“Life Among the Weeds”

Matthew 13:24-30

July 24, 2005

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

If you will open up a newspaper these days, watch the evening or nightly news, pull out your copy of Newsweek or Time magazine, or pull up your internet connection to the place where the day’s headlines are kept, you will get a full dose of how awful things are.

Since we were together last and worshiped together, now some three weeks ago because of my vacation, a lot has happened in the world. I will admit that a couple of Thursdays ago, I had my eyes glued to any weather forecast that was on. In particular I watched the Weather Channel. I feel as if I know Mike Bettis and Jim Cantore and Dr. Steve Lyon personally. I wanted to know where Hurricane Dennis was headed and if there was any way he would leave my trip to Destin, Florida alone. But on that Thursday and the days that followed it, I also found myself flipping to CNN to hear the latest on the bombs that had gone off both in the subway system in London and on those famous double decker buses there. I have never been to London. I would like to go one day. If and when I do, one of the things that I would like to do is to sit in one of the seats on the second floor of such a bus. There are some who now have no desire to do that or to board a subway anywhere. It really doesn’t matter what the lead story in the news is. It could be bombings in London or Iraq. The consensus is that things aren’t getting any better, in fact, many will say that things are getting worse.

I can remember sitting in the living room of Thelma Frizzell’s house. Thelma was a member of the first church that I pastored. While I was her pastor, we helped her celebrate her ninetieth birthday. I went to visit her one day. Thelma had lived nine decades. She had seen and experienced many things and been to many places. At the time of my visit, I had only lived a couple of decades. I was twenty-seven the day that we talked. I hadn’t experienced much. I hadn’t really been anywhere or done anything, not compared to Ms. Thelma. After a little bit of small talk, somewhere in the middle of the conversation, Ms. Thelma said something like this, “Preacher, the world is in an awful mess. So much is wrong with it. I just don’t know how much longer God is going to put up with it!” Well, evidently at least ten more years, because here I stand, ten years later. I didn’t quite know what to say to Ms. Thelma back then. Ms. Thelma is dead now and given the chance to tell her what I think, now as a seasoned pastor, I still don’t know what I would say. The whole creation is groaning, just like old Saint Paul said that it would, and the weeds seem to be crowding out the wheat.

Those of us who believe in God, who are called to His purposes, sometimes have a hard time explaining, to ourselves, and to everyone else, why things are the way that they are. I know some who fear the end of the world and the return of Jesus. After all, the scriptures are clear that one day that will happen. I know others who are hoping for it, and pray that it happens sooner than later. But for the most part, most of us just shrug our shoulders when the preacher says such things because we have been saying the same thing, for years now. In the meantime, we wrestle with a world that is messier than we would like for it to be.

The details may have changed since the Bible was written, but the dilemma remains

the same. And we ask questions like: “What should we do about the mess? What can we do and why is it the way that it is in the first place? If God really is in charge of the world, then why isn’t the world more like a sandy beach and a calm ocean with small waves rolling gently in. Or why isn’t it, to use a picture from our lesson this morning, more like a field of grain, with stalks gently swaying in the wind?” At the very least, at the very least, the church should be like that.

But 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 was sleeping, an enemy slipped in and sowed some weeds among the wheat. The weed in question has a formal name, lolium temulentum. It also has a common name, bearded darnel. It is a nasty weed, a wheat wanna be. The problem with it is that it looks just like a wheat plant. But it’s not wheat. It’s seeds are dangerous, poisonous. And it’s roots are more like strong nylon cords. And if it is not separated from the wheat, if for some reason it is harvested along with the wheat, ground together for bread, that loaf of bread will give you a real bellyache.

I have had a little experience with weeds in the yards that have been my responsibility and in the flower gardens that I have planted. I don’t think that there were enemies that came in and planted them while I slept. I am pretty sure that they weeds just appeared. None of my yards were as bad as a preacher that I heard about who called a yard company to come and assess his yard. They sent someone out and a couple of days later, the preacher received a letter telling him that his yard was hopeless and that they weren’t willing to take him on as a customer. It must have been bad! An enemy sowing seeds, what’s that all about?

Some commentaries dismiss this as Jesus’s conspiracy theory. They note that weeds do not require a terrorist to plant them. They grow up all by themselves. They don’t need any help at all. How the weeds got there does not matter. The truth is that most of us have weeds, not only in our yards and gardens, but in our lives. You have noticed them, haven’t you? They are thorny people who aren’t a part of the plan. They are people who aren’t welcome. They are people who take up all of the sun light and the lime light and the water and all of those other things that were meant for the good plants. Some of these people are just irritating, like poison ivy. Maybe they make us break out in a rash, or at the least, make us jittery. And some of them, quite honestly, are down right dangerous and poisonous. The question that begs to be asked is this one, “What do we do about them?”

The slaves of the house owner, in the story that Jesus tells, go to him. They first wonder if the wheat seeds that he planted were bad. They are told that an enemy has come in during the middle of the night. It really doesn’t matter how it happened, I guess. They ask their master, the landowner, “Do you want us to gather them up?” That is the common sense answer. That seems to be the best solution. There are weeds among the wheat, so pull them up, cast them out, clean out the rows, get ride of the weeds. If the parable was being told today, the slaves might have wondered if they needed to go to Home Depot to purchase some Round Up.

The boss says “No.” Maybe he has a little experience in dealing with these kinds of weeds. That is my guess. He quickly lets the servants know that if they were to pull up the weeds, there was a good chance that they would pull up the wheat as well. And so the boss said, “Let the two grow together. At harvest time I will tell the reapers to collet the weeds first. I will tell them to bind the weeds into bundles to be burned, but to put the wheat in my barn.”

I want you to know that I’ve struggled with this parable this week. The story has this unusual twist, or so it seems. The twist says that in the face of evil all around us, with the weeds among the wheat, what we are supposed to do is nothing. In the face of evil, we are to sit back and wait and watch. It also seems to say that we can do more harm when we think that we are doing good than when we are doing nothing at all.

Now, as far as I can tell, there are at least a couple of reasons that the boss says for the weeds to be left alone. Here is the first. We are not skillful enough to separate the good from the bad. Telling the difference between a weed and a plant isn’t easy.

Back when I was in college and seminary, for a couple of summers I worked on the staff at a United Methodist camp on the Tennessee River. Throughout the summer, children and youth came to week long camps. Along with them came volunteer directors and counselors. Our job, as summer staffers, was to help out and to run the afternoon activities. We planned games and crafts and took them on long pontoon boat rides. On Wednesday evenings, we took them on a hike, up a small mountain, and when we returned, watermelons were waiting for us. At the camp, in front of the main building, there was a large planter full of dirt and watermelon vines because children and youth had spit their seeds in it throughout the summer. There weren’t many big watermelons on those vines, but there were two or three that were beginning to grow. Lou Ann Perkins was one of the volunteers. I’ll always remember her. She had blonde hair. Now, not all blonde jokes are fitting and applicable for blonde haired people. But for Lou Ann, all of them were perfect. I remember that several of us were inside, when Lou Ann came through the doors. She was so proud of what she had done. She had worked hard. She came to find the camp’s administrator and greeted him with these words, “I know that you are going to want to thank me. I just pulled up all the weed vines out of the planter.” Turns out he didn’t want to thank her. Instead he wanted to kill her. Telling the difference between weeds and wheat, as it turns out, isn’t so easy.

I guess another difficulty in separating the good from the bad is that often the two are intertwined. That is one of the ways that bearded darnel survives. It wraps its roots around other roots so that you can’t yank one plant up without pulling up the other. I guess that that is how we all are. We want to say that we are wheat, but there are a few weeds mixed in our lives. Turns out we’re not wheat or weeds. Mostly we are wheat and weeds. Perhaps the good news in the parable is that Jesus tells us not to worry so much about it. I think that he is saying to us to do the very best that we can do and that when he returns, he will separate it out for us. And, by the grace of God, we will be free of our weeds once and for all. The weeds, all of those things that choke the life out of us, that take up room and add nothing good. All the worries and the habits and the sorrows and the grudges and the bitterness and the failures and the hatefulness, the things that we so dislike in others, all those weeds in the wheat. By the grace of God and only by the grace of God, will we be finally weed free.

Then there is the second thing. Put aside the mixture of weeds and wheat inside of you for a minute. Think instead about you being wheat with weeds all around you. Let’s ask this, “How will we survive, as wheat?” Do we spend our time trying to get rid of the weeds, or do we think, instead about being wheat. It is one of the trickiest things weeds do. They tend to get wheat so stirred up, so riled up, so defensive that they start acting like weeds themselves. Good guys turn into bad guys trying to put the bad guys out of business. We’ve been warned about this before. Says Jesus, “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, do not resist an evil doer....Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven...”

You see God allows a mixed field so whether we like it, or understand it, or approve of it, it is the way that it is. But we aren’t called to sit back. And it is not easy as any of you who have tried lately to love your enemies have discovered. Our job is to be wheat, even in a messy field. Our job is to believe that the one who planted us among those who have been planted by someone else is near us and will sort things out one day. So stay true to your roots and to the one who planted you. Believe him when he says that the harvest is his. Let us pray.

(Special thanks to Barbara Brown Taylor for the idea of this sermon and for several words in it)