In recent sermons, I’ve spoken on a number of occasions about the problems that can be caused in the Church, and in parish congregations and for parish churches, when people have unrealistic expectations of others in the Church and the congregation. I’ve spoken about the Donatist Controversy which raged in the Church in the 4th Century. That was focussed on whether or not the personal qualities of a minister affected the validity of the sacraments they administered, but in more general terms, it was about the holiness and perfection, or otherwise, of Church members. And I’ve also spoken about the problems churches and parishes can have when people leave the Church because of what they see as the un-Christian and hypocritical behaviour of other members of the Church.
In many ways, those people who today, leave the Church because of the behaviour of other people in the Church, are modern day Donatists. They’re people who expect the Church and all members of the Church to be perfect and holy. They also, it must be said, see themselves as, if not perfect, then at least much better and much more Christian than other people in the Church and especially than those they criticise. Well, I think those people, before they say another word or take another step away from the Church or their parish church should take some time for honest self-reflection. And they’d do a lot worse than start by reading this morning’s Gospel.
In the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, Jesus makes it quite clear that, in the world, good people and bad people, saints and sinners if you like, although by our own admission we’re all sinners, live side by side. And that’s just how the world is. Jesus also makes it clear that it’s not up to us to sort this situation out. We might be called to proclaim the Gospel, to teach other people the things that Jesus said and did, and encourage them to do the same, but it’s not our job to weed out the sinners from amongst us, nor to condemn them, nor to throw them out or away. How could we anyway? As sinners ourselves we’d have to condemn ourselves along with them. No. To weed out the good from the bad, the saints from the sinners is his job, and it’s something he won’t do until he comes again in glory.
In the parable, Jesus is speaking about the world, but this parable applies to the Church too. Perhaps it shouldn’t because if the kingdom exists anywhere on earth, it should exist in the Church. But because the Church is in the world, it’s made up of saints and sinners too. How could be any other way? There’s something of the saint and the sinner mixed up in each and every one of us, and we make up the Church. So the Church simply mirrors it’s members, and it mirrors the world. And it’s this understanding of the Church that St Augustine of Hippo used to counter the ‘holier than thou’ pretentions of the Donatists.
Augustine said that the Church, as it exists in the world, mirrors the world. He said the Church is a ‘Corpus permixtum’, a ‘mixed body’, something that’s made up of both wheat and weeds, saints and sinners, and that is just how it is and how it will be until Christ himself separates the two at the end of time. He said that whilst the Church is called to be holy, the holiness of the Church is something that can only ever be partial in the world and that the Church’s holiness will only be, and can only be, fully realised in heaven.
As well as using the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds to counter the Donatists, Augustine also made great use of the fact that the Donatists themselves didn’t live up to their own high expectations of others. Among the Donatists, for example, there was a group known as the ‘Circumcellions’ The name comes from the Latin for ‘to go around’ because these people did go around, in gangs, causing trouble. To be fair, in part they were social reformers who condemned poverty and slavery, but they were also thugs who used to beat people up with clubs which were known as ‘Israelites’ because they were used for smiting the foe, which they did to cries of “Laudate Deum” (“Praise God”). And their motive for this seems to have had less to do with their desire to see an end to poverty and slavery than with provoking their victims into killing them so that they could die a martyr’s death and be taken straight to heaven. For the same reason, they’d also interrupt courts of law and provoke judges into condemning them to death, which was a common punishment for contempt of court at that time. So despite their expectation, and demand, of holiness and perfection in others, the Donatists were far from perfect and holy themselves.
When I say that people who leave the Church today because of the behaviour of others, particularly when people’s behaviour doesn’t live up to their own high expectations and demands, are modern day Donatists, I don’t mean that they’re modern day Circumcellions. I don’t know that there any of those. What I do mean is that the Donatists condemned people, they tried to have people thrown out of the Church, especially bishops and priests, who they saw as less than perfect and holy. In fact, they consecrated their own bishops and split the Church because of this. And they did all this because, despite what Jesus says in the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, they wanted the Church to be perfect and holy in the world. But despite their own far from perfect and holy behaviour, they saw themselves as perfect and holy. They saw themselves as the wheat and anyone who didn’t agree with them as the weeds. And because they saw themselves in this way, themselves as saints and everyone else as sinners, they also believed that they were capable of sorting the wheat from the weeds and justified in throwing the weeds away. And there are so many people in the Church today who are like this, that I’m sure we’ve all met at least one of them and probably more than one.
How many times have we come across a situation in which one member of the Church has disagreed and fallen out with another? And when they’ve spoken to us about it, how many times has the one making the complaint claimed that it’s all the other person’s fault? How often have we come across a situation in which someone, or perhaps more than one, has taken a dislike to another Church member and said something like, “We don’t want (or need) their sort here”? Aren’t these examples of people thinking they’re wheat and those who disagree with them are weeds? How many times have people done things like this, not got the support they want and so they’ve left the Church, or at least that congregation, saying something like, “That lot are all the same”? All the same of course meaning wrong whilst they’re right. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have told me that I’m wrong because I’ve said or done something that they don’t agree with, or when I haven’t backed them up in a dispute with another member of the Church. There are very few occasions when I’ve been able to convince that person to consider the fact that it might be them who’s got something wrong, let alone accept that. I’ve lost count too, of the number of times other priests have told me that they’ve had the same experience. Well, I’m sorry, we’re parish priests, not private chaplains, we have to do what’s right and best for the parish even if that does mean that, at times, someone gets upset because they can’t have their own way. But when this happens, it’s not unusual for a person to leave the Church or a congregation and blame the vicar. All these things are Donatistic because they all stem from a belief that if anything happens that ‘I’ don’t like, it must be wrong and it must be someone else’s fault because ‘I’ am a good person and a good Christian so therefore it can’t be my fault.
What this really shows, in most cases, is a lack of real self-awareness, an inability to do something that’s absolutely essential to us as Christians; the ability to see ourselves as we really are, to see ourselves as God sees us. It also shows a great disconnect between what we say in church and what we actually believe. We all admit, do we not, each and every time we come to church to worship the Lord, that we’re sinners and that we have sinned against both God and our neighbour, in thought and word and deed, in what we’ve done and what we’ve failed to do? So how can we, on the one hand, admit that we are amongst the weeds, and on the other, claim that we’re amongst the wheat? And if we accept that we’re counted among the weeds, how can we possibly claim that we’re better than others or believe that we’re in any position to sort the weeds from the wheat and throw the weeds away? And even when we are right in a dispute with another member of the Church, it’s not for us to stand in judgement on the other person or people involved. We’re neither perfect, nor perfectly holy ourselves so we have no right to judge others nor especially to condemn them. Sorting the weeds from the wheat is Jesus’ job and it’s up to him to decide what to do with them after he has done the sorting.
As St Augustine said, the Church on earth is a mixture of saints and sinners, and because we, in ourselves are a mixture of the saint and the sinner, the Church on earth can’t be anything else. That might not be the ideal, it might not be the way we want it to be, but that’s the reality. So those who expect the Church and parish congregations to be perfect examples of the kingdom of heaven, or who expect individual members of the Church to be perfect examples of holiness, simply have unrealistic expectations of both the Church and its members. They’re making unrealistic demands of the Church and its members. What’s more, these are unrealistic expectations and demands that those who have and make them are incapable of living up to themselves because they’re no more perfect and holy than anyone else. What people who do this are really looking for is heaven on earth. This is why so many people who do these things are constantly moving around from church to church and denomination to denomination. They’re never happy in any church because they can’t find what they’re looking for, and they never will because what they’re looking for doesn’t exist in the Church on earth. And so in the end, they stop looking and stop going to church completely, full of bitterness quite often, because they blame other people for not being the perfect, holy people that they expect them to be but which no one, including they themselves, ever were, or are, or ever can be until and unless Christ decrees otherwise when he sorts out the weeds from the wheat.
Amen.
Propers for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Trinity 7) 23rd July 2023
Entrance Antiphon
God himself is my help.
The Lord upholds my life.
I will offer you a willing sacrifice;
I will praise your name, O Lord, for its goodness.
The Collect
Lord of all power and might,
the author and giver of all good things:
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
increase in us true religion,
nourish us with all goodness,
and of your great mercy keep us in the same;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s)
Wisdom 12:13, 16-19
Psalm 86:5-6, 9-10, 15-16
Romans 8:26-27
Matthew 13:24-43
RCL (St Gabriel’s)
Wisdom 12:13, 16-19
Psalm 86:11-17
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 