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July 20, 2008 sermon

Weed Control
(Matthew 13: 24-30)

Reverend Minister Sally Harris

Giver of Life and love this I pray: for stillness to hear the song of Your Spirit.
For vision to see the shape of Your dreaming.
For wisdom to touch the depths of Your creating.
For courage to take the paths our souls have always known. Amen

Matthew’s world was in disarray. The times were hard. The government, a huge bureaucracy that provided so many important things like roads and military support and the justice system, was hopelessly out of touch with the people. And the religious establishment wasn't much better. It seemed so focused on preserving what was that it had little or no vision for what might yet be. When a prophet spoke out, they were vilified, punished, especially if they called into question the decisions of the government. Voices of hope arose, but just as quickly they fell as questions arose about the character of the speaker, about their ability to deliver, or about the transgressions of their past. Apathy was the prevailing ethos in the community. It is not hard to imagine the people asking, "Why even bother when nothing seems to change?" The weeds are crowding out the wheat.

Our world is in disarray. Watch any newscast - bad news outweighs the good. Indeed, whether the topic is the world, the nation, the church, the economy, or the environment, things seem to be getting worse, not better. The weeds do seem to be crowding out the wheat. Yes, no matter where we live or when, what we do or who we are - all of us and in all ages the world seems to be experienced as messy and destructive. Nothing is as neat and clean and tidy as we were once promised by someone… somewhere….

What should we do about this mess? What can we do and why is it this way in the first place? If there is a God why isn't the world like a beautiful sea of waving grain rather than a chaotic vista of conflicting vegetation? If not the whole world how about the church? Couldn't the church, at least, be an orderly field of superior wheat - without ignoring injustices and initiating intrigues?

Well, according to Jesus not even the kingdom, not even the kin-dom of heaven, not even the place where God's presence prevails, where goodness and peace and justice are the wheat of the day - not even there, is one free from toxic, invasive, unwanted, aggressive plants. It may have started out that way, a field planted with only good seed but sometime during some night in some spring, while everyone was enjoying their well-earned and rightful night's sleep, an enemy sneaked in and sowed weeds among the wheat. A weed that is most likely darnel, a nasty wheat look-alike with poisonous seeds and roots like nylon cord. Some scholars dismiss the enemy business as Matthew's version of a conspiracy theory. They note that weeds do not require a seed-sowing terrorist to plant them. Weeds grow all by themselves. But however the weeds get there, we've got them - not only in our yards, our fields but in our governments, in our churches, in our corporations, in our families, in our lives. Weeds that look like wheat - counterfeits of reality. No wonder the enemy plants and runs. The enemy doesn't need to do anything more than sprinkle negative virtual reality. Why? Because this kind of weed is pretty clever. This wheat impersonator survives by wrapping its roots around the roots of the wheat so that you cannot yank up one without yanking up the other. There is no plant surgeon alive who can extract the poisonous seed without killing some innocent bystanders. So even in seeking to do good by eradicating the counterfeit reality there is the great danger that reality itself will be altered. By frantically pulling out the supposed weeds the wheat itself will be uprooted. Yes, since good seed and bad seed inhabit the same field the only result of a truly dedicated campaign to get rid of the bad will undoubtedly destroy the whole.

Most however see this as the common sense solution. The most effective weed control, the most efficient method of protecting the proper plant is to eradicate. Pull them up, cast them out, cleanse the field. This approach is very popular on the world stage - from stereotyping all Muslims as terroists to genocide in Rwanda and in the Sudan; from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the conflict in the Middle East. But extermination is not the solution of this story. Here the owner of this mixed field says no. No to what every farmer and gardener would naturally do. Don't pull out the weeds. Let them all grow together until harvest. Be patient. At the time of harvest we will separate out the weeds from the wheat

This is a stunning statement, not only to the peasant folk of Galilee but to us. Does it really mean that we can do more harm when we think we are doing good than when we are doing nothing at all? Yes, says the wise grower of wheat and inadvertently weeds. Yes because who is skillful enough, knowledgeable enough to separate the good from the bad? Just when you think you are eradicating something that looks for all the world like a weed you see grains of wheat fall to the ground - rashly destroyed. During one of the first crusades, knights from western Europe blew through an Arab town on their way to the Holy Land and killed everyone in sight. It was not until later, when they turned the bodies over, that they found crosses around most of their victims' necks. It never occurred to them that their view of whose right and whose wrong - whose in and whose out - was gravely skewed.

Once the President of Harvard University was asked, what he hoped students would receive from a Harvard education? He said, "Tolerance for ambiguity.” [Derek Bok]
Tolerance and patience is this tale-telling prophet’s kind of weed control.

Perhaps this storyteller knew that in first-century Palestine the best bet for heating and cooking fuel was dried weeds. Perhaps this prophet of paradoxical parables knew that by letting the wheat and weeds grow together farmers had almost everything they needed to make bread: the wheat for the flour and the weeds for the fire. The only other thing they needed was a little patience, a little tolerance of the temporary mess, until everything was put to good use at the harvest. Perhaps the metaphor maker knew that sometimes the wheat needed to be woken up. That sometimes the existence of weeds wakes up the wheat, reminding them of who and whose they are. Sometimes when the field gets very, very messy, the search for the Sower becomes a necessity, not a luxury, and good seed that once toasted in the sun taking everything for granted remembers that surviving as wheat is going to take some effort.

What really does separate the wheat from the weeds - what is good seed? What is bad? And if you spend all your time trying to figure out the weeds there is a risk that the wheat paradoxically becomes the weed. It is one of the trickiest things weeds do. The weeds get the wheat so riled up and defensive that they start acting like weeds themselves - full of prickles, full of poison - good guys who turn into bad guys trying to put the bad guys out of business.

So here you have it - a mixed field. Whether we like it, approve of it, understand it or not, this is a story that tells us that life even in the kin-dom is going to get messy. Our role in this mixed field is not to give ourselves to the enemy by devoting all our energy to the destruction of the weeds but to go about our lives growing according to ways of God, not according to the ways of the world. Our job is to be wheat, even in a messy field - to go on bearing witness to the one who planted us among those who seem to have been planted by someone else. To trust that the harvest is really God's job.

There is a story about Pope John XXIII, who ended his lengthy prayers each night by saying to himself, "But who governs the church? You or the Holy Spirit? Very well then, go to sleep." Our job is to stay true to our roots and to the one who planted us. To grow and bear much fruit. Our job is to live out the church's prayer - that God's kin-dom, God's way, be done on earth as it is in heaven. It is enough to be wheat - to be daily bread for ourselves and for others. That is our power - to be patient and to be faithful to the kin-dom that has already been planted among us.

May it be so! Amen.

[resource: : Barbara B. Taylor, Bread of Angels]

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