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.

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.

This weekend we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The thirteen British colonies were barely a year into the Revolutionary War that would continue another seven years. The founding fathers and the people they represented had faith in a vision they could not see, ideals they thought were rooted in God although they were yet developing.

These built upon their conviction that all men were created equal with inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” “All men” meant all people, but of course that wasn’t true in 1776. Almost 4 million people, about 12.5% of the population were slaves. Native Americans were being steadily pushed out of their lands. Women couldn’t vote.

As you hopefully know, I lead a Bible study on Tuesday mornings which goes over the reading for the coming Sunday, usually focused on the Gospel. It’s hopefully helpful for the people who attend and watch on Facebook to dig more deeply into the passages. And it is very helpful for me. In addition to the study time to prepare, it is helpful to talk about it.

This week, I looked at it and realized this is the shortest Gospel passage we have in the three-year lectionary cycle; three verses, 88 words. At first glance we readily see the familiar agency that Jesus imparts to his Apostles, his “sent ones,” which extends also to those given the spiritual gift of prophecy, which is not fortune telling but speaking God’s will, as well as the righteous who are doers of God’s will.

We had a wonderful Vacation Bible School this past week. We had over thirty children participate. That included almost all of our congregation’s children who were in town, plus a number of friends and other kids from the community. We also had a large number of middle and high school youth volunteer to help and of course a strong group of volunteers. We must thank co-leaders Amy Gammons and Meghan McLaughlin who led it all wonderfully.

On Thursday, our theme was “God is Love”, and we talked about how God’s greatest demonstration of love is Jesus dying on the cross to save us from our sins, and was raised from the dead for our salvation. That is what theologians refer to as, “The Big Enchilada.” It is the core of the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ. We teach it again and again with the hope and expectation that it will sink into the very foundations of who these kids are. God loves you. God saved you. God will never let you go. If the kids remember nothing else from this week, we hope and pray they will never forget that.

Back at the start of the pandemic, one of the big medical schools (I’m not sure which) produced a graphic cartoon to show how highly infectious diseases like respiratory viruses spread. It showed a large box with dozens of blue dots bouncing off each other. Then one red dot entered the box. When it touched a blue dot, that dot turned red, as did any dot it touched. Every red dot turned any blue dot it touched red. Soon, most of the dots turned red.

That’s how cold and flu bugs spread across the world, although not ever at 100%. Its principle applies to ideas as well. Ideas stick to people and spread quickly, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. They can sweep across cultures. Ready examples are in popular music. The Beatles got so popular that their live performances were drowned out by the audience’s screams. Or K-Pop – which is a Korean dance music craze that began about 10-15 years ago and remains wildly popular.

Often, when faithful people encounter hardship and tragedy, we reflexively say something like, “God has a plan” or “Everything happens for a reason.” We trust God, even when we cannot see any good in the situation. There’s a gap between those two a mile wide and we cannot see any connection, but we remain faithful. This morning’s scriptures bring us to consider how our faith intersects with our lives. Our most difficult trials, our deepest losses and hardest decisions can and should reinforce our faith in how God fills that huge gap.

When we say, “God has a plan,” that doesn’t mean he is actively laying out your life as a particular maze for you to find clues and grope your way through, and heaven is your reward at the end. When we say, “Everything happens for a reason,” it’s not as if God has designed your life as an obstacle course with tragedies and disasters tailored just for you. As Lamentations 3:33 says, “for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.”

The creation story in Genesis describes God bringing chaos into order, step by step. When he creates humanity, he goes a further step. The key verse is Genesis 1:27, which is perhaps the most important sentence ever written “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.”

We come into the picture, in the image of God, and God immediately includes us in his work. We are to continue to bring order to the chaos. We see words like “dominion” and “subdue” that evoke a sense of control, but they are also infused with stewardship. It is not our creation to use as we see fit. It is God’s creation into which he has invited us to participate as co-creators.

You are so complicated.

When Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution, the best science of his time regarded the cell as the fundamental building block of life, from single-cell organisms to highly developed plants and animals. The human beings are very complex at that level. There are roughly 200 different types of cells in our bodies that must work together in astonishingly intricate ways.

But there’s more. Much, much more.

Within each cell, each individual cell, are trillions of individual molecules and 10,000 to 20,000 different proteins in a given moment. There are up to 400,000 distinct structural types of proteins in the human body.

Graduation Sunday is always bittersweet. We are so very blessed by the young people in this church, as well as their families. Year after year, we celebrate our graduates’ extraordinary character and goodness, which attest to how very well-grounded they are in their faith. That is largely a product of God’s hand on them, their families and their church.