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By giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the gospel according to Matthew, the 13th chapter, I begin the reading at the verse which is numbered 24. Another parable Jesus put before them saying, "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but

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while men were sleeping his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the householder came and said to him, 'Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?' He said to them, 'An enemy has done this.'

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The servants said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he said, 'No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. And at harvest time I will tell the reapers, 'Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the

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wheat into my barn.'" Another parable he put before them saying, "The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its

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branches." And he told them another parable, "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour till it was all leavened." All this Jesus said to the crowd in parables because he said nothing to them without a parable. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the

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prophet, "I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world." Then he left the crowds and went into the house and his disciples came to him saying, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field." He answered, "He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man.

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The field is the world and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one and the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is at the close of the age and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The

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Son of Man will send his angels and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers and throw them into the furnace of fire. Their men will weep and gnash their teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father. He who has ears, let him hear." And may God

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bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. On the face of it, the very suggestion seems rather ridiculous. Here we have an unknown preacher traveling with a group of itinerants through a cultural

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backwater of the first century called Palestine. He sits down in a field with his few disciples gathered about him and he tells them a parable about some people who go forth sowing seed into a field. But at night an enemy comes and sows weeds among the seeds. The next day the servants of the owner of the field

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come and seeing the weeds suggest that they should cleanse the field immediately by ripping the weeds out. But the owner says, "No, we will wait till the time of the harvest and then we will separate the weeds from the wheat." Well, the disciples hearing this story do not understand. And that's not too surprising

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because they were a group of berry pickers and fisher folk, not sophisticated or educated. And so they say to Jesus in a time of privacy, "Explain to us this parable." And Jesus says, "You are the persons who are sowing the seed. The seed is my word. The enemies who sow weeds are those who oppose my

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word. And the field in which you sow is the world." Now here is where I suggest the whole idea becomes somewhat absurd. For what Jesus is saying is that you, 12 disciples, are to sow my seed throughout the entire planet. The 12 of you are sent out with the message into the field and the field is the world. And on the

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very face of it, that seems a ridiculous idea. Yet look at the reality today. There are two billion Christians on the face of the earth. There are two and one-half million churches and places of Christian worship. There are 1,500 Christian radio and television stations which reach more than a billion people a month with the

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gospel. The words of Jesus have been translated into more than 2,000 languages. 50,000 books and magazines are published each year concerning the word of the Lord. And there are 260,000 missionaries serving outside their own countries and spreading the seed through the field which is the world today. And

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now on this Sunday we observe World Communion, which means that Christians in every nation on the face of the earth in the course of the 24-hour period of which these minutes are apart will gather together at the table of Christ. What sounded like a foolish fiction when it was first announced in the first

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century, "The field is the world," has turned out to be an absolute fact insofar as the gospel is concerned, the field is the world. And with regard to this idea, I would like to share with you three thoughts. The first is that the field is the world constitutes a mission imperative. There has been no other

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religion on the face of the earth that has emphasized missions as has the Christian Church. Most faiths are somewhat insular and parochial, but Christianity from the very beginning has made mission not something peripheral but something central to its life. Jesus saw himself as a missionary sent by his

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father into the world, and he sent his disciples into that same world in his name. He summed it this way, "As my father has sent me, so send I you." The church is the only society on the face of the earth which from its very beginning has given itself primarily to the service of those who are not a part of it. And today

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we stand on what is perhaps the greatest missionary opportunity threshold in all of the 2,000 year history of the church. And this is so largely because of trade and travel and television. These three things have crossed every national and international and cultural boundaries. Let me give you about a few examples. We

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drink Perrier water here in the United States. We furnish our homes from Ikea. We don't hesitate to eat sushi. We listen to British rock groups and we drive to church in our Toyotas. Last year, 1 billion passengers flew on the world's airlines. This number is expected to double by the end of this century. Stocks,

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bonds, and international currencies are sold and bought across all kinds of boundaries with a rapidity today which is absolutely startling. In this fax-it-to-me age, it is as easy to do business with Paris as it is with Peoria. They celebrate Christmas in Japan, even though fewer than 1% of the Japanese

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are Christian. You can buy a McDonald's hamburger in Moscow. You can buy kosher Tex-Mex food in Israel. You can buy Haagen-Dazs ice cream in Tokyo and Kentucky fried chicken in Beijing. Films, movies, television shows girdle the globe. In Peru, there is a little town called Ocabambo. In that little town of only 400

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people, there's no running water, no electricity, and no regular mail service. But there are 50 battery-operated television sets. The Turareg tribe is the largest tribe which lives in the Sahara Desert, a nomadic group. Last year, the Turareg tribe, living in its tents out there on the Sahara, delayed the date of

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its annual migration by 10 days in order that it could watch the last episode of Dallas. For the first time in history, we have what might be described as a planetary language, and that language is English. One billion of the world's citizens speak English. More Chinese study English every day than there are

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citizens of our country. European nations require that their students take four years of English. Japanese students are required to take six years of English. In international airports, the communication between pilots and ground services is all done in English. Computers speak to each other principally in English. 85% of

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the international telephone calls made every day are conducted in English, and 80% of the scientific papers which are read to the world's scientific community are written and delivered in English. There is a greater opportunity to spread the gospel because of the breakdown of national and international and cultural

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and linguistic barriers, a greater opportunity today than ever in history. Oh yes, there are problems. The population explosion constitutes a problem. More nations are restricting the direct admission of missionaries. Expatriates are not serving as missionaries as ardently as we would

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like. There are significant demographic changes, more and more older people and more and more younger people. There are competing faiths, both Islam and Hinduism are engaged now in active evangelism in the world. There is still unnecessary duplication within the Christian Church concerning its missionary efforts, and

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there are places where new and exciting forms of evangelism and mission are being squelched by old and traditional ideas. But the primary reality of this time is that the opportunity for mission far exceeds any of the obstacles. The field is the world. That has never been more true. The mission imperative has

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never been greater. The second thought I would suggest to you is that the field is the world is also a political imperative, and I think this has been brought home to us very vividly in the last weeks in the situation in the Middle East. We are seeing war held off there by the United Action of the United

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Nations. The United Nations seems to finally be recognizing the fact that the field is the world and it is acting accordingly. Our president describes this new action and this new understanding and this new collective cooperation as the beginning of a new order. Now as Christians, as followers of that one who

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said, "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God," we should be particularly active in the support of any international groups that are seeking to prevent war. Now that we have chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, we are either going to do this or we are going to see this

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planet destroyed. Christ said, "Those who take the sword will perish by the sword." And this is the message which the church worldwide must proclaim. War, you see, is the ultimate insanity. That is true in the first place because war drags you down to the level of your enemies. It's not very often that a Christian minister

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can quote Nietzsche from his pulpit, but I can quote him today for it was Nietzsche who said, "When you fight a monster, beware lest you become a monster." So Hussein gathers together his nuclear and biological and chemical weapons in the Middle East and we are doing exactly the same thing. He rattles his sword and we

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rattle ours. We are dragging ourselves down to his level. Another example of the ultimate insanity that war is is the fact that it never turns out in the way that is expected. We fought the First World War to stop German hegemony and to make the world safe for democracy. The result was a greater German

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dictatorship than we had ever anticipated and the worst war the world has ever seen. We fought the Second World War in order to stop the Axis powers and to stop the growth of fascism. What happened instead was the development of international communism to a degree never known before

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in which one nation after another was swallowed up and virtually lost its identity. We fought the Korean War to protect the Pacific. The result was the growth of red Chinese power throughout the Pacific area and wars in the Philippines, in Vietnam, and the establishment of a permanent red state

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in North Korea. We fought the Vietnam War to stop the dominoes from falling and we left 58,151 of our boys and girls dead in those jungles and Vietnam is as red as red can be. You will remember from your knowledge of mythology that Mars is the god of war. Mars is the one who mauls and massacres. Mars is the one who

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smashes and stars and even now he reaches out for thousands of our young women and men and he longs to crush them into red pulp which he will then mix with the sucking sands of a death-dealing desert. We sometimes say that we fight wars to overthrow evil but the fact is that war is the evil that

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most urgently needs to be overthrown and this is something we cannot do as individuals. There are millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people on the face of the earth who hate and despise war and would prefer anything before it but they are not united. They have no political power or strength and

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that is where an agency like the United Nations becomes so important and what it is doing now so significant. William Howard Taft was asked at the time when the League of Nations collapsed, "What did you think of the League of Nations?" and he replied, "Like most good things it was crucified and buried in a tomb but it

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will have its resurrection day." I believe that right now in our own time we are witnessing the third day, the resurrection day, of the League of Nations in the new power of the United Nations and if we are followers of the Prince of Peace we are going to support the United Nations, demanding justice throughout all

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the world and justice also for our own nation because it is not enough for us not to want war if we still want the things we can't have without going to war. The field is the world and we are part of it. I remember a cartoon I saw several years ago about a meeting of the world cabinet of the world government

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and the president of the world sat at one end of the table and gathered about him were his cabinet secretaries and one carried the portfolio of environmental resources and one carried the portfolio of space and sitting in the midst of the group was Jesus of Nazareth and the portfolio that he carried read, "Secretary

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of Human Relations." My friends, there will be no peace until that finally becomes so and it becomes the collective responsibility of the world church to use every political expression of power that it has to proclaim this truth in every home nation and in every other nation on the globe.

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But finally, the field is the world has a profound personal imperative in it. That means that we must all as individuals become involved in this matter. If we move as a world church, that is a collective activity and we need to do that. But as individuals we must also become emissaries of peace. Now how do we

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do this? Well that depends on who and where and what you are. If you are, for example, particularly interested in the problem of world hunger and if you are very scientifically sophisticated, then you might give yourself to the development of fast-breeding nuclear reactors which can desalinate water and

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make desert places into places of green and growth. And if you're not that sophisticated, then at least you can write letters to your senators and representatives in support of the programs of an organization like Bread for the World. If your principal interest is in the field of education and you are

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yourself highly educated, then you might want to give yourself to the development of a synchronous satellite program which will enable us to send lessons to all the world, educating the masses everywhere at the same time. And if that is beyond you, then when you retire you could give a year of your life as a

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volunteer in mission teaching the ignorant somewhere either in your own country or overseas. Perhaps your particular interest is in questions of poverty. If that is so, then you might labor to lift the amount of money that our nation gives to foreign aid. I suppose you know that there are 12

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nations in the world that give a greater percentage of their gross national product to foreign aid than we do. And almost all of the foreign aid that we do give, we give in the form of arms and we insist that those arms be bought here in the United States for our own economic advantage. And if that is beyond your

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involvement, then at least you can stop complaining when the prices of gasoline or sugar or bananas go up because the United States can't throw its economic weight around in the world as it used to. It simply isn't fair that one-fifth of the world's people control four-fifths of the world's resources. So as I say, it

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depends on who you are and what you are and where your interests lie, but each of us has something that we can do. Jesus said, "The field is the world." That does not mean that we are to deny our heritage, but it does mean that we are to understand ourselves to be not only citizens of individual nations, but also

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citizens of the world. Jesus hands us what we might call a Declaration of Interdependence. I was profoundly moved by an address given by Theodore Hesburgh, who was at that time just retiring as president of the great University of Notre Dame. In that address he said that he thought every Christian

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should have three citizenships. First of all, there is his citizenship in the kingdom of heaven. Secondly, there is the citizenship which belongs to him by virtue of his birth or naturalization in the land he calls home. And thirdly, he said, there is a world citizenship. And to be a world citizen, he argues, one must

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do three things. One must first believe in the unity and the dignity of all humankind. One must second, certify one's own willingness to work for peace and justice in the world. And one must third, start doing the work that one certifies, that is, become actively engaged because the field is the world. This is a great

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task, but by the grace of God it can be done. For if God before us, who can be against us? Some of you are old enough to remember years ago when Boulder Dam was being built in the American West. We call it Hoover Dam today. It was very difficult to erect that immense structure, and as with most difficulties,

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there was costly sacrifice. Eighty-nine men lost their lives in the building of that dam. But the goal toward which they gave themselves was achieved. The dam stands, and inscribed on a memorial plate on the side of that dam appear these words, "This is dedicated to those who died that the desert might bloom." I would

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beg you today, as we come together to this table to join Christians around the world, that we recommit ourselves to the truth and the task that is summed in the words of Jesus, "The field is the world." And may God grant to us faith enough and courage enough to do at whatever the cost what must be done to cause the

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field, which is the world, to blossom with the flowers of peace and justice. To that end, may God bless us all. Let us pray. Our Father, as we come now to this table, remind us that we do not sit here

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alone, but there are gathered at this table people of every race, educational, economic, social level. There are people at this table who hold two different political ideologies than our own. There is a diversity here that is beyond our imagining, but in this we are one. Jesus Christ, thy Son, is our Lord, and he says

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to us, "The field is the world." Make us agents of the gospel, the church an emissary of peace, and all of us as individuals, the warriors, if you will, of peace and justice in all of this wounded, wounded, wounded world. We ask it in the name of the Prince of Peace.

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Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]