Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
“Weeds!”
Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church
Mindy Douglas Adams
July 27, 2008
16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
You would not believe the weeds in my garden. I mean, we were only gone a week and I weeded the garden pretty well before we left. But upon our return, I found weeds of several shapes and surprising sizes taking over the ground around my tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and flowers! I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but every year I am amazed at how quickly the weeds can take over a garden.
Gardeners well know that weeds have to be pulled from the time the good seeds are planted and must be controlled throughout the growing season. If ignored, they will soon take over, winding around our fruits and vegetables and flowers with reckless abandon and choking them until they can’t see the sun and aren’t getting the water that the imposing roots quickly soak up for themselves. Weeds, therefore, cannot be ignored! For some gardeners, this war against the weeds takes on an almost obsessive life of its own. The gardener is determined to do whatever it takes to control the weeds so that the beautiful flower or fruit-bearing plants might not pale in beauty or fail in fruit-bearing.
It makes sense to us – weeding out the bad so that the good can thrive. We like the idea of bringing order to disorder or of making right that which has been tainted by wrong. We often approach life in this way, don’t we? In our kitchens, we remove the rotting fruit so that it won’t contaminate the fresh fruit. In the school classroom, we seek to remove the bullies so that the good children can thrive. In the workplace, we seek to weed out the lazy or dishonest so that the good workers can be productive. In the lab, we seek to destroy the cancer cells so that the good cells can grow and be healthy. We have prisons so that those who have committed crimes can be removed from society and those who are good can have a safe community in which to live. We give to good causes in order to eradicate the evils of hunger and poverty or abuse or disease. We go to war in Iraq or Afghanistan or the inner city in order to weed out those who intend evil or violence or harm to others. We understand what it means to weed out the bad so that the good can grow and thrive. Whether it is in our garden or in the world, this just makes sense to us.
Until we read Matthew. In our passage for today we find Jesus telling a parable that once again goes against our initial, common reaction to a situation. Jesus tells a parable of a wheat farmer who one day sows his field with good wheat seed. But as he sleeps that night, an enemy sneaks in and sows weeds among the wheat before he vanishes. Sometime later, after the wheat has grown and produced grain, it becomes apparent that there are weeds throughout. Something is wrong and the workers’ immediate impulse is to make it right. Get those weeds out of there. Fix it. But the farmer says no. “For in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.”
From a Palestinian farmer perspective, this response probably came as somewhat of a shock to the workers that day. You see, the weed that was amongst the wheat was mostly likely the wheat-resembling weed called darnel – lolium temulentum, for the weed experts among us. This darnel is evil indeed for it hides so well next to its cousin in the wheat field, but is poisonous in the end. If too many darnel seeds make it into the bread dough, blindness or even death can occur.
Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor writes,
Palestinian farmers learned to deal with it early, uprooting the darnel once or twice before harvest so that they did not have to separate the seeds by hand. To let the wheat and the darnel grow together posed an unnecessary risk, but one that this morning’s sower seemed willing to take. He is . . . reluctant to let his servants weed his field for fear they will uproot the wheat, certain that an enemy is responsible for the problem in the first place.
So why does Jesus’ parable go against popular Palestinian practice? Because it is not a parable about agricultural decision-making. It is a parable about life. It is a parable about the Kingdom of Heaven.
It’s no surprise really that the disciples go looking for Jesus after he has left the crowds. They corner him in the house where he is staying, saying, “Okay Jesus, you are going to have to explain that weeds parable to us. We just don’t get it.”
So Jesus does explain. And it ends up being very much like the story of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 – in the end, the good and the bad will be separated. Only this parable makes it clear – you workers in the field are going to want to do the separating, but you can’t, so don’t even try. You won’t be able to tell the good from the bad, so don’t even try. Don’t even try.
But we do try. As people and as nations we have spent our history trying to rid the world of weeds. But in the process many, many ears of wheat have been lost. Consider the history of the church that one of our Sunday School classes just studied. In our history, high-minded Christians have taken it upon themselves to destroy the weeds of the world – and in the process have wreaked havoc on many innocent people. During the Crusades, for example, entire villages of good people were killed by the crusaders because they were assumed to be evil. In the current war in Iraq innocent people are killed every day in the effort to stop the insurgents. The wheat is going out along with the weeds. Jesus says that’s the best reason for us not to try to get rid of the weeds – because we’ll inevitably take out a lot of wheat in the process.
The twentieth century German theologian Helmut Thielicke believes that there is another reason not to go after the weeds. To illustrate, he tells the story of a situation he encountered in his ministry when many people were flocking to his church because he was such a well-known preacher and theologian..
One of his parishioners didn’t like all these new folks showing up, didn’t trust their motives. He said, “All this fuss that’s going on in [our church] has nothing whatsoever to do with spiritual fruit; it’s pure sensation seeking, almost a fad. The people come to get a thrill or see what’s going on, but certainly not to attend to divine worship.”
Theilicke commented on this:
The man who said this . . . did not, it is true, identify himself with the servants in the parable and draw the conclusion that we should exterminate this weed patch, stop the whole business and require the people to submit to a test of their spiritual sincerity before we let them in. Nevertheless, he did intimate that what was flourishing here was some kind of weed anyhow.
I will admit that I fell into a similar spiritual trap not long after I began serving as the Associate Pastor at University Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill. I had been watching from a distance as young couple after young couple expressed their desire to join the church within months of their planned wedding. The timing was remarkable, considering University Presbyterian only allowed members (and those active in the campus ministry program) to be married in the beautiful downtown sanctuary. As I watched these couples join and express their desire to be active in the church, then request the use of the sanctuary, then get married, then disappear, I became extremely cynical. “It’s ridiculous!” I exclaimed to my colleague who would be marrying most of these couples. “They are just using membership in order to be married in our sanctuary!” My colleague, older and wiser than I, made me think twice about weeding these “bad seeds” out. “If only one person hears a word from God during the time that they are worshipping with us, if only one person is changed by that experience, then it doesn’t matter how many others come and go.” My mind was changed. I realized that it wasn’t my place to judge someone else’s motives, and even if a person came to worship for the wrong reasons, God could still work. They could still be changed by God’s message of grace and love through Jesus Christ. I became a cynic tamed.
Thielicke argues that Jesus’ attitude would have been one of grace, and that he might say:
“It may be that many come because of very different and probably very complex motives. Many come, perhaps, because others come, because they like the music . . . , many because they love the place itself.” Of course, there are many motives at work, possibly even that of curiosity. But I can conceive of Jesus’ continuing, in line with our parable, and saying, “Why do you decry the people for this? Can you separate the false wheat, the curious and the sensation seekers from the other completely different plants that stand right beside them? Can you distinguish all this from the real hunger and thirst that tugs at many a heart and drives many a person to seek the Word? Can you distinguish it from the yearning, the anxiety to get away from oneself and find security?” Perhaps for many a person who actually came here for these questionable reasons and this afternoon may again be doing something altogether different, having forgotten everything that was said, it may happen that in this last hour, or in some hour of great loneliness or terrible despair there will come back to [this person] one single word which he heard this morning, perhaps a word of the Lord’s Prayer, possibly even a word of this sermon. And then this despised and forgotten word may comfort and accompany [her] as [she] goes through the dark and pathless forest. How much more merciful and understanding is God compared with us . . . how patient [God] is and how long are the seasons of grace [God] grants to [God’s] seeds!
A good reason in and of itself not to try to pull up the things we think are weeds. God has the power to make good wheat from any seed. It’s happened before and it will happen again. And by the grace of God, it will happen to us. For we all have a bit of weediness about us, every now and then . . . . ?
I haven’t touched on an issue from this passage that will probably linger upon the minds of a number of you. It has to do with the way this passage talks about evil. Evil in this passage is planted by the enemy of the farmer. In the interpretation Jesus gives, the enemy is the devil and the farmer is the Son of Man. Now we Protestants have been a little uneasy in the last fifty years or so talking about evil personified as the devil. But it clearly is here in this passage. The enemy actively comes and tries to trip up the farmer, tries to choke out the good with evil, hopes perhaps that the workers will destroy the good in their efforts to destroy the evil. Hmmmm. Whether or not you are comfortable with a concept of an enemy of God, or the devil, this passage gives us one. But even in this passage, the evil planted by the hand of the enemy, the devil, is rooted out in the end. In the Kingdom of God all causes of sin and all evildoers will be no more. And Jesus makes it clear that this is not like our garden - it’s not our job to decide between weed and wheat. That kind of decision is far beyond our comprehension and causes trouble when we try to make it. Think of the wars raging in the world right now. Jesus tells us clearly that that decision is beyond the realm of human understanding.
Another part of this passage that might be troubling to some of you is the judgment that comes at the end and the way the wheat will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father, but the weeds will be burned in a furnace of fire. This troubles many twenty-first century types because we dislike the thought of such a harsh judgment. But a judgment is only harsh when there is no mercy, no compassion, no understanding, no grace and no second chances. And everything we know about Jesus proves that his judgment would never be so. He made sure of that on the cross. In Jesus’ life we see that he is the giver of second chances. Jesus is the one who dines with sinners and outcasts. Jesus is the one who gives a kingdom banquet and calls in all the unexpected guests of the world. Jesus is the one who in his life points to a God of mercy and of grace. Jesus reveals to us a God who will work on the weedy part of every one of us until we shine golden in the sun, not because of our own good works, but because of God’s good grace and because of God’s unending desire to be in relationship with us.
So this passage teaches us that as we live our lives in this world, let us not live in judgment of others, judging who is weedy and who is not. That’s not what God has called us to do. Rather let us rejoice that God has sent Jesus to redeem even the weediest part of us all and let us yearn in our own lives to be a reflection of the love and grace that God shows us so clearly in Jesus – and let us bear fruit worthy of the Kingdom of God.
Amen.
Copyright: Mindy Douglas Adams, 2008
