AProp11-2008

Genesis 28:10-19a; Psalm 86:11-17; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

July 20, 2008

This is the time of year for weeding.

Before we know it, those pesky, hearty weeds

can choke out the plants we want to grow.

We want our veggies and flowers – not the weeds! –

to get the benefit of our rich compost and fertilizers.

I’m growing a little patch of sunflowers and zinnias.

They are getting up in size –

and the other afternoon I came home,

went out and checked on them and saw a gazillion shiny beetles munching away.

Some of the leaves were nothing but thin veins with all the leafy green gone.

Needless to say, I didn’t waste much time getting rid of them.

At St. Mary’s one big chore they asked us to do was to weed the garden.

They do a vegetable garden every spring and the soil has been enriched year after year.

But this year they had some manure brought in, tilled it in the garden soil,

planted their little veggie plants –

and thick tall green grass sprung up all through the garden so that you couldn’t even see the young squash and cucumber plants.

That cow that manure came from must have eaten lots of grass!

We all know that weeds and bugs are not welcome in our gardens.

So why does Jesus say NOT to weed?

Why would he advise his listeners to let the weeds and wheat grow up together?

Let’s look closely at his words.

The seed sowed into the field was good.

Then, in the darkness, unseen by anyone, for all were asleep,

an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away.

So, as the tiny plants came up out of the ground,

there was a mixture of good and bad – wheat and weeds.

Jesus was not implying that the weeds were really good plants that would do no actual harm.

He was clear that they were placed in the field by an enemy –and were bad.

The weeds were actually darnel, an annual grass that looks a lot like wheat.

It’s hard to tell the difference, especially when the plants are young.

The well-meaning servants are concerned for the farmer’s crop.

They assume that they should go and pull up the weeds out from the wheat.

And here is where the story becomes a parable.

A parable is meant to help us see what is hard for us to see.

To help us hear and understand.

And so, a parable will often start with a familiar situation

that should follow into a logical solution.

Then, it will inject something completely foreign, upside down,

opposite from what the hearer would expect –

-          and cause us to look for a hidden meaning.

“Do you want us to go and gather up the weeds?” ask the servants.

We would expect something like:

Oh, good and faithful servants, go and pull the weeds and the kingdom of heaven will be yours!

But instead, we hear:

“No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.

 Let them both grow together until the harvest.”

Well, we think, to lose a little wheat in order to save the whole crop

wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

So, what is Jesus trying to get across?

Let’s think about another garden – the first garden.

In that first garden the serpent told the woman,

when he offered her the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

 – you will not die. You will be like God, knowing good and evil. (Gen 3:4-5).

So, we humans have been convinced from the beginning

that we can know the difference between good and evil –

that we can know what God knows.

We are the servants who think we can know the good seed from the bad

– a task that only the farmer can carry out at the harvest.

And so we realize that Jesus is not talking about gardening after all

but about the human tendency to think we know about and can handle evil just as God would.

The farmer’s response gives us a clue that there is a difference between us and God,

between our way of doing things and God’s way.

That enemy can go away after doing his dirty work, because we, the overeager servants,

will come in and righteously do the rest.

We will rip out some of God’s goodness in order to get rid of evil.

We think we know the difference between good and evil enough to take that action.

And we never fail to kill some good along the way.

 Obvious examples to us are religious fundamentalists,

whether Muslim, Jew, or Christian,

para-military arian supremist groups training in rural America,

‘skinhead’ racists, suicide bombers, and so on.

All these people think they know good from evil.

And we would say they surely don’t.

And we watch them pull up the wheat right along with the weeds.

And we watch innocent lives become sacrifices to their understanding of the will of God.

And we have to take a look closer to home – in ourselves.

We ALL have the tendency to think we know as God knows

and that we should act on God’s behalf in dealing with evil.

Good and evil commonly are mixed into the same field

and even into the same individual human being.

If we try to get rid of all the weeds around and within every person,

we will end up abolishing everyone.

 But, getting back to the theme of the parable,

we feel about evil like we feel about weeds.

We can’t just let them take over! We want evil out of our world.

Our hands want to reach into the soil and pull it up by the roots.

We throw up our hands and ask how to live?

Turning to Romans, we hear Paul’s words –

that the whole creation is groaning for the end of evil –

for the revealing of the children of God –

for the garden to contain only the good seed that God sowed.

Paul says we respond to this time

between the sowing and the harvesting  - with hope  -

that the creation will be set free from its bondage to decay

and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

That we trust with a peace-filled confidence that the good farmer

knows when and how to sort it all out so that none of the good will be lost

and the bad will be taken up and consumed in God’s refining fire -

a fire that is not a fire of death, but a fire that purifies and transforms.

Paul’s familiar words:

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God,

who are called according to his purpose.

If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own son?

Leaving the weeding to God, is not being passive or uninvolved.

When the farmer said, “Let them grow together,”

that word ‘let’ has the meaning of

‘suffer both of them to grow together until the harvest.’

It is an intentional suffering on our part.

The word also has the sensing of releasing as in forgiving.

“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Paul also says that as children of God we are to be like Christ.

Jesus’ response to evil was to suffer with the victims, to stand with them,

to share in their plight of being pulled up with the weeds, and to forgive his enemies -

and then to show the world that God is a God of life.

Jesus was removed as a weed.

And those who bundled him up and threw him into the fire

thought that death would be the final blow.

Jesus died at the hands of our gardening efforts and bounded back to life –

so that we might finally hear and see and understand.

God was indeed as Jesus claimed!

Brilliantly and completely alive!

And so in the end, the weeds did not choke out the good wheat.

 Anthony de Mello – a Jesuit priest, psychotherapist, speaker, and author of books on spirituality. The last little book he wrote was a collection of meditations called The Way to Love. One meditation describes love as given by a rose, a tree, and a lamp.

 “Take a look at a rose. Is it possible for the rose to say, “I shall offer my fragrance to good people and withhold it from bad people?” Or can you imagine a lamp that withholds its rays from a wicked person who seeks to walk in its light? It could only do that by ceasing to be a lamp. And observe how helplessly and indiscriminately a tree gives its shade to everyone, good and bad, young and old, high and low; to animals and humans and every living creature – even to those who seek to cut it down. This is the first quality of love: its indiscriminate character. That is why we are exhorted to be like God, “who makes his sun to shine on good and bad alike and makes his rain to fall on saints and sinners alike; so you must be all goodness as your heavenly father is all goodness.”