"Let It Be?"
Matthew 13:24-30
July 20, 2008
St. Paul UMC of Little Rock
Rev. John Fleming
Leonard Sweet is one of our world's shining theological stars and one of United Methodism's sons. He is the editor of Homilietics, a magazine I sometimes use to help jumpstart our sermons. Leonard had a humble beginning in West Virginia and now teaches seminary students at Drew University in New Jersey.
His greatest gift to the church is that he challenges the church to be one that lives and breathes in the twenty-first century and not to be one that is stuck in the 1950s. Leonard is also a great author, teacher, and speaker. I have heard him speak on a couple of occasions. One of the things he does when he addresses a group is to greet them. This is his usual greeting: "Good morning saints." Those in the congregation then usually reply back, "Good morning." Unless you have heard Leonard speak before. If you've heard him speak before then you know the greeting that comes next. It's this one, "Good morning, sinners." Some who have already said good morning decide that they fit in the second category a little better than they do the first and so they say good morning again.
When the apostle Paul used the word saint in his letters to the church, he meant for the word to be understood synonymously as church member. Saint or sinner, where do you fit in?
One preacher I know said this, "There is more bad in the best of us and more good in the worst of us than we will ever know." You might need to listen to that line again. "There is more bad in the best of us and more good in the worst of us than we will ever know."
This leads us to our scripture lesson this morning, a parable of Jesus that he tells about the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God, of course, is the way the world should be, but not necessarily the way the world is.
In one way this story is simple enough. Jesus tells the story of a man who sowed good seeds in his field. We learn later that the seeds produced a wheat plant. Then, when everyone was asleep, someone, an enemy perhaps, came and sowed weeds in the field. I didn't know you had to plant weeds. In my experience weeds just show up!
In due time, as the wheat grew up and began to have a head on them, the weeds became noticeable. Now you would think it would be obvious way before then that the weeds were there. In this story, the weed is a particular one. It has a formal name, but we'll call it darnel today because darnel is easier to pronounce.
This weed, darnel, is sneaky! It looks just like wheat right up until the time it begins to bud and blossom. And there, instead of grain, is poison. The servants see that and go to the master and ask, "Where did you buy those wheat seeds? There is something wrong with them!" Actually they asked the master if he had indeed planted good seeds. He said he did. Then they asked, "Then where did these weeds come from?" He answered, "An enemy has done this!" The servants ask, "Do you want us to go out there and take the weeds out?"
This, of course, is the natural thing to do. But the master said, "No, don't do that. If you do that, you'll pull up the wheat. Just leave it alone. At harvest time, I will tell the harvesters to take out the weeds and burn them and to gather the grain in my barn."
Now all that seems simple enough. The first part of the parable is fine. A man sows wheat seeds in his field. Someone else comes along and sows weed seeds. It is a mean thing to do, but it is easy to understand the story. We are not sure if Jesus had the world in mind when he told this story or if he had the church in mind, but the truth is that there are saints and sinners here, there are weeds as well as wheat in our pews. That is a reality.
What do we do about it, Jesus? Do we pull the weeds? Do we get rid of the rift raft? Jesus says, "No, don't do that. Just let it be." Remember, none of us are free of evil. As the preacher put it, "There is more bad in the best of us and more good in the worst of us than we will ever know."
I heard the story of a preacher from Tennessee this week who served the largest church in his town. The pastor was successful, you might say, but he was also tired. His church had its share of problems. Whatever happened in the church, whatever anyone said or did was always a problem and her pastor was tired. The pastor saw a colleague of his one day. His friend asked how it was going. The tired pastor said, "It's not. I'm thinking about quitting." His friend said, "You won't quit." The pastor said, "Yeah, I know, but here's what I am thinking. I am thinking about moving to Arkansas and building my own church in a rice field. There will be a study there for me to do my work. The church will have a beautiful steeple and that will be it. There won't be any Sunday school rooms or a fellowship hall. There won't be a sanctuary. The church won't have any members. It will be just me and God." Then he said, "Church wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for all these people!" Maybe he should have quit. We laugh at that because we've got a pretty good church here filled with wonderful people!
The hard part of this passage is that the master said to leave the weeds there. The hired hands must have thought, "What? Leave the weeds with the wheat? There is a difference between right and wrong, good and bad, true and false." They must have thought, "We've got to take a stand. We need to draw the line. We need to say, ‘You go and you stay.'" But the boss said, "Leave the weeds there." The servants must have thought, "But they're taking up good soil. They're cluttering the ground."
The master said to leave the weeds. Why? Because we can do more harm than good if we're not careful. The disciples of Jesus day knew that the world they were living in was weedy. We live in a world like that. In the days of Jesus, there were things like poverty and prostitution, injustice and oppression, drunkenness and drought and disease. The disciples could have said, "Jesus, look at the world. It's full of weeds!" Watch the news long enough and you'll come to the same conclusion. There was a shooting in my neighborhood on Wednesday for crying out loud!
Jesus, let's just pull some of these weeds. But Jesus says no. Why? Jesus must have thought, "The world is not the way it is supposed to be. It is weedy. It is corrupt. It is in a mess." Jesus also must have thought, "The world is not the way it will always be, either!"
You see, friends, this weed pulling business is God's business. It's not our business. We don't have to judge the world. We don't have to play God. We don't have to set things right all by ourselves. It also doesn't mean that we sit back and wait and do nothing. But the story does have the lesson that weed pulling is up to God. God, you see, has a plan for dealing with evil. The end result may not be today. It might not happen tomorrow. But one of these days, evil will be gathered up and dealt with. And those who are right with God will shine like the sun.
But the problem, you see, is that there is a little bit of weed in all of us. What do we do about that? Well, we do our very best everyday. And when we fail, when we're weedy, we try again the next day.
There is magic in this teaching. Here's the magic, "With God all things are possible." With God it is possible that the weeds out there in the field somehow can become wheat.
I heard of the preacher who posed this to his congregation. What if we drew a circle around our neighborhood, had boundaries, barbed wire, and a force field? What if we had a policy of weed pulling and made a vow that we would keep watch and spend all of our time and energy keeping out evil. What if we made a vow that no evil would cross the line and that we would spend the rest of our days keeping watch? What would we have? The preacher said that we would have a neighborhood without evil, but that is not the same things as a community characterized by good. That might have to sink in!
Maybe this is what Jesus had in mind in telling this story. Maybe he meant that it is better to have a field filled with wheat and weeds than a field filled with nothing at all.
The preacher who proposed the boundary scenario also had his congregation start a new ministry to a trailer community near their church. Members went there every Saturday morning and ministered to the community. They put up a basketball goal. They told stories from the Bible. They taught and sung songs about Jesus.
Two years after they began the ministry, their pastor received a note. The note simply read, "Adrian wants to be baptized." The preacher tells that Adrian had been the terror of the trailer community. She was the most difficult of all the children. Who would have guessed it? Instead of the church pulling up the weeds, they did their best to be good wheat plants. Adrian saw that. She noticed that. She wanted that for her own life. And she was baptized. After she was baptized, there was a little more wheat in the field than there had been before.
The apostle Paul is right. In a world filled with weeds, our best strategy is the one he gave to the Romans. In what we've come to call the twelfth chapter, Paul wrote these words, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." That sounds like a good plan to me. Let us pray.
(Special thanks to the ministries of Fred Craddock, Leonard Sweet, and Jim Somerville for some of the ideas and words of this sermon. It seems we worked on it together).