WISDOM 12:13, 16-19

PSALM 86: 11-17

ROMANS 8:18-25

MATTHEW 13:24-30, 36-43

Sermon – July 17, 2005

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Jesus lived in a society where agriculture was one of the main means for making a living. Although many of his parables are based on subjects that seem esoteric and strange to us today, to his listeners, they were based on the common place stuff of everyday life. Those who heard the parables were drawn into them immediately because they were about their world, their reality. But Jesus used the everyday, common stuff in a very special way. Once he had drawn his listeners into this familiar, everyday place, he used the parable to change the ordinary into the extraordinary. He took his listeners to the place where they were all saying “Yea, I hear you” or “That’s the way it is” only to suddenly have that familiar reality upended, changed or in someway altered so that they could never again quite get back to the old reality.

Today’s parable is about weeds, and what we should do about them. Now if any of you do not know about weeds or about the normal course of action taken toward weeds, Deacon Barbara will be glad to take you out between services and introduce you to weeds and give you instructions on what you should do with them. She will then urge to do likewise on a regular basis for the habitat of St. Barnabas.

Jesus’ parable is not about the same situation as the weeds on banks in front our building. It is about a specific situation and a specific type of weed. The situation is a newly planted and sprouting wheat field. The weed is possibly darnel, although it is not named in the parable, which until it is fairly mature looks much like the wheat. At maturity though, unlike the wheat which is extremely valuable, darnel is worthless.

So the familiar part of the parable which everyone immediately recognized and which brought them into their usual reality and way of doing things is this. A man with a large farm had his field or fields sown in the spring with wheat. With the spring rains and sunshine, the wheat began to sprout. Everyone was so happy! There could be another bountiful harvest. But wait, as the wheat grew, something seemed wrong. Not everything out there was wheat. There were weeds! Not just the usual garden variety of weeds that any farmer or gardener would expect, but a very pernicious weed that was hard to distinguish from the wheat. And it was all through the field. An enemy must have planted it one night when no one way watching. (One commentator wondered if Jesus liked conspiracy theories.)

What shall we do? What do you mean “What shall we do?” Isn’t it obvious? We go pull all of those weeds out of your field, and then we go and burn down your enemies’ barns!

And then reality gets turned upside down. No! Wait! Be patient! If you pull out the weeds now, you will pull out a lot of wheat along with the weeds. Wait and at the harvest the wheat and weeds will be harvested and separated. The wheat will be saved, the weeds burned.

So we have the parable. How shall we interpret it? If I choose to be a literalist, I can stop preaching now because I doubt anyone in this congregation grows wheat. We can interpret the parable as an allegory which Matthew and his community did, but Jesus probably did not do. (The same basic parable can be found in Mark without the allegory.) Or we can let the parable upend or change our reality, our vision, our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of God.

We can take a clue from the fact that the parable is even in Matthew’s Gospel and the allegorical interpretation that the community gave to it. It is fairly clear that the Gospels are not biographies of Jesus nor are they complete collections of his teachings or miracles. The things that appear in each of the Gospels are there because they tell something that the community where the Gospel originated thought was important and that also may have addressed an issue that was bothering the community. In this case the allegory gives us a very valuable clue that at least Matthew’s community thought the parable had to do with evil and rooting out evil.

I want to throw out some ideas and a story that might point to ways our reality might be shifted. This is not an exhaustive list. Let the parable work through your reality and shift it.

Do we always understand good and evil clearly and the way God does? The answer to that is simply no. Most of the time we do not understand it that clearly. Our understanding is shaped by our history and our culture as James R. Lowell pointed out it so well in his poem Once to Every Man and Nation: “New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth”. And then sometimes new occasions and new times do not. I will let you put your own list together.

We as humans have a long well established nearly universal habit of judging prematurely. When Jenner introduced the concept of vaccinations, scathing condemnation was heaped upon him. It is estimated that nearly 100 million lives have been saved because of him. When the board of the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig had to hire J.S. Bach as their organist and choir master because their first choice turned them down, they lamented that they had had to hire a second rate composer.

Related to the above is the issue of unintended consequences. Have you ever read a list of the predictions that have been made about the future? They are fun to read. We seldom have a clue. When Dwight Eisenhower started the interstate highway system, he wanted to create the means for evacuating densely populated areas quickly in case of a disaster. Well we have thousands and thousands of miles of interstates today, and we cannot evacuate highly populated areas much more quickly today than we could then. On the other hand, I doubt he could have seen the suburban sprawl that they would create, or the proliferation of cars or the weakening of public transportation. The truth is we seldom see clearly the consequences of a development or action in individual lives or society until long after the fact.

When I look at the church and world today and then look at history, I wonder what future generations will say about the issues that so bitterly divide us? How will things be judged? I suspect that we come closer to where Jesus wants us by truly loving and listening to one another rather than by condemning one another and being so sure we have the answer to what God wants.

You cannot injure, weed out or punish only one person. When you injure, weed out or punish one, you affect others. I refer you to John Donne’s poem For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Jesus said a lot about sinners judging sinners. He said something about taking the log out of your own eye before taking the spec from the other’s eye.

Here is a wonderful story that throws some light on all of this. In his book, The Road to Daybreak, Henri Nouwen recounts it. A four year old girl found a dead sparrow in front of the living room window. The little bird had killed itself by flying into the window glass. When she saw it, she was both deeply disturbed and greatly intrigued. She asked her father, “Where is the bird now?” Her father said he did not know. She then asked where it was now, and he said that all birds return to the earth. The little girl wanted to bury the bird so the family got a box and gathered to bury it. After it was buried, her father asked if she wanted to pray. “Yes” she said. Telling her sister to bow her head and fold her hands, she prayed: “Dear God, we have buried this little sparrow. Now you be good to her—or I will kill you. Amen.”

Nouwen said that that story told so much about the human heart—compassionate, but cruel and ready to kill when threatened.

Blaise Pascal commented on the human tendency evil to slip into even the best of qualities in this way: “Discourses on humility are sources of pride to the vain. Few men speak humbly of humility.”

When we look truly at our own hearts what do we see? How do we handle the weeds?

Is this the last word on good and evil, and what we are to do about it? No.

But let this parable enter your reality and upend it just a bit.

(The Rev.) William O. Breedlove

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church