We were at Cocoa Beach last week, the same spot where we’ve gone for the last 20 years. It’s great to spend time on the beach, where the land meets the water. You smell the salt air, feel the sand and the breeze, and hear the sound of waves rolling into the shore as they have from the beginning.

I’ve been to that stretch of beach my whole life and that spot the last twenty years in a row. The wind has always come out of the east, a sea breeze, and there are usually enough waves to at least boogie-board or body surf.

That’s a lot of fun. But it can also be dangerous when the waves are big, or there are rip tides. You all get that. And it is a metaphor for life. The land is stable, orderly. The water is at once inviting, yet chaotic; extremely powerful and potentially dangerous. And there are other risks. There are always sharks, maybe jellyfish, maybe a crab pinches your toe.

Read More

People are fundamentally unique in that we continuously look at the way things are and imagine how they could and should be better. That drives us to seek change. People tend to pursue social change in two ways; persuasion and force. In today’s Gospel, Jesus introduces a third way. While Jesus certainly taught and persuaded, the Kingdom ultimately spreads because people encounter him personally.

Persuasion involves generating ideas and positions, then sharing them so that they can be evaluated, improved and enacted. For example, “We take our shoes off when we enter the house,” or “You can only drive 15 miles per hour in a school zone.”  We hope better ideas win out over time and progress follows. We hope.

Read More

Last week we heard Jesus describe God’s extravagant sharing of the Word of the Kingdom as scattering seed on all sorts of soil. This morning’s Gospel touches on one of the most challenging issues of our existence. There is other seed. Not only do we see a lot of evil, there are, apparently, evil people in the world. This is more than flawed people making bad choices. It’s real evil, evil seeds sown by the evil one, the enemy, the devil, Satan himself.

Weeds are a great analogy because we all get that. They are a persistent issue everywhere from our landscaping to the cracks in our sidewalks. Weeds are a real problem in agriculture, and the problem can cut several ways. If you don’t control them, then they can hurt the crop yield, which not only affects the farmer but also the consumer. The lower the yield, the higher the price and the more people go hungry.

Read More