The Weeds and the Wheat Sermon by Rev. Peter Shidemantle June 3, 2018 Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Transcription

1 The Weeds and the Wheat Sermon by Rev. Peter Shidemantle June 3, 2018 Matthew 13:24-30, Every once in a while someone will approach me with a sense of righteous indignation about some evil being perpetrated in the world something so shocking or vulgar that they think something just has to be done about it. They may not say it, but the implication is that I am the one who is supposed to do it! Either that, or they ll say, What is the church going to do about it? when they are part of the church and are perfectly free to invite others to join them in responding. What is the Christian response to evil in the world? That s what our parable from Matthew s gospel is about this morning. It s the second of several parables where Jesus uses an agricultural theme and metaphor to teach about life in God s realm. Just before this is the parable of the sower, the focus of which was the condition of the soil to receive the seed of God s word, and to produce growth in service to God s kingdom. Our parable this morning features the weeds. As Jesus explains it, weeds represent sin and evil-doing, anything that works against the purposes of God. As Jesus tells it, a householder sows good wheat seed in his field. That night, while everyone is sleeping, an enemy comes into the same field and sows weeds right where the wheat seed had been planted. No one is aware of it until the spring comes, and the weeds grow up right alongside the wheat. It was all mixed up; you couldn t tell where the wheat stopped and the weeds began. When the plants came up, the servants go to their master and ask where all these weeds came from. The enemy planted them, he says. Do you want us to pull them out, they ask? No, the householder replies, let them grow up along with the wheat, then at harvest time I ll tell the reapers to collect the weeds first, tie them in bundles to be burned as fuel, and the wheat will be gathered into my barn. 1 of 5

2 Later Jesus says that that field is like the world weedy and corrupt not the way it was supposed to be. No one needs to be told that s the kind of world we live in. We can pick from the shocking or vulgar realities that we see or read about that makes us shake our heads, or shed a tear - or enrages us - at the difference between how the world is and how it ought to be. Some people ask why such evils should exist in the world. Christianity has never gotten too worked up about that. Our faith is quite realistic about evil and its power in the world, because we know about sin. We fess up up to it every Sunday, and our complicity in it. The more pressing question is, What is to be done about it? In one sense there is a quite satisfactory end to the story, as Jesus later explains the parable of the weeds to his disciples. The enemy who plants all the weeds gets his in the end. Not only did the weeds not do what he intended, to choke out the life of the wheat. The weeds become free kindling for the householder. It seems, then, that the worst the evil one can do is to be transformed into energy to serve God s eternal purposes. Evil gets its due. The weeping and gnashing of teeth that s what awaits the purveyors of evil in the world. Sometimes it even feels good to imagine it! But before we get carried away too far in this direction, as purveyors of God s wrath may want to do, we should hear what the rest of the story has to say. We might expect that master to put the servants to ridding the field of all the weeds just yank them out of there. Shouldn t we Christians be involved in ridding the world of evil? We hear plenty of calls for that identify the evil and go after it. That may be our inclination, but when it comes to evil in the world, and God s response to it, Jesus seems to be saying in his parable that God doesn t have any immediate plans to uproot all the evil among us. For now God s plan is to let it be. The reason is, as the householder puts it,... in gathering the weeds you ll pull up the wheat too. I ve read that this was a specific kind of weed that commonly grew up along with the wheat, known as darnel. It s an annual grass with long, slender bristles that actually look like wheat. You can easily mistake it for the real thing. In a frenzy of weed pulling you d be yanking up the good with the bad. 2 of 5

3 The problem so often with the eliminators of evil is they use the same methods as its purveyors. God knows it s been tried, efforts to purify the field, to eliminate the bad weeds so that only the golden stalks of wheat survive. It s been tried in the church when some have concluded that the church would be better off without those people who are so wrong-headed and argumentative and with whom they disagree so vigorously about important matters and on a vastly greater and more deadly scale with extremists who believe they have a mandate from their god to literally destroy those they deem to be the enemies of god. Martin Luther King once said, God s purpose is not wrathful judgment. God s purpose is redemption, and the road to redemption is by way of reconciliation. Only in that way will the world finally be saved. Today s parable is a cautionary tale. It warns us against relying on our human capacity to know fully the mind of God. It also suggests that what might appear to be good and pure might not necessarily be either one. In the story that Jesus tells, the enemy sows his evil seed and then goes away, confident that the damage he intends will be done. Robert Farrar Capon says that the enemy doesn t have any real power over the goodness anyway: the wheat is in the field, the commonwealth of God is in the world, and there is nothing that evil can do about that. But, he adds (and this seems so relevant to the chaos and confusion being sown in these days, with conspiracy theories and all the rest, how evil thrives on chaos and confusion) he (the evil one) can sucker the forces of goodness into taking up arms against the confusion he has introduced, to do his work for him. That is why he goes away after sowing the weeds. He has no need to hang around. Unable to take positive action anyway having no real power to muck up the operation he simply sprinkles around a generous helping of darkness and waits for the children of light to get flustered enough to do the job for him. Yes, the wheat and the weeds get all mixed up, good sometimes being twisted to serve the forces of evil, and sometimes the evil that is intended ends up working for good. The master says, Wait. Let the wheat and the weeds grow up together until the harvest, and when the harvest comes I will tell the reapers to collect the weeds and bind 3 of 5

4 them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn. He doesn t like the weeds in his field it s just that he has a different plan to deal with them. Jesus wants us to hear that God s solution to the problem is long term rather than immediate, that this is God s way of dealing with the evil in our world, not immediately but finally, once and for all. It seems like it could be a cop out, taking us off the hook in terms of our responsibility to confront evil wherever it exists, to pull the weeds of hunger and oppression and violence and racism. It could be, but it would contradict what Jesus and the prophets of Israel, and the demands of our faith clearly express. But Jesus was teaching his disciples that their way of dealing with the evils of their day and time were different from God s way. Many of them thought that by overcoming the Romans, by establishing Israel as a political kingdom, by getting the right man in there to rule it, then everything would be as it should be. They thought in their terms, as we think in our terms that they could fight their way, legislate their way, vote their way into the kind of kingdom that would please God. They were wrong. Jesus didn t put much faith in the political processes of his day. I doubt he d put much more faith in our processes today, as important as it is for us to work within them. He does it God s way not ours by going to Jerusalem, where he is arrested and tried and crucified. It was easy to believe, as he hung there on the cross, that his way has failed and evil has triumphed, that the world was completely overrun by weeds. But that isn t what happened. In his death those who believe, believe that evil was somehow ultimately, finally defeated, and that while evil might exercise dominion for a time, it won t exercise dominion forever. In the meantime, we have to accept the reality that we live in a world of weeds rather than pulling up every plant that looks vaguely suspicious because the truth is that none of us is completely free of evil. As Jim Somerville puts it, There is more bad in the best of us, and more good in the worst of us, than any of us, in this life, will ever know. Years ago, early in our ministry, my wife Karen served as director of a youth center at an urban church in Zanesville, Ohio. She was doing a year s internship there 4 of 5

5 while studying at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. I was chaplain at Muskingum College at the time, and we lived about 15 minutes from Zanesville. There were a lot of little weeds running around at that center when she arrived. It was chaos. The community served by that center was comprised of a lot of first and second - generation people from Appalachia, most on public assistance. It was hard to tell who was from which family, and several of the young girls were pregnant, as was Karen at the time with our son Dale. Karen worked with these kids and families, doing simple things like saying please and thank-you, getting them to sit down long enough to talk about things. She organized a parents group and got a library and a tutoring program going. She got them talking about how to prepare healthy meals on a limited income. She loved them, both the parents and the kids. She got the parents talking about what they hoped and dreamed for their children. Instead of pulling weeds, and there were a lot of weeds to be pulled, they decided to grow some wheat. They got the city to put fencing up around the playground and Slow down, children at play signs along the street. At the end of Karen s year there, just before we moved to St. Paul, the parents threw a baby shower for her and for Jenny, a 14 year-old girl at the center. There was a little more wheat in the field. In a world of weeds, perhaps the best strategy we can adopt as Christian people is the one St. Paul advised in Romans 2:21: Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. 5 of 5