Mendocino Presbyterian Church

10/06/2026

MPC Choir!

10/06/2026

Come worship with us in person or online...www.mendopre.org
Psalm 80:7-15
Matthew 14:13-21
"All Along the Watch Tower"
--In honor of World Communion Sunday and Hispanic Heritage Month
When I was in college I was in a cover band. My favorite song to sing was "All Along the Watchtower".
(Singing)
"All along the watchtower. Princes kept their view. While all the women came and went. Barefoot servants too, well, uh.... Outside in the cold distance. A wildcat did growl. Two riders were approaching now. And the wind began to howl. Heh. heh. heh."
Bob Dylan wrote it. Jimi Hendrix set it on fire. And for fifty years people have argued about what it means. When I hear it, it makes me think of royalty trying to keep their view and their positions of power. It is a prophet’s song. A prophet stands at the edge of things and says: something is coming, and the people up in the tower are not ready.
Un profeta se para al borde del camino y anuncia: algo viene, y los que están en la torre no están preparados.
Hold that image, because Jesus gives us a watchtower this morning. Matthew 21:33. “There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a w**e press in it, and built a watchtower.”
The landowner invests. A fence. A press. A tower. This is a place built to last, built to be safe, built to see danger coming from a long way off. And then the owner hands it over. He leases it to tenants and goes away. He trusts them to tend it, and to multiply what he started.
That’s the beginning of the story, and it’s a story about trust.
El dueño construyó una viña fuerte y segura, y se la confió a otros. Es una historia de confianza.
But you know how it goes. The harvest comes, the owner sends slaves to collect his share, and the tenants beat one, kill another, stone a third. He sends more, and they do the same. Finally he sends his son. “Surely they will respect my son.” And they seize him, throw him out of the vineyard, and kill him.
The tower was supposed to be for watching. For guarding the gift. Instead, the tenants used it to look out for themselves. The watchtower became a place from which to see only what they could keep. Princes keeping their view while everyone else came and went barefoot.
Pero los labradores traicionaron esa confianza: usaron la torre para cuidarse a sí mismos, no para cuidar el regalo.
Please picture who is standing in that crowd. Jesus is in the temple courts in Jerusalem, and the people pressed around him are not the powerful. They’re peasants. The lame and the blind who came to him in the temple. The outcasts, the day laborers, the ones who know exactly what it is to work somebody else’s land and never own a row of it. Jesus was a poor man, and the crowds who loved him were poor too. He had no money, no army, no title.
And there, at the edge of the crowd, standing apart, listening from a distance, are the chief priests and the Pharisees.
Jesús les hablaba a los pobres, a los enfermos y a los marginados, mientras los sacerdotes y los fariseos escuchaban desde lejos.
So I wonder this morning whether Jesus was speaking two languages that day.
To the crowd, to the people, the parable of the vineyard, verses 33 through 41, I imagine Jesus speaking Aramaic. That was the language of the village, the kitchen, the field, the marketplace. It was the mother tongue of the poor. When a man of the people tells a story about landowners and tenants and harvests and debts, he tells it in the words of the people. They would have leaned in. They knew that vineyard. They knew those tenants. Some of them were those tenants, or had been beaten by men like them.
A la gente, Jesús le habló en arameo, la lengua del pueblo, la lengua de la casa y del campo.
And then, in verse 42, Jesus changes. “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?”
Jesus here is quoting the Psalms. Psalm 118. Now if I was Jesus which I am not but if I was: what language do you think Jesus would quote the Psalms? Probably not Aramaic. This is scripture, the language of the scroll, of the temple. This is Hebrew.Jesus would have quoted the psalm in Hebrew.
So when Jesus finished quoting the psalm, did he go back to Aramaic, back to the language of the crowd? Or did he keep speaking in Hebrew, the language of power?
Cuando Jesús citó el Salmo, cambió al hebreo, la lengua de las Escrituras. ¿Volvió después al arameo, o siguió hablando en hebreo?
I think the latter.
Because words have power. And the language that carries those words carries authority. In that place, Hebrew was the tongue of the scribes and the priests, the tongue of those who controlled who could read the Law and who could interpret it and who got to stand close to God. It was their power language, and with it they kept the people at a distance, barefoot, down in the courtyard.
And Jesus takes their own language, the language they used to hold God in their hands, and turns it back on them. He speaks to the poor, but he speaks over their heads in the priests’ own tongue, as if to say: I know your words. I know your scripture. I can speak it better than you, and I know what it says about you. The builders have rejected the stone. The tenants have killed the heir. The ones sitting in the tower have forgotten what the tower was for.
Las palabras tienen poder. Jesús usó la lengua de los poderosos para desenmascarar su hipocresía.
And Matthew tells us they understood. Verse 45: “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized he was speaking about them.” Of course they did. He was speaking their power language.
Jesus is giving us a warning. The temptation of every tenant, every one of us, is to start using what we’ve been entrusted with for our own power. We use our language, our learning, our certainty, our religion itself, to build a tower and keep a view. We use holy words to control who is in and who is out. We try to hold God the way you’d hold a deed to a piece of land.
Es una advertencia para todos: podemos usar lo que Dios nos confió para tener poder, en vez de servir.
And God keeps sending servants. God keeps sending prophets. And finally, God sent a Son.
Look at how that Son came. Not with the tower. Not with the power language. He came the way Paul says, emptying himself, taking the form of a slave, and on the cross he was as vulnerable as a person can be. The stone the builders rejected. Out of the vineyard, outside the walls, cast out into the cold distance where the wildcat growls and the wind begins to howl.
And that is where the cornerstone is laid. Not up in the tower. Out there.
La piedra rechazada es ahora la piedra angular, y la encontramos afuera, no en la torre.
So hear this invitation. The table is set. And you are invited to come to it.
Don’t come in the power language. Don’t come with your credentials, your arguments, your good standing. Don’t come trying to control God, or manage God, or hold God at the distance you find comfortable. Come the way Jesus came to us: empty-handed. Vulnerable. Weak. Come barefoot, if you have to. Come with your hands open.
Vengan a la mesa sin lenguaje de poder. Vengan débiles, con las manos abiertas.
Because it’s in our weakness that Jesus fills us. He doesn’t need us to bring the harvest. He gives it. The bread, the cup, the good things. The vineyard was always his gift, and the table is where he gives it again.
And when you leave this place, I ask you for one thing. Learn the language of those who are vulnerable. Learn the mother tongue of the poor, of the lonely, of the ones who come and go barefoot. Listen for it in the grocery store, in the clinic waiting room, on the street. Learn to speak it, not from above, but from beside. Because that’s the language Jesus spoke to the crowd. And it’s the language in which the Kingdom is still being told.
Come to the table. The stone has become the cornerstone, and it is amazing in our eyes.
Al salir de aquí, aprendan el idioma de los vulnerables. “La piedra que desecharon los constructores ha venido a ser la piedra angular.”
Amen y Amén.
https://youtu.be/_qHJ8pApxm0?si=t7QnqA5Lv-ias1Qy See less

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"My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps one hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive in meaning. And I believe this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities." The Chinese character above depicts a human being beside the sign for "word". It is the written form of xin which Ezra Pound defined as: "Fidelity to the given word. the human being standing by their word." Such fidelity to the word, as evidenced by clarity of meaning and intent, would go far to reconnect language to life. Without a renewed sense of language we cannot hope to restore balance, harmony, and coherence to our lives, our land, and our communities fro these must be joined "as marriage joins them–in words by which a man or woman can stand, words confirmable in acts."
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07/30/2026

Giving thanks for the life of Patrick Freeling.

The Gospel of Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
"God Watching Over"
Before we turn to God’s word this morning, I need to share some news with you. Friday at 10:25 in the evening, we lost a member of our wider Mendocino Coast family. Patrick Freeling, a California Fish and Game officer, died. He had just turned sixty. He leaves behind his wife Linda and his son Cole, who loved him, and who will grieve him for the rest of their days. He leaves behind all of us who knew him along this coastline, who watched him do his quiet work of protecting the animals, the plants, and the people who call this place home.

I want to tell you something about Patrick, because I think it matters for what we’re about to hear from Matthew’s Gospel.

Some summers ago, on one of those rare warm days here — you know the kind, maybe seventy-five degrees, when the ocean feels almost forgiving — I went swimming at Van Damme State Park without a wetsuit. Normally I know my limits. Thirty, forty minutes, and I come in. But that day was so warm, I felt good. I felt strong. I went out further than I should have. And by the time I turned back to shore I was cold and I knew I was in trouble. By the time I finally dragged myself onto the sand — an hour and ten minutes had gone by — my legs had gone numb underneath me. I couldn’t stand.

And there was Patrick. He had been watching my swim the whole time,
from a distance, without my ever knowing it. He came down and got my legs under me, got me steady, got me safe. He said, “I was watching you at a distance the whole time, making sure you were safe.”

I did not know, that day, that I was being watched over.
I found out only after the danger had passed.

Biblically, when we hear the phrase "at a distance" it is a clue to pay attention...something sacred is at work. That phrase reminds me of the story of the Prodigal Son where the son has basically told the Father that he wishes his dad was dead and takes his inheritance and runs. In this parable, when the Father sees the Son returning "at a distance"...what does the Father do? He runs and embraces his Son who was lost but now found.

Or the women who stood in solidarity with Jesus at the cross. They had walked with Jesus...they had prayed with Jesus...and now as their Teacher is dying on a cross they will not leave him and so we find the woman "standing at a distance" unable to leave.

Consider those moments when you like Patrick or like the Father or the Mother or the woman at the cross...stand at a distance. Those are moments to be paying attention.

Here is another small, strange grace ...a moment of attention....I want to share with you.

When Cole and Linda had to file the paperwork yesterday, the time of death was recorded in military time. Translated, that time — 21:25 — was Patrick’s own radio call sign. 21:25. The number he answered to his whole career, the number that meant I am here, I am on watch — that number came back to mark the hour he went home. I AM.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

I think it’s a kind of assurance, hidden in plain sight, that the God who watched over Patrick’s watching is watching over him still. That he is safe now, the way he made sure I was safe that day on the beach.

Let us hold Linda and Cole in our prayers this week.
And hold this thought too, because it is going to lead us straight into the parables before us today: sometimes the Kingdom of God is hiding inside something so small — a call sign, a mustard seed, a pinch of yeast — that you would walk right past it if you weren’t paying attention.

Cyril of Alexandria, one of the early teachers of the church, said that parables are word pictures — not of visible things, but of things of the mind and the spirit. Jesus is not giving us botany lessons or baking instructions. He’s giving us pictures for the eye of the soul.

The biblical scholar Robert Funk put it another way. He said the Kingdom confronts us through the power of metaphor — that a parable’s job is to strike the imagination, to carry reality inside it, to induce a vision.

So what's your vision for God's world? What do you actually see?

Here is what I see. I see a mustard plant — an herb native to Galilee, not some stately garden tree, but a wild, scrappy, black mustard shrub that can grow to eight feet tall. It is not a tree at all, technically. It’s a w**d. It germinates fast, and once it takes root, you can hardly get rid of it. Its seed — barely a millimeter across — was proverbial in the ancient world for being the smallest thing anyone could name. And from that seed comes an oil...from that seed comes a plant birds will nest in.

The story moves as our lives do: a seed is sown, it grows astoundingly, and birds come to nest in its branches. Three acts. And notice — the parable isn’t really about the farmer. It’s about the seed itself, and what it becomes almost in spite of us.

Isn’t that curious? A roadside w**d becomes the measuring stick for the Kingdom of God. Not the cedar of Lebanon. Not the great oak. A w**d that farmers were probably trying to pull out of their fields. What does that mean? I think it means the Kingdom should burn out our expectations. It refuses to let us picture God’s reign as something grand and impressive from the start.
It insists on beginning small — nearly invisible — and it insists on becoming, in the end, something that shelters creatures nobody expected to shelter.
Think, too, of the leaven. A woman takes yeast — a pinch, hidden — and works it into three measures of flour, more flour than one household could eat in a week. And the whole batch rises. Not because of anything dramatic. Because of what leaven simply is:
a hidden, inevitable, transforming power.

Paul knew this too. Writing to the Galatians, he said, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (Galatians 5:9). He wasn’t talking about bread. He was talking about how a small thing — a belief, a practice, an influence — works its way invisibly through everything it touches until nothing is the same.
Like the mustard seed once it’s sown, the leaven once it’s mixed has an inevitable effect.

You cannot un-mix it.
You cannot ask the dough to go back to being flour and water.
Something has begun that cannot be stopped.

Let us sit under the mustard plant this morning considering what it means for our lives.
The mustard plant grows large enough that birds come to nest in its branches. In Jesus’ world, birds nesting were sometimes a picture for the Gentiles — for the outsiders, the ones not yet gathered in, the ones who don’t belong to “us” in any obvious way. How might we live our faith so that it becomes, quite literally, a place for the birds to rest? A shelter wide enough for people who would never think to walk through our doors?

And the leaven works through the whole loaf until the bread is something a hungry person can actually eat. How might we live our faith so that it becomes bread — a meal that nourishes someone else, not just ourselves?
I think of the poets who understood this.

Wordsworth wrote of small, unremembered acts of kindness and love as the best portion of a good life — not the grand gestures, but the quiet, ongoing ones.

Mary Oliver spent a whole life teaching us to pay attention to small things — a grasshopper, a field, a single loaf of bread rising in a bowl — because she believed attention itself was a form of devotion, almost a form of prayer.

And I think of Patrick Freeling, standing quietly at a distance on a warm afternoon, watching a swimmer he had no obligation to watch, ready to act the moment he was needed. Nobody gave him a medal that day. Nobody even knew he was there — until the moment I needed him most. A small, hidden, watchful presence. A mustard seed of a moment. And it turned out to hold, inside it, someone’s whole life.

That is how the Kingdom of God works here on the Mendocino Coast.
Not with trumpets first. With seeds. With yeast.

With a man on watch who nobody sees until the numbness sets into your legs and you finally understand you were never alone out there.
Amen. Amen.

Let us pray.
Gracious God, we bring you our grief this morning for Patrick, and our comfort for Linda and for Cole, who feel his absence the way a shoreline feels the tide going out. Thank you for a man who watched over your creation — its animals, its plants, its people --quietly, faithfully, for years that most of us never noticed until we needed him.

And Lord, plant us like seeds. Small ones. Nearly invisible ones, if that’s what it takes to begin. Work through us like leaven — hidden, patient, inevitable — until something in the people around us begins, almost without their noticing, to rise.

Make us a shelter for the birds who have nowhere else to rest. Make us bread for the hungry, in whatever quiet way you ask of us. And when our own hour comes, let it be marked, as Patrick’s was, not by fear but by assurance — that the one who watched over us the whole time is bringing us safely home. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

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Thank you MPC for nurturing and encouraging our young leaders.

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Hosting reception at Preston Hall today plus the “Jessica Fletcher” run through Mendocino. This is the “grey sweatsuit run” with Angela Fletcher distinctive hand wave!