He Will Have Us, If Only We Don't Get in the Way

The Watershed of the Parables

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Listen.

There was a man I knew in a church I once served. Andy. And if you had just one sentence to describe him, you would probably say that Andy was a hard man.

His eyes were as dark as pavement and his voice as rough as gravel. He’d been a cop, and I’ve always wondered if his jaded personality came as a result of his career or if his career choice had been a perfect fit. He was a hard man.

One time I was in my office on the phone and I heard Andy’s gravely voice in the foyer— not shouting but barking in his cop’s voice, “Get up. Get your stuff. Move on out of here. You don’t belong here.”

I hung up the phone and I went to see what the barking was about. A hitchhiker— a homeless man— had stopped at the church earlier that morning, looking not for money but for a meal. So when Andy came into the church office that day, he found this hobo seated on a dirty, green army duffel. The man was eating ham and sweet potatoes leftover from a church dinner.

The door to the church office had a little electric bell that went off whenever someone entered the building. That morning, before the bell even stopped ringing, Andy had appraised this stranger and was ordering him away, “Get up. Get your stuff.”

For Andy, the “real” world was the world he’d retired from, a world where people will do anything to get ahead and where scores are settled not forgiven. For Andy, that was the real world not the world as it’s described in stained glass places.

He’d grown up in the church…without every really becoming a Christian.

In his moments of need— when his dad had died, when he’d lost his job, when he’d struggled with alcoholism— God had not been the one he’d turned to. He had two daughters, a wife and a house. Andy was happy with his life but not grateful. And he’d be the first to admit he’d made mistakes in his life, but he’d never call those mistakes sins.

If you asked Andy if he was a Christian, without thinking, he’d say, “Yes, of course.”

If you asked his friends or his neighbors, they wouldn’t know.

Andy came to worship whenever his wife or one of his girls was singing. Every time he came he looked like he was restless to get to the main event, which for him never came.

When I preached, Andy would squint at me, suspicious of the agenda hidden beneath my words. And whenever I saw Andy sitting in the pews, I would practically throw the Gospel at him every which way, like he was target practice, hoping that some Word would take root in him. Nothing ever did.

When I heard Andy barking “Get up. You don’t belong here.” I got up and walked out to the foyer and, in my pastoral tone of voice, I asked Andy, “What are you doing?”

And Andy smiled at me like I was the most naïve child in the world and, with the man still sitting there on the duffel, he said, “He doesn’t need to be here. He’ll only bother the old folks for a handout or scare the kids.”

And I said,

“This is a church. We can’t treat him like that. Whether he bothers the old folks or not, whether he scares the kids or not, we’ve got to treat him like he’s Jesus.”

My words just bounced off him like seeds on a sidewalk.