Sermon 7/20/14
Matthew 13:24-30
Wheat and Weeds
This week is enjoyed spending a little time helping out
at the Matthew 25 Farm in Tully. The weather this spring and summer has helped
to create a plentiful harvest, and the peas are ready to be picked faster than
they can manage with their volunteers, so they were enlisting extra, emergency
help this week. When I got there, one of the farmers spent a bit of time
showing me the difference between peas that were not yet ready to be picked,
peas that were a bit past their prime, and peas that were just right,
Goldilocks-style. He also showed me that some younger, more eager volunteers
weren’t gentle enough with the peas when they were picking them, and would
accidentally uproot the whole plant in the process. As tall and winding as the
plants are, their roots aren’t very deep or anchored into the ground. So
they’re pretty fragile when you go to snap a pod off. Of course, once a plant is
uprooted, that’s it for harvesting from that particular plant. He also pointed
out that they don’t really spend much time weeding the field. There were rows
of pea plants that were easy enough to see. But there were lots and lots of
weeds. He said the plants were healthy enough – yielding more than they could
keep up with already – and the weeds didn’t seem to be a problem. I guess if
you have limited volunteer hours, you better focus on getting the food
harvested that will go to feed hungry people. I also suspect, given the fragile
nature of the plants and the eagerness of volunteers, weeding might just end up
doing more harm than good.
I had all of this on my mind this week as I prepared my
sermon. This summer, we’ll be journeying through the gospel of Matthew, and
today we come to what is known as the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, or
the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Jesus has been teaching the crowds in a
series of parables, first sitting outside the house where he is staying by the
lake, and then eventually, because the crowds are so great, teaching from a
boat to give him a little space while the crowds listen from the beach.
Now parables are a particular kind of teaching that Jesus
uses. Parable is from a Greek word –
a verb actually – that means literally to bring something alongside another
thing. To set something beside another thing. To bring something parallel with
something else. To compare one thing with another. You’ll notice that Jesus, in
his parables, is always telling a story that he sets alongside something in
particular: “The kingdom of heaven is like” or “The kingdom of God is like.”
Whenever Jesus tells us a parable, he’s bringing his story, his illustration,
and setting it alongside what he knows about what God’s kingdom, God’s realm,
is like. So, he’s trying to get us to learn about the kingdom of heaven, the
kingdom of God, by telling us these vivid stories that are maybe easier for us
to understand than if we just went straight for trying to understand God’s
kingdom.
So, this time, what does Jesus say the kingdom is like?
Well, it’s like a this: Someone sows good seed – wheat – in his field. But
while everyone is asleep, an enemy comes and sows weeds with the wheat. When
the plants start growing, and the weeds are discovered with the grain, the
slaves of the sower seem shocked, and go to the sower saying, “Master, didn’t
you sow good seed here? Why then are their weeds? Where did they come from?”
The master replies that an enemy sowed the weeds. So the slaves offer to pull
the weeds up. “No,” the master replies, “for in gathering the weeds you would
uproot the wheat along with them.” Both wheat and weeds have to grow together
until harvest time, when the wheat will be harvested at least, gathered into
the barn, and the weeds will be bundled and burned.
Jesus’ parables would cause a mixed reaction in the
crowds. On the one hand, the parables would use imagery that was familiar to
them. They knew about planting crops and working the land. But on the other
hand, some things would stick out to the crowds and cause them to ask
questions. This is just what Jesus wants. The crowd knows how to find the point
of the parable by noticing the details that Jesus presents as commonplace, but
they know are quite unusual actually.
You might wonder how you can figure out the things in the
parable that would make the crowds’ ears perk up, worried that our twenty-first
century ears won’t understand what sounded strange to first century ears. But
if you think carefully, any of us with basic gardening knowledge might have
some questions about this parable. Jesus says the sower sows good seed. Who
would sow anything else? And why would the slaves think the master sowed weed?
Or why would an enemy need to sow weed?
We all know that weeds do just fine planting themselves. I was telling someone
(Mary?) yesterday about a bag of potting soil that’s sitting in my backyard. I
had it open to pot some plants, and left it outside. Now, there’s a big plant –
a weed, really, pretty though it is – growing right in the open bag of potting
soil. Weeds will grow anywhere, without our effort in planting them.
So what does this parable tell us? What is Jesus trying
to get us to know? First, in any parable, I think it is important to figure out
where we are in the story, and where we are not.
In this story, as in most of Jesus’ parables – we’re not the master! We’re the
slaves! We’re not the sower of the seeds. And that means, as the master tells
the slaves, that it is not our
responsibility in this world to decide which are wheat and which are weeds. I
repeat – it is not our responsibility
to decide which are wheat and which are weeds. That responsibility belongs to
the sower. And the sower is not us. I’ve found that we’re all pretty sure that
we know how to tell wheat and weeds apart. But even if we’re right, our
attempts to weed seem to end up like the over eager harvesters whose work I
witnessed at the Matthew 25 Farm. In our attempt to pull out weeds, we uproot
healthy plants, and find delicate blossoms that could have become good plants
to harvest withering without root. It is not
our responsibility to decide which are wheat and which are weeds. God has
that covered, and God has not asked for our help with this task, as eager to
help as we are. We need to do some soul searching, and ask ourselves when and
where in our quest to point out the weeds of the world to God, our actions and
attitudes have actually resulted in hurting, uprooting, destroying good plants.
Second, we need to wonder about the parable telling us an
enemy has sown the weeds in the field. It seems strange to us, to me at least,
to picture some villain sneaking into a garden under cover of night to plant
weeds in the field. It’s absurd. There’s enough weed without anyone planting
anything intentionally. Who would do that? So, if it sounds so silly to us –
planting weeds on purpose – we need to ask ourselves – when have our actions in
the world been like planting weeds? What have we done, or failed to do, that
has resulted in planting in someone else’s life some extra weeds for them to
deal with? Where have you sown division, or bitterness, or envy, or mistrust,
or judging attitudes, or unkindness, or even hatred, in the life of another
beloved child of God? If sowing weeds sounds so silly, so useless, we all have
to remind ourselves to stop doing it!
Finally,
we need to wonder about what it says when you can’t tell wheat from weeds
anyway. Sometimes good plants and weeds look so similar that you can’t tell one
from another. And they grow so closely together, as Jesus’ parable indicates,
that it is hard to tell which is which, where one begins and the other ends.
What does it say if we can’t tell wheat from weed? If we’re sure we’re wheat,
but there’s nothing about our lives, our treatment of one another, our
relationship with God, our actions in the world that says we’ve been planted by
God as good seed? We don’t only want to be careful not to do harm by taking on
God’s role and pulling up what we think are weeds – we need to realize that
sometimes others might see the way we’re living our lives and feel like they know that we’re weeds!
I can
tell you for sure that everything God created God called good. Go back and read
Genesis 1. “And God saw that it was good” is the theme of creation. We are good seed. So let’s live like it! And live like we see that
goodness at the core of everyone we meet. It’s there. So let’s claim the
goodness with which God created each one of us by living out the love God has
poured into us. The kingdom of heaven is like this: God sows good seed with
love everywhere, all around. And
despite the weeds, God’s good seed can’t be stopped. The wheat can thrive in
abundance, undeterred, until the Lord of the harvest gathers us in again.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
