PROPER 13, YEAR A

Sunday 2 August 2026

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

 

Matthew 14:13-21

 

The feeding of the five thousand is one of the classic Gospel epiphanies or revelations of Jesus’ identity as the Son of God. This miracle is one of the few recorded in all four Gospels. And all four Evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—clearly present it as a miraculous event: five loaves and two fish multiply to feed five thousand people. 

 

Now, somewhere along the line, you may have heard sermons that attempt to explain what really happened here as a “miracle of sharing.” According to that interpretation, when Jesus took, blessed, and distributed the five loaves and two fish, they didn’t really multiply to feed the five thousand and more who were present. As modern people, of course, we know that sort of thing doesn’t happen and can’t happen. Instead, the generosity of Jesus and the disciples sharing what they had inspired everyone present to bring out whatever food they’d brought with them and share it with their neighbors so that in the end everyone was fed. So, according to that interpretation, the real miracle was one of generosity and sharing.

 

With all due respect to the preachers who preach such misguided sermons, such an explanation belongs to a modern rationalist mindset, which rules out any possibility of the genuinely miraculous from the get-go. It certainly doesn’t belong to the biblical mindset. But if God is the sort of God the Church professes him to be, he can certainly multiply five loaves and two fish to feed a multitude—just as he can part the sea’s waters to let the Israelites cross over on dry ground, and just as he can raise those who have died to eternal life. So, we need not buy into such naturalistic interpretations. We need not be scandalized by the miraculous.

 

Another problem with the miracle-of-sharing interpretation is that it takes the focus off Jesus and places it on us. It replaces the Gospel of salvation by Christ with a Gospel of salvation by collective community self-help. It reduces Christ to a teacher who sets an example for us to follow. The problem is that we don’t need a teacher and example nearly as much as we need a Lord and Savior. And a Jesus who can multiply five loaves and two fish to feed a multitude of over five thousand men, plus women and children, is clearly the Savior of the world and the Lord of the universe. 

 

Now, having got that out of the way, let’s refocus our attention on the story itself. Matthew’s account shows an interesting interaction between Jesus and the disciples in responding to the crisis occasioned by the lack of food. The disciples initially identify the problem. It’s getting late, and they’re in a remote place. So the disciples approach Jesus and ask him to send the crowds away to the villages round about so that they can buy food for themselves.

 

In response, Jesus issues the command: “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” A similar pattern often obtains in the Christian life: We perceive a need; we take it to Jesus and tell him what we think he ought to do about it; and he responds by telling us what he wants us to do about it!

 

The disciples protest: “We have only five loaves here, and two fish.” But Jesus is unfazed. He s answers: “Bring them here to me.” Even though it’s well within his power as the Son of God to create loaves of bread from the rocks lying on the ground, he chooses instead to make full use of what the disciples have to offer. They must offer all that they have, holding nothing back. All five loaves and two fish: nothing less will do.

 

What I find enormously comforting and reassuring in this story is that it’s precisely the gifts that the disciples actually have that Jesus works with. He doesn’t fault them for not having brought more. The five loaves and two fish will do just fine. Nothing less will do, but nothing more is needed. 

 

So, in the end, all eat and are satisfied. Those fed number five thousand men, besides women and children. The miracle shows God at work, doing what only God can do. But, apart from the immediate purpose of responding to the crisis at hand and feeding the hungry people, does it have any deeper meaning?

 

Well, first, notice the twelve baskets of fragments left over. These point to both the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles. In the future, after the Lord’s death and resurrection, the twelve apostles will be sent into the world to preach the Gospel to all nations. The twelve baskets signify that they will carry a superabundance of Word and Sacraments to feed all who hunger and thirst for God.

 

The English Dominican theologian Aidan Nichols writes that the deepest signification of the feeding of the five thousand is God’s decision to give himself as food for humanity. The multiplication of the loaves and fishes depicts Jesus as a new Moses, feeding the multitudes in the desert with bread from heaven. 

 

At the same time, Matthew’s depiction of Jesus’ actions—taking, giving thanks, breaking and distributing—anticipates what he does at the Last Supper. The Church carries these four actions forward into the Christian Eucharist. Here we take, give thanks over, break, and distribute the bread, which truly becomes Christ’s Body. And here we take, give thanks over, pour out, and distribute the wine, which truly becomes his Blood. And just as the feeding of the five thousand points beyond itself to the Eucharist, so the Eucharist points beyond itself to the messianic banquet that awaits us in the life of the world to come. 

 

As Nichols puts it: “Ultimately, the [miracle] of God feeding us with himself will happen in the future, in glory, when by the Holy Spirit we shall see the exalted Jesus Christ face to face as who he is—God from God, but in a human form, in a humanly accessible way. We shall see him as God’s very life poured out for us and into us, and we shall be supremely satisfied by that vision.”

SAINT IGNATIUS LOYOLA

Friday, July 31

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R. I.

Ignatius of Loyola was born in 1492 to a noble family in the Basque region of Spain. At the age of eighteen, he joined the army of one of the Spanish dukes. He became a distinguished soldier and, over eleven years, participated in many campaigns and skirmishes. However, during the siege of Pamplona, on May 20, 1521, a French cannonball broke one of his legs and wounded the other. He began a long convalescence, marked by several painful surgical operations in the days before anesthetics.

During his recovery, Ignatius read the Life of Christ of Ludolph of Saxony, a 14th-century commentary on the Gospels. This book invites readers to place themselves imaginatively in the scene of each Gospel story. This technique of meditation became the basis of the more elaborate method that Ignatius himself later developed.

Ignatius also read the lives of the saints. He became fired with the ambition to lead a life of self-denial after the pattern of Saint Francis of Assisi and other founders of religious orders. He also resolved to devote his life to the conversion of non-Christians in the Holy Land.

 

Once he was sufficiently recovered, Ignatius visited the Benedictine monastery of Our Lady of Montserrat, where he hung up his military uniform and armor before the image of the Virgin. He then traveled to Manresa in Catalonia, where he spent several months in a cave practicing rigorous self-denial.  During this time, he began writing The Spiritual Exercises, a 200-page set of meditations designed for use on a directed retreat over a period of 30 days. 

The following year, 1523, Ignatius went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He hoped to stay there, but the Franciscans in charge of the holy places sent him home, telling him that he needed an education before he could be of any use in the mission field. In Barcelona, he began studying elementary Latin grammar alongside schoolchildren, while begging for his food and living on alms. In 1526, he began formal studies at the University of Alcalá.

In 1528, Ignatius began studies at the University of Paris. Here, he gathered six fellow students to be the co-founders of a new order. On the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1534, they took upon themselves the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Three years later, Ignatius and his companions were ordained to the priesthood. However, renewed war in the Holy Land made it impossible for them to go there as planned, so they decided to offer themselves, in obedience to the Pope, to serve however and wherever they could be useful to the Church. In 1539 they formally established the Society of Jesus, to be led by a Superior whom they would elect from among themselves. 

In 1540, Pope Paul III gave the Society his approval, and Ignatius became its first Superior General. Later, the Pope approved publication of the Spiritual Exercises in 1548. Unlike other religious orders, which emphasized life and prayer in community, the Society of Jesus emphasized pastoral and missionary work. Members embraced a vocation to accept assignments anywhere in the world under the most extreme conditions. The Spiritual Exercises were uniquely suited to this life because they can easily be taken anywhere.

The Jesuits, as they came to be called, became known not only for their missionary work, but also for their involvement in education: founding and running schools, colleges, universities, and seminaries. In the United States alone, there are today 28 Jesuit colleges and universities, and more than 50 secondary schools. The Jesuit motto is, Ad maiorem Dei gloriam, “for the greater glory of God.” 

Between 1553 and 1555, Ignatius dictated his life story to his secretary, Fr. Goncalves da Camara. He died in Rome on July 31, 1556, from the Roman Fever, a severe form of malaria. He was canonized by Pope Gregory XV in 1622. His principal relics are interred in the Church of the Gesù in Rome—well worth visiting if you’re ever in the Eternal City! In the Episcopal Church, notable devotees of Ignatian spirituality have included the late Frank Griswold, Presiding Bishop from 1998 to 2006.

PROPER 12, YEAR A

Sunday 26 July 2026

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-49a

 

Today’s Gospel contains five parables, each beginning with the words “The Kingdom of heaven is like …” These parables are thus sometimes called “the parables of the Kingdom.”

 

Our Lord’s original audience would have heard the phrase “Kingdom of heaven” differently than we do. For first-century Jews, the Kingdom of heaven was not the place where good people go when they die. It wasn’t even really a place. Where Matthew used the term “Kingdom of heaven,” Mark and Luke used “Kingdom of God.” Some scholars think Matthew substituted “Kingdom of heaven” out of reverence, to avoid mentioning God’s name.

 

In any case, first-century Jews would have understood either term—Kingdom of God or Kingdom of heaven—as referring to a very this-worldly state of affairs or series of events. The coming of the Kingdom would involve God intervening in human history to put everything right that was wrong with the world. It would entail the total transformation of this world’s social, economic, and political orders, through the reign of God’s kingly Messiah, or Anointed One.

 

Jesus appears to have had such a transformation in mind when he taught us to pray the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

 

Among the crowds following Jesus, some perhaps wondered whether he was the Messiah, the Anointed One sent to inaugurate God’s Kingdom on earth. As Christians, we believe that Jesus was indeed the Messiah and that he did inaugurate God’s Kingdom, but in a way no one expected.

 

And so, the parables in today’s Gospel offer us five clues, five tantalizing hints, about what the Kingdom of heaven is like. According to one commentator, it’s as though Jesus holds the Kingdom up to the light, turns it as one turns a prism in the sun, and, in these stories, tells us what he sees.

 

The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which someone took and sowed in his field. That is, the Kingdom has tiny beginnings. To our Lord’s contemporaries, his itinerant ministry would have seemed a small-time operation indeed. How could anything world-changing ever come from this ragtag band of misfits, fishermen, and tax collectors, roaming the remote backwaters of Galilee? But then look at the great plant that grows from the tiny mustard seed, providing a haven even for the birds of the air. Small beginnings can have enormous consequences.

 

The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened. To grasp the force of this image, it helps to know that “three measures” is roughly sixty pounds of flour, enough to bake bread for more than a hundred people. What’s being prepared is not just a family meal but a feast for an entire village. Moreover, this measurement carries rich biblical connotations that our Lord’s listeners would have recognized instantly. In Genesis 18, when God appears to Abraham and Sarah in the guise of three men, Sarah prepares cakes for the guests using three measures of choice flour. The three visitors, in turn, announce the forthcoming birth of a son, despite Sarah being well past childbearing years. Thus, the parable evokes the memory of this mysterious Old Testament encounter in which God does something totally unexpected, fulfilling his promises and bringing new life into the world.

 

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Although the text doesn’t say so, I like to imagine the man who discovers the treasure as a tenant farmer whose plow strikes a treasure chest while he’s plowing his landlord’s field. 

 

And again: The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. The point in both parables is that finding and gaining God’s Kingdom makes the loss of everything else completely worthwhile. Both parables challenge us to reflect on the question: What do we consider so valuable that we’d be willing to give up everything else to gain it?

 

The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. This parable hints at the Kingdom’s inclusiveness. Just as the net catches all kinds of sea creatures, so the kingdom gathers all sorts and conditions. Our job in the Church isn’t to decide who’s worthy to be here and who’s not. We don’t get to sort the good fish from the bad. God and his angels will do that on the Day of Judgment. In the meantime, our job is simply to gather in everyone we can.

 

Finally, the Lord’s saying about the householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old signifies that his disciples must draw on both the established teachings of the Old Testament and the new teachings Jesus has been imparting through his preaching and parables. Both are necessary to preach the Gospel in its fullness.

 

Together, these five parables show us that we discern the Kingdom not so much in the earth-shaking events of world history as in the ordinary activities of everyday people: a farmer scattering seed or plowing a field; a woman baking bread; a merchant examining pearls in a marketplace; fishermen casting nets into the sea.

 

I would suggest, then, that the first place to recognize the presence of God’s kingdom is right here, in this eucharistic assembly. We’re a ragtag bunch, a motley crew. Yet here we take the ordinary, everyday elements of bread and wine, offer them to God in solemn remembrance of his Son’s death and resurrection, and receive them back as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. And when we finally arrive in heaven itself, I believe we’ll be able to look back and realize we were already experiencing it here all along.

 

Our calling as the Church is to work, pray, and give for the spread of God’s Kingdom – and to let that Kingdom take root in our hearts so that we may become its ambassadors in this world. In this way, we both learn and teach others to live in joyful anticipation of the Kingdom’s completion in the life of the world to come.

SAINT MARY MAGDALENE

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R. I.

(Friday, July 24, 2026—tr. from July 22)

 

Before we can begin to understand Mary Magdalene, we need to debunk several popular misconceptions about her. First, no evidence supports the belief that she was a reformed prostitute. That notion dates from the sixth century, when Pope Saint Gregory the Great conflated her with three other women: the unnamed penitent who anoints our Lord’s feet in the seventh chapter of Luke’s Gospel, the woman taken in adultery in the eighth chapter of John’s Gospel, and Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus—although absolutely nothing in the Gospel texts supports any of these identifications.

 

Luke’s Gospel does say that “seven demons had gone out” from Mary Magdalene, and Pope Gregory supported his contention that she was a prostitute by identifying her seven demons with the seven deadly sins. But in the biblical world, the number seven signified completeness and perfection. So, to say that seven demons had been expelled from her indicated her complete healing and deliverance. While I have enormous respect for Gregory the Great, he got this particular point wrong. The Eastern Orthodox tradition has always rejected any notion that Mary Magdalene was a sinner, and instead regards her as a woman so holy that the devil sent the seven demons to torment and tempt her. 

 

In any case, the misidentification of Mary as the penitent woman washing our Lord’s feet with her tears, combined with John’s depiction of her weeping outside the tomb on Easter morning, led to her being depicted in Western art weeping or with red eyes. The English word maudlin—meaning tearfully sentimental—derives from Magdalene. At both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the names of the colleges dedicated to her are spelled in more or less the usual way but pronounced “maudlin.”

 

More recently, theories about Mary Magdalene have included the propositions that she was the beloved disciple who wrote the Fourth Gospel; or that she was the wife of Jesus, and that their offspring became the Merovingian Dynasty of French kings. Not a shred of evidence supports any of these theories, which reflect more the preoccupations of their proponents than anything else.

 

What, then, can we positively say about Mary Magdalene? The title Magdalene is not a surname but indicates that she came from the town of Magdala on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. The canonical Gospels record that she followed the Lord from Galilee to Jerusalem along with several other women, and there ministered to him and the apostles. She was present at his crucifixion and burial. She was among the women who went to the tomb on Easter morning and found it empty; and John’s Gospel identifies her as the one to whom the risen Christ first appeared.

 

 At the tomb Mary doesn’t recognize the risen Jesus and supposes him to be the gardener. They address each other politely, even formally: his use of the term “Woman” really has more the sense of “My lady,” and she in turn addresses him as “Sir.” But then he calls her by name and, recognizing him, she responds with the familiar form of address, “Rabbouni,” which means “My teacher” or even “My master.” Most likely she has fallen down and tried to take hold of his feet when he utters the enigmatic words: “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father.”  This can be paraphrased as “Don’t try to cling to the way you’ve known me in the past.” Then, to redirect her attention to the future, he entrusts her with the mission: “Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” 

 

The word apostle means one who is sent. The early Christian tradition designated Mary Magdalene as the apostle to the apostles—the one sent to tell them that she had seen the risen Lord, and to report all he had said to her. She is, above all, the first witness of the Resurrection. 

 

In Mary Magdalene we encounter a pattern of Christian life and discipleship. Having received the Lord’s healing and help, we become his loyal followers. But then, either gradually or in a moment of profound encounter, he transforms his disciples, those who follow, into apostles, those who are sent out. Above all, Mary Magdalene shines forth as an example to us today, as we seek to fulfill the Church’s calling to bear witness to the Resurrection in our own day and time. 

WILLIAM WHITE

First Bishop of Pennsylvania, 1836

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R. I.

Friday, July 17, 2026

 

Before the American Revolution, Church of England congregations in the thirteen colonies were under the direct jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. There were no bishops in the colonies, partly because the British government was reluctant to grant such autonomy to colonial churches, and partly because many in the colonies were adamantly opposed to the idea.

 

Once the colonies became the United States of America, however, it became imperative to provide an American episcopate for the newly forming Episcopal Church. The first American bishop was Samuel Seabury of Connecticut, who was consecrated by the Scottish nonjuring bishops in Aberdeen in 1784.

 

Three years later, in 1787, having been elected by the dioceses of Pennsylvania and New York respectively, William White and Samuel Provoost sailed to England. There they received episcopal consecration at the hands of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and the Bishop of Peterborough. Since episcopal consecration traditionally requires the laying on of hands by at least three bishops, the Episcopal Church now had the requisite number to continue its own episcopal succession.

 

William White was born in Philadelphia in 1747 and educated at the College of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania. After being ordained deacon and priest in England in 1770, he returned to Philadelphia in 1772 and first served as an assistant, then as the rector of the Church of Christ and Saint Peter.

 

When the American Revolution broke out in 1776, unlike many of his colleagues who sided with the British, White took his stand with the revolutionaries, serving as Chaplain of the Continental Congress from 1777 to 1789, and then as Chaplain of the United States Senate.

 

White served as the first Bishop of Pennsylvania for forty-nine years from 1787 until his death in 1836. He also served as the Episcopal Church’s first and fourth Presiding Bishop. During all this time, he continued as Rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia. (This was before Episcopal dioceses had the financial resources to support full-time bishops, so bishops generally also served as rectors of prominent parishes in their dioceses.)

 

Unlike some of his contemporaries, White did not travel widely in his large diocese. He was well respected, however, for his support of charitable and philanthropic societies in Philadelphia and for staying in the city to tend the sick during outbreaks of yellow fever, when many wealthy residents fled to the country. He also ordained the first two African American priests in the Episcopal Church, Absalom Jones and William Levington.

 

Most of all, White left his mark on the Episcopal Church by his influence on the shape of its Constitution. Against his contemporary Samuel Seabury, who wanted the Church to be governed solely by a House of Bishops, White insisted on a General Convention comprising representatives of both the clergy and the laity from each diocese. And against those who wanted each diocese to be governed solely by its bishop and a synod of clergy, White insisted that Diocesan Conventions should also include lay representatives from each parish, who would participate in electing new bishops. Largely due to White’s influence, the Episcopal Church today has a mixed form of church government, in which bishops, clergy, and laity all participate together in legislating and decision-making.

 

William White is buried under the chancel at Christ Church, Philadelphia. His rectory, the Bishop White House at 309 Walnut Street, is part of Independence National Historic Park and is open to the public via guided tours.

PROPER 11, YEAR A

July 19, 2026

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

 

At this time of year, weeds are a major problem in our gardens, lawns, and flowerbeds. I’m no gardener, so when I see a flowerbed beginning to choke on weeds, I resist the temptation to try to do the weeding myself. In my horticultural ignorance, I’d probably pull up what look like weeds only to discover later that they were among the most valuable plants in the garden. Better to rely on landscapers and gardeners, like my wife, who know what they’re doing.

 

In today’s Gospel, both Jesus and his listeners know all about weeds. A certain invasive and toxic weed, known as darnel or tares, closely resembles unripe wheat. Mistaken for wheat and baked into bread or brewed into beer, darnel is hallucinogenic in small doses and deadly in larger doses. Roman law explicitly prescribed punishments for the crime of sowing darnel in someone’s wheat field out of malice or revenge.

 

As the householder in the parable tells his servants, once darnel has invaded a wheat field, it’s futile to try to weed it out. It’s nearly impossible to tell the two plants apart in their early stages of growth. Moreover, their roots are intertwined, so you’ll likely pull up a lot of good wheat with the bad weeds. Better to wait until the harvest, when they can be distinguished, sorted, and separated, and the ripe wheat gathered into barns while the tares are bundled as fuel for the fire.

 

Of course, Jesus is not merely dispensing advice on good farming techniques. He’s teaching about the Kingdom of God. He’s helping his followers understand and deal with the evil they encounter in both the Church and the world around them.

 

In the traditional interpretation of this parable, the enemy who sows the weeds is the devil, and the weeds represent those Church members who seem somehow to obstruct and thwart our Christian life together. The Methodist preacher Will Willimon describes these weeds in our midst: “Weeds are the people who come up with great ideas for programs but never follow through, so we’re scurrying around at the last minute, trying to pull things together. Weeds are the rumormongers who pass along a damaging bit of gossip . . . Weeds are the demanding souls who drain all [a congregation’s] energy . . . and then leave in a huff, saying they want to find a more caring church.”

 

No doubt, we can each add our own pet complaints about people who keep our corporate life from being everything we believe God intends it to be. Sometimes, we might even be tempted to think we’d love to weed them out if we had the chance.

 

In the late fourth century, Saint Augustine of Hippo drew on this parable to oppose the heresy known as Donatism. The Donatists were a group in North Africa who sought to purge the Church of all notorious sinners. They believed that those who committed serious sins after baptism—particularly the sin of denying Christ to save one’s life during times of persecution—could not be forgiven and should be permanently excommunicated.

 

Against this rigorist vision of the Church as an exclusive society of saints, Augustine argued that the Church is really a hospital for sinners. The weeds and tares grow together, and it’s not always possible to tell which is which. Appearances can be deceiving. Moreover, unlike weeds and wheat, people change. At the last judgment, many of those we admired as good and holy may turn out to have been the worst sinners, and many of those we condemned as notorious sinners may turn out to have been the greatest saints. So we’re called to avoid rushing to premature judgment and to leave it to God to sort the wheat from the tares in the end.

 

In the meantime, we live in an imperfect Church, in an imperfect world, full of imperfect people: what Augustine called a mixed field of wheat and tares growing together. In this situation, God calls us to be faithful, to grow in grace, and to cultivate several basic dispositions we need to become the people he calls us to be.

 

The first of these necessary attitudes is patience and tolerance. Many people we encounter day to day bore, irritate, and annoy us—whether by stupidity, insensitivity, rudeness, or a simple lack of consideration. We don’t have a choice about that, but we do have a choice in how to respond. We can either get all worked up and angry or choose to overlook it and let it go. We’re called to cultivate the virtue of forbearance.

 

The second necessary disposition is the willingness to extend the benefit of the doubt. For example, we walk into a room where three or four of our friends are talking, and as soon as they see us, they stop. At that point, we can assume the worst: that they’ve been saying bad things about us behind our back. But maybe the truth is that they were planning a surprise birthday party for us. While it may be just as foolish to get our hopes up by always assuming the best, Christians are nonetheless called to give the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, and give puzzling situations the best possible interpretation until we’re proven wrong.

 

And the third necessary disposition is the most important of all: the willingness to forgive. Sometimes other people really do hurt us. Yet the definitive mark of Christian community is mutual forgiveness. 

 

When I first arrived in Rhode Island from the Mid-Atlantic states 26 years ago, a priest friend warned me to be careful. He said that New England culture can be judgmental and unforgiving. It’s all part of the region’s Puritan legacy. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Frost have noted the Yankee tendency to stand aloof, maintain reserve, and hold grudges! 

 

Thankfully, I haven’t always found that to be true. But to the extent that it is true, we’re called to be countercultural. As fallen creatures, the more time we spend together, the more likely we are to hurt one another. But in a truly Christian community, we do our best not only to treat one another well, but also to forgive one another when we fail to do so. We often boast about what a caring community we have here at Sts. Matthew and Mark, and it’s true. But the real challenge is also to be a forgiving community. That’s something to think about when we say the Lord’s Prayer: forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

 

To sum up, in this mixed field of wheat and tares, we’re called to practice patience and tolerance, to give the benefit of the doubt when possible, and to forgive when necessary. We thus wait in hope for the final harvest, when God will do what only God can do: separate the wheat from the tares. May we then be found among those who “shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”

PROPER 10, YEAR A

July 12, 2026

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

 

Forty-five years ago, I approached the rector of my parish to discuss the possibility of going to seminary to prepare for the priesthood. During the long conversation that followed, I asked what sorts of personal qualities he thought a priest should have. He replied by telling me what the rector who’d sponsored him for ordination had told him. A priest, he said, needs a high tolerance for failure. About four out of five things that you try to do in the parish don’t work, at least not as you’d hoped and planned.

 

I found this answer both surprising and unsettling. Both he and the priest who gave him that advice were well known for being competent, methodical, well-organized, and effective rectors. 

 

Over the years, however, I’ve come to understand what he meant. Parish ministry brings its share of frustrations and disappointments. In retrospect, though, I do think that he was exaggerating. It’s not really four out of five things: maybe more like two out of three.

 

The Parable of the Sower in today’s Gospel calls that long-ago encounter to mind. A sower goes out to sow. But, as the parable explains at length, not all the seed yields grain. Some falls along the path, where it’s eaten by birds; some falls in stony ground, where it can’t take root and is scorched by the sun; some falls among the thorns and is choked by weeds. Obviously that sower also has a high tolerance for failure.

 

This parable answers an implicit question that must have been on the minds of many of those that Jesus was addressing. If Jesus is so great, then why aren’t more people following him? The same question persisted in slightly different form in the early Church: if Jesus is the Messiah of Israel, then why have so many of his own people rejected him? And if he’s truly the Savior of the world, then why do so many of the world’s people refuse to accept him as such?

 

From time to time, we may even be tempted to ask a similar question in this parish: given all that is so indescribably wonderful here at Sts. Matthew & Mark, why aren’t more people here? In every generation of the Church’s history, people have asked that question in one form or another. Not: what is attracting those who are here, but rather, what is making others stay away?

 

I think that Jesus tells the Parable of the Sower to address precisely this sort of question. The images of the Sower and the Seed bear multiple layers of meaning. At one level, we can think of the Sower as God the Father sending his Son Jesus, the Word Incarnate, into the world. At another level, the Sower is Jesus, proclaiming the Kingdom of God among his people Israel. And at still another level, the Sower is the Church, preaching the Gospel and calling the world to faith in the Lord’s death and Resurrection. In each case, however, not everyone’s able to hear, understand, and respond to the message, just as some types of ground are unable to receive and support grain-producing seed.

 

Yet, the parable assures us, it’s all okay. It’s all good. Never mind the seed that falls along the path, or on the rocky ground, or among the thorns. In the end, what’s important is the seed that falls in the good soil and brings forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.

 

A crucial bit of background for understanding this parable is that a good yield for grain-bearing seed in those days was seven or eightfold. So, our Lord is clearly describing a miraculously abundant crop that more than makes up for all the seed that’s wasted.

 

To put it another way: in the long run those who hear and receive the Word grow and multiply in amazing numbers. The final success vastly outweighs what seem the present failures. 

 

The parable challenges us to take the Sower as our model and guide. It’s been said that the single most important sentence in this parable is the first one: A sower went out to sow. 

 

In other words, the sower doesn’t stay home and keep the Word of God to himself. Nor does he worry about how much seed he’s wasting. He doesn’t try to verify whether this or that patch of ground is good soil before he sows it. He just ambles along, slinging the seed hither and yon. Bad agricultural practice, perhaps, but the economics of God’s Kingdom are so different from the economics of this world.

 

We’re called to share the Gospel in the same way: not worrying about whether our witness is falling on receptive or deaf ears. Instead, we do what we can, and leave the results to God. At times it may seem that our efforts are going to waste. But then some seed falls on good soil in places where we least expect it, and sprouts up to an amazingly abundant harvest.

 

So, the other side of the advice my rector gave me about needing a high tolerance for failure is that sometimes God surprises us with totally unexpected success!

 

When I was in seminary, on my very last Sunday in the parish to which I was assigned for fieldwork, a young man who’d recently started attending that parish approached me during Coffee Hour and thanked me for something I’d said to him about two months earlier. Those words, he said, really changed his life. The irony was that I couldn’t even remember the conversation, let alone anything I’d said to him, and I had to ask him to remind me!

 

In the years since, that same pattern has recurred. Particularly in moments when I’m feeling discouraged or demoralized by some apparent failure, someone thanks me for something I said or did that brought about some major breakthrough in their life—in a way that I least expected and often had no idea about at the time. But according to the Parable of the Sower, that’s precisely how God’s Kingdom works.