God's Triple Action Formula
Fr. Tom Seitz, Jr.
July 3, 2022
Children’s Homily
God promises to feed with his love; as a result, our hearts, that part of us that is nearest to God, shall rejoice, and our bodies shall flourish like the grass.
When it comes to grass, you can go to Walmart, Lowe’s or Home Depot and find all sorts of products designed to feed the grass in your lawn. Here is a picture of a bag of Scott’s Turf Builder. It has a triple-action formula. It not only feeds your lawn so that your grass grows tall, thick and green with deep roots. It will also kill your weeds and get rid of fire ants.
God’s prophet Isaiah tells us that God has his own triple-action formula that will kill the spiritual weeds that may take root and grow out of our hearts. It will also repel anything that might sting our hearts or our bodies like a fire ant, and it will feed our hearts and bodies so that we can grow up to be like Jesus.
God’s triple action formula is not available at Walmart, Home Depot or Lowes. You have to go to Jerusalem to get it. Jerusalem is not a store. It is like a loving mother who feeds her children with the very best food, with some of her own life, food that will kill any weeds that may be growing out of our hearts and repel other creatures who might want to injure us.
Our church, the Church of the Good Shepherd, is one of those Jerusalem distribution centers that is more like a loving mother. When you come forward and receive the bread and the wine of Holy Communion, you are receiving the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, who is God’s life for your heart and your body.
We come to church each week for two reasons: first, to receive the seeds of the gospel, like I am planting them within you now; and second, to receive God’s triple action formula to protect and nourish those seeds. God uses Good Shepherd and many other churches around the world to distribute his unique, triple-action, life-giving formula, a formula that is even more nutritious than what a mother can give us.
Someone once said that “no one can have God for his Father, who does not have the Church for his mother.” The Church is our mother, the place where God the Father feeds his children so that they can be protected and strengthened to grow and become more deeply rooted in his Son, Jesus Christ.
Let us pray. God, thank you for killing our weeds and for feeding us with the love and life of your Son. May we receive all the food and drink we need so that our hearts may rejoice, and our bodies may flourish like the grass. AMEN.
[which segued into the adult sermon]
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Let me add and amplify for a few minutes on the basic message I have already shared with our children.
Isaiah’s image of the church as our nurturing mother is rather daring. The Church is not just the Bride of Christ. She is the nurturing mother of all God’s children. Isaiah makes it clear that the church is the one place in this life where we may always turn to taste and know the consoling love of God. I avoided repeating one verse of Isaiah’s prophesy with the children precisely because it was so explicit, where he says, “you may nurse and be satisfied from her consoling breast; you may drink deeply with delight from her glorious bosom.” John the evangelist picks up on this imagery in the prologue to his gospel, where he states that Jesus, the Son of God, rests in the bosom of his Father. If we carry this bosom analogy further, the picture we have is that of God the Holy Spirit as the life that the Son receives from the Father, and the Son’s offering of his life back to the Father is expressed most fully in this world in the outpouring of his blood on the cross.
Because this is the very nature of God, we believe that the Holy Eucharist, God’s unique meal and stream of life, like that of a mother, is one of the two great sacraments that Jesus has given to the Church as the means by which we share in the life of God, Holy Baptism being the other sacrament that is necessary for our spiritual life and the flourishing of our hearts and bodies like grass.
We live in a world filled with spiritual weeds, with fire ants, snakes, scorpions, and wolves. A lot of life is simply hard to digest, or outright poisonous, but the good news is that we have been commanded to eat and drink God’s pure love in remembrance of Jesus’ death and resurrection, to find the strength and protection and comfort we need to live faithfully in the world without aggravating and multiplying the weeds or turning into a wolf ourselves. What we enjoy here at the banquet table of the Lord has the power to turn a wolf like Paul into a tireless disseminator of the life-giving seeds of the Gospel.
When I moved into my current home some sixteen years ago, my lawn was Bahia turf. After I installed a vinyl fence to enclose the back yard, I stripped the turf from the perimeter of the fence and planted a variety of plants and shrubs. Almost immediately weeds began to proliferate in the rest of the lawn. I was told that this was the result of stripping away the turf to make room for the shrubbery, because in doing so, I had unintentionally stirred up and propagated the seeds of weed that were lurking below the surface. Had I applied an herbicide to the bare ground before planting the shrubs, I would likely have minimized the subsequent infestation of weeds in the rest of the back yard.
The Episcopal Church will be meeting in General Convention next week in Baltimore. A resolution has been offered to do away with the requirement of Holy Baptism for those who visit the Church and wish to receive Holy Communion along with those who have been baptized. Like my error in planting shrubbery in my back yard without first treating and preparing the ground, I believe that making baptism optional would be a serious error. As Paul tells the Galatians this morning, a new creation is everything, and this is only possible if we accept the grace of Holy Baptism, of dying completely to our old self with all its inherent and potential weeds, in union with Christ’s own death, submitting to that death, as he did, in obedience to his Father so that he might bear away our sins and the sins of the whole world so that we might rise from the waters of Baptism as a new creation. I was pleased to learn on Friday that the committee that was considering that resolution has decided to withdraw it from further consideration.
We believe these two sacraments of Mother Church are God’s saving graces to us. Unlike the infant formula companies that had to shut down due to bacterial contamination in their plants, creating a crisis for many mothers, no such disruption will ever occur in the Church’s sacraments. As Isaiah promises us, we may drink deeply with delight from the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood. That triple-action formula is like a river and an overflowing stream. Not even a corrupt priest can interrupt or taint the effectiveness of the sacraments, as long as the proper elements of water, and of bread and wine, are used, the words of institution are remembered, and those who receive God’s grace do so with faith in their effectiveness, despite whatever spiritual shortcomings may exist in the celebrant, shortcomings, if they become a public scandal, that bishops are authorized to address with appropriate disciple.
Our own deacon John’s chemical container business serves as a fitting analogy to Jesus’ sending out seventy disciples into the towns where he intends to go in today’s gospel. We are not only the beneficiaries of the sacramental life of Mother Church. We are the containers of the residual grace of those sacraments which enables us to proclaim to our families, friends, neighbors, and associates who receive us in peace that they, too, can drink deeply of God’s grace. They can know his healing power through us as his channels of that residual grace no less than we have received that grace directly in the Holy Eucharist.
We, the people of Good Shepherd, correspond to the seventy in today’s gospel. We are the extended family of God no less than the seventy members of Jacob’s extended family, the spouses, and children of his twelve sons, who went down into Egypt and grew and prospered and became the nation of Israel.
Moreover, God will often use us in pairs, as partners, like he did those animals who left Noah’s ark two by two after the flood, to reproduce more and more Christian disciples.
And furthermore, we are like the seventy elders Moses selected to receive the Spirit of God to help him bear the burden of administering a growing nation of believers, just as the seventy sent out by Jesus in today’s gospel represent the extended family of God, beyond his initial twelve apostles, who will enable the fledgling Mother Church to grow.
Our current world, with all its dissentions, disagreements, animosities, violence, diseases and war, spreading seemingly unchecked like weeds, longs to know that there is an effective triple-action formula, that there is a place where they can come and be fed and comforted with that formula, where wolves can become lambs, where they can be strengthened to handle the snakes and scorpions in this world, where weeds can be replaced with the fruit of the Holy Spirit. That is our unique mission. Let us take with delight and with joyful hearts the nourishment God offers us to fulfill the mission he has entrusted to us. AMEN.