality.

I believe America owes the people of the world an apology. If we are unwilling to take responsibility for what our government has done and is doing, we will never regain our standing in the community of nations. Who will be the leader who is willing to make confession and ask for absolution? Will our next president be willing to admit defeat in our conflict with Iran? Will he or she apologize to the families of the service members we’ve lost and to the people of Iran for the civilian deaths caused by this illegal and unnecessary conflict? Will America be willing to face the International Court of Justice and abide by penalties imposed? Could our next president stand before the United Nations General Assembly and ask the world’s forgiveness, understanding that we have lost the trust of other nations and that we must earn our way back into their fellowship? Can we admit that we have forfeited our position of leadership in the free world, and that we must commit to humble cooperation if we wish to regain it?

Or will we simply jut out our chin and pretend the people of the world have not seen what we know they saw?

Who is that man or woman willing to do the unpleasant and distasteful task of acknowledging our errors and seeking reconciliation? Who will have the integrity to call our land to repentance? Doubtless the president who is willing to speak the embarrassing truth will invite vitriolic condemnation. He or she will be accused of hating America or even of treason. Such sincere humility may be political poison, but I believe it will be one of the greatest acts of statesmanship in modern times—and an absolute necessity.

Keep Seeding (Reflections on Pentecost 7, Year A 2026)

 

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven

    and do not return there until they have watered the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

    giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

    it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose

    and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:10-11)

Can I just say that I’ve found lawn care to be one of the most anxiety-producing responsibilities of home ownership? I have been locked in mortal combat with spotted spurge, dandelions, mushrooms, and a plethora of diabolical vegetation answering to the description of “weeds.” I constantly face the conundrum of watering. When to water? How much to water? Is my irrigation sensor working? 

Last fall the Bride and I sowed some grass seed on our lawn. Heat or fungus or some insidious blight or other turned the fecund green of our lawns to a sickly brown, requiring us to shell out about nine hundred bucks to have seed scattered and sown in hope of reviving the lawn to something approaching health. Wouldn’t you know it? Just as the seeds were starting to sprout, the landscaping company that services our development sent some bovine-brained Gen-Zee on an ATV to treat all our lawns with weedkiller. This wannabe Evel Knievel did a doughnut on our front lawn and tore up a good patch of recently seeded grass.

Recently, as I did my morning chore of pulling up the mushrooms which are sucking the nutrients away from my poor lawn, I asked myself, “Why? Why don’t I run up the white flag and surrender? Why don’t I just let this lawn go and do its own thing? Why can’t I let what will grow grow and what will die die? Who says I should try to control nature?”

The answer, of course, is my HOA. They want everyone’s lawn to look like the eighteenth green at Augusta, and they send you an intimidating letter if your lawn doesn’t measure up. So I guess I’ll be scattering more seed this year. But that’s okay. I’ve come to a place of peace with this. All I can do is scatter the seed. It’s God who gives the growth.

I love Jesus’ parable of the sower which we hear again as the Gospel lesson for Pentecost 7, Year A (Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23) because it’s really a tale of hope. The “seed” is a metaphor for God’s word, and Jesus assumes that some of this seed is going to take root. It’s a mistake to dwell on the seed that doesn’t seem to be germinating when every seed has the potential for growth.

Saint Paul taught us that faith comes from what is heard.[i] No one hears the Word unless we proclaim it. If we’re to cast ourselves in this parable, we’re the sower of the seed. We can scatter the seed through public proclamation, but we also scatter it through our actions and our demeanor. When we do works of charity, when we show patience and forbearance, when we forgive, we are sowers of the seed. We sow when we are advocates for justice for the poor and marginalized, when we are neighbors, and when we show welcome and inclusion. I would hazard to guess that for everyone who is drawn on a Sunday morning to hear more of God’s Word there was a person in the past whose kindness or empathy or sense of internal peace was a seed of inspiration. Can you think of anyone who embodied the Word of God in your life? I can.

The Word of God is a word of love and forgiveness and healing. In the words and works of Jesus we learn and are called to love, patience, acceptance, compassion, mercy, sacrifice, and faith in eternal life. God’s Word is God’s work. When that seed takes root in our hearts, we can’t help but spread it around.

I’ve joked that we at Faith Lutheran of Philadelphia have been growing our Christian Education program back from seed. After the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic our Sunday School pretty much vanished. But then, God decided to send us some infants and toddlers and a few primary grade kids. They’re too little to start reading the Bible on their own, let alone tackle the theological intricacies of the Augsburg Confession or even Luther’s Catechism. Nevertheless, our heroic Sunday School teachers—two Gen-Zees who were baptized and brought up in our congregation—are doing their best to plant the seeds of faith by involving these tykes in our Sunday liturgy. Do the kids have a sense of the sacred? Not so much yet. But they’re learning that they are welcome in church, and church is a safe and fun place to be.

Yes, I have also lamented that many of my former confirmands have shot out the door of the church right after affirming their baptism like someone was giving away Taylor Swift tickets. But some of them have stuck around. Some of them have even returned from time to time. My job is to sow the seed. I can’t force it to grow. When I do funerals for unchurched folks, I always try to explain a little about our faith. I also hand out the church’s business card to the bereaved. Do they ever come through our doors on a Sunday morning? Once in a great while someone does. But, I think, I may have just planted a seed of faith in some of the ones who don’t. That’s up to God. My job—our job—is to keep on spreading the seed.

Yes, I will probably have to reseed my lawn again this fall. My HOA will insist, so surrender is not an option. It’s not an option for Christians, either. God doesn’t give up. Neither should we. There may be a seed lying dormant under the soil, waiting to sprout in God’s good time.

I hope I’ve spread some good seed to you this week. Please come and see me again.

 

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[i] Romans 10:17

Celebrate with Kid Wisdom (Reflection on Pentecost 6, Year A 2026)

 

“I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants…” (Matthew 11:25

I love the Fourth of July. When I was a little kid, this holiday was always special to my family because my maternal grandmother, the child of German immigrants, lived with us. She’d been born in the U.S. on July 4, 1884, so Independence Day at the Griffiths home always involved a celebration. I seem to remember a picnic meal on the back patio of our Long Beach, California home. At night our neighbor, Mr. Gallagher, would set off fireworks for all the kids on our street[i]. Some of the dearest memories I have were of events on or around the Fourth of July.

This particular Independence Day is pretty special for us. It’s America’s 250^th anniversary. We’ve lasted a quarter of a millennium, and representative democracy still has a beating heart. I think that’s kind of special, don’t you?

I’ll confess I’ve had a bit of a hard time getting my “whoopie!” on this year. My anxiety for America has been crowding out my enthusiasm for her birthday. There’s this god-awful debacle in the Middle East. We’re seeing climate disasters throughout our nation which no one seems to be doing anything to address. And, even if it’s come down a smidge, the price of gas is still way too high, and a huge chunk of my pay is still going into the tank of my 2017 Corolla.

Ambivalence, however, has always been with us. Even when I was a kid watching Mr. Gallagher’s fireworks, the grown-ups were taking sides over the direction of our nation, just as grown-ups have done since Jesus’ time and before. In our Gospel lesson for Pentecost 6, Year A (Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30), Jesus expresses his own pique with a bunch of folks who’ve seen the goodness of God with their own eyes but still have to whine and bitch about something. They criticized John the Baptist. I can just imagine them saying to each other, “What’s up with this loony-toon preacher? He keeps telling us to repent and give money to the poor. We’re not made of money! We’re doing the best we can. Not everyone can live off eating bugs like this guy. And why’s he always complaining about King Herod? He’s just going to start trouble!”

They weren’t that pleased with Jesus either. Can you hear them? “Who is this Jesus dude? He’s eating with tax collectors and sinners! Why, in my day, boy howdy, when a person was ritually impure, they stayed ritually impure! And nobody healed anyone on the Sabbath. Back then we had rules, by golly, and we followed them! What’s all this mercy and forgiveness crap? In the good old days, you pulled yourself up by your sandal straps!”

You get the idea. There are some folks who don’t like to hear John preach the law or Jesus preach the Gospel. Their happy place is in the quicksand of their own critical indignation. You may have met people like this (You may have met some of them in church!).

Jesus tells us in the Gospel that wisdom sometimes is revealed to children. I think it might be a good idea sometimes to recapture a bit of childhood wisdom. While watching Mr. Gallagher’s fountain blast a geyser of multi-colored sparks over Stevely Avenue, I wasn’t thinking about the war in Vietnam or whether Humphrey or Nixon would be a better president. I just thought the display looked really cool. The Fourth of July was America’s birthday party, and birthdays are fun.

Maybe this Independence Weekend I can try to recapture a little of the joy I felt as a kid. It’s our country’s birthday, and—by the grace of God—our Republic has lasted another year. Our neighbors are still our neighbors. Even if we disagree with them, they still love their children like we do. They still take their trash out to the curb like we do. They still pay their taxes (we hope!) like we do. And they still might give us a lift if our car breaks down and we ask them nicely.

We still have hope in the ideas which founded this wacky experiment in self-governance. Mr. Jefferson—slave holder that he was—put his quill to parchment and gave us these magnificent words:

“We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

However imperfectly this idea has been realized in our 250-year history, it remains our aspiration, and one worthy of celebrating.

The Hebrew scripture lesson for Pentecost 6 is from the prophet Zechariah (Zechariah 9:9-12), a guy who found himself in a geo-political situation worse than anything we could imagine.[ii] Nevertheless, ol’ Zech had a child’s ability hope for tomorrow. He could look beyond the goat rodeo he was experiencing and see a time when peace and humility would be the order of the day, when a new King would come riding on a baby donkey. Like the prophet, let’s all keep that childhood dream alive, because God never stops being good even though we haven’t noticed the goodness. Let’s look beyond today and rejoice we are still “prisoners of hope.”

God bless America, and God bless you, my friend. Please come again.

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[i] The firework display was, technically speaking, illegal in Long Beach. Mr. Gallagher did it for years, and no one ever called the police to my knowledge.

[ii] Okay. If you’re a Bible nerd, you’ll know that the author of this lesson in chapter 9 of the book was probably writing about 100 years after the guy who penned the first eight chapters. Chapter 9 and following are known as “2^nd Zechariah.” I doubt one guy lived long enough to write both parts, and it wasn’t uncommon for writers to write in the name of their teacher or one who inspired them.