8th Sunday of Pentecost

“His disciples approached him, saying, ‘Explain to us the parable of the weeds of
the field.”
After Jesus gave his response to this question:
Did you fully understand the parable?
I had some help with for today’s sermon on this parable.
There’s a famous Episcopal Preacher,
Named Barbara Brown Taylor.
And she’s largely responsible for what I’m about to say today.

As I sat down to do my sermon research this week,
It was clear that her understanding of the parable was way more helpful than
anything I could’ve come up with on my own!

So let’s review:
“Jesus said: The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed
good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and
sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.”

There’s a lot of grief and anxiety in today’s world.
Open up any newspaper and you’ll see how awful things are.

Many of us: right now in this very church:
Are struggling with deep grief,
Loss, anxiety, health.

Whether the topic is the nation, the church, the economy, or the environment:
Consensus is that things are getting worse, not better.
The whole creation is groaning:
And the weeds seem to be crowding out the wheat.

Those of us who believe in God have a hard time explaining—to our selves or to
anyone else—why things are the way they are: wrestling with a world that is
messier than we would like it to be.
The details may have changed since the Bible was written,
But the dilemma remains the same:

What should we do about this mess?
What CAN we do, and why is it this way in the first place?
If God really is in charge,
Then why isn’t the world a beautiful sea of waving grain?
Or at least the church--
Couldn’t the church, at least, be a neat field of superior wheat?

According to Jesus:
Not even the kingdom of heaven is pure.
It may have started out that way,
But sometime during the night,
While everyone else was sleeping:
An enemy sneaked in and sowed weeds among the wheat.

A weed known as darnel:
Which was a nasty wheat look-alike with poisonous seeds and roots like a nylon
cord.

If it’s not separated from the wheat at some point or another,
Those seeds can get ground into the flour and make a loaf of bread that will give
you a real bellyache.

Now we all know from our own gardens and flower beds, that weeds do not
require someone to physically plant them:
They grow all by themselves.
And most of us have got them:
In our yards, and also in our lives:
Those thorny people who were not part of the plan,
Who are not welcome:
Sucking up sunlight and water that were meant for good plants, not weeds.

Some of them are just irritating,
Like poison ivy:
But some of them are as deadly as nightshade,
And the question is: what do we do about them?

In Jesus’ parable, the slaves ask their master:
“do you want us to go and gather the weeds?”

That is, after all, the common sense solution.
Pull them up, cast them out, cleanse the field.
But the boss said “no.”

“No” he said, “For in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with
them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will
tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them into bundles to be burned,
but gather the wheat into my barn.”

This is a stunning statement.
Not least of all because it seems to advocate passivity in the face of evil.
It also seems to suggest that we can do more harm when we think we are doing
good, than when we are doing nothing at all.

But there might be a few reasons that the boss says no to those who want to
neaten up the field.
The first reason is that they are not skillful enough to separate the good from the
bad.
They cannot always tell the difference. They exterminate something that looks
like a weed, but when they bend over to pick up the limp stalk, grains of wheat
fall out.

Did you know:

That in 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 Christians
might be living in the Arab town.

Another difficulty with separated the good from the bad is that often their lives
are intertwined.
That is one of the ways darnel 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,
And according to the Boss: it’s just not worth it.
Better to let them all grow together until it is time to harvest.

A second reason to let the weeds grow is that they may turn out to be useful in
the end.
In Jesus’ time:
Lumber and coal were hard to come by.
The best bet for heating and cooking fuel was dried weeds or manure.
By letting the weeds and the wheat 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 ended was a little patience:

A little tolerance of the temporary mess, until everything was put to good use at
the harvest.

For those of us living in the time before the harvest,
That patience can be hard to come by,
But the weeds may still be. Useful in ways that surpass our understanding.

Sometimes the weeds wake the wheat up and remind them who they are.
Sometimes, when the field gets very, very messy, the search for the Sower
becomes a necessity, not a luxury,
And good seeds that once toasted in the sun taking everything for granted
remember that surviving as wheat is going to take some effort.

The point of all of this is that God allows a mixed field.
Whether we like it, approve of it, or understand it or not:
God asks us to tolerate a mixed field too--
Both in the church and in the world.

And this is NOT being passive.
It is, instead, a call to strenuous activity (as any of us who have tried to love our
enemies already know.)

It is not easy being wheat:
Especially with so many weeds competing for the soil:

But what the Boss seems to know is that the best and only real solution to evil is
to bear good fruit.
Our job, in a mixed field, is not to give ourselves to the enemy by devoting all our
energy to the destruction of the weeds,
But to mind our own business, so to speak--
Our business being the reconciliation of the world to God through the practice of
unshielded love.

If we will give ourselves to that, God will take care of the rest--
The harvest, the reapers, the fire—all of it.
Our job is to be wheat:
Even in a messy field--
To stay true to our “roots”
And to go on bearing witness to the one who planted us.

Amen.