“Okay, this is harsh…”
(Matthew 13:24-30)
Jesus put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field, but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed seeds among the wheat and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
Well, I am in a constant fight with thistles. They’re everywhere. So, as I prepare to go to battle, I first put on my long pants and a long sleeved shirt, then, the tall boots. Finally I don my gardening gloves and wade through the pachysandra and begin to pull those nasty, ugly, stubborn things up. I put them in a bucket and haul them to the back of our property adding to the other stuff that I have thrown there. I know this pile of weeds and sticks and other yard debris probably drives our very neat neighbor, Dave, crazy, but I don’t want these thistles to be manufacturing methane in the landfill.
Within a week, those ugly weeds will have begun to reappear. I’m sure I never completely pull out the roots, and, also, the darned things must be multiplying. It can cause a preacher to take the Lord’s name in vain. This is not to mention all the other stuff that grows where it should not. It is a losing battle. You gardeners know this, and I don’t, for a minute, consider myself a gardener.
Just reading today’s passage gives me heartburn on a lot of levels. The traditional approach to interpreting this parable about the lovely wheat field in which the enemy sneaks in surreptiously planting weeds while everyone is asleep comes from verses 36-43 which I have purposely chosen to not have read today. Still, when we read even today’s parable we tend to go to that place in which Jesus is looking to whack some of us, burn some of us up, throw some of us into the furnace—UNLESS we are not the evil-doers. That’s how it has been mostly handled.
Today I am proposing that we open our minds a bit, that we read into this parable Jesus’ call to all of us to repentance. This call is not just to those whom we decide are enemies and evil-doers. Let’s see if we can hear it in a different way from that which may have been planted in our minds. You know, on the one hand the good, on the other the bad, the right, the wrong, those who are in good with God, those who are gonna get cast away.
So how about this? The kingdom of heaven is like what each of our lives looks like. We all struggle with doing what we know is the right thing, and most of the time, most of us do okay. But there’s always that tendency to get sucked into some conspiracy theory or piece of gossip or temptation to shoot off our mouths before we think it through. There is always a tendency to judge others before we give ourselves the chance to know them. There is always a temptation to make decisions about who we want to hang around with because of certain appearances or certain behaviors. This is what it is like to be human.
So, all of us are always dealing with weeds among our good traits—always. And it’s always tempting to blame some outside influence for what’s going on.
I’m sorry to admit that when I was raising my kids, most of the time I was sure that their occasional aberrant behavior was due to kids with whom they hung around. You may remember that great scene in the movie, “The Christmas Story” when Ralphie dropped the f-bomb.
Now, Ralphie’s dad was changing a flat tire, a task he took great pride in, and this time he had allowed Ralphie to assist. Well, the bolts went flying because Ralphie accidentally hit the hub cap that they were placed in. That’s when he uttered the awful word. His dad was furious because he was going to have to dig in the snow to find the bolts and was out of his mind because of Ralphie’s unadvised exclamation.
So Ralphie was sent back to the car despairing. When Dad finished changing the flat tire and returned to the driver’s seat, Mom was, of course, wondering what had gone wrong. Dad whispered in her ear what Ralphie had said, and she lost her mind about it. When they got home Mom washed Ralphie’s mouth out with soap, and she demanded to know where in the world he had heard such a thing. Well, he couldn’t say what the truth probably was, that he had witnessed his dad using that language regularly, so he said he heard it from a certain friend. Mom immediately got on the phone with that friend’s mom and we could hear her losing her mind over it. We hear her whaling on her son, and he’s crying, asking, “What did I do, Mom?”
So, there you have it. Dad and Mom were certain that Ralphie had gotten into so much trouble because of external influences. It’s much easier to blame an outside enemy for our own failings, our own internal struggles.
So, couldn’t we see that the kingdom of heaven is like the weeds that grow up within us and sometimes threaten to take over our good traits? This happens to us all. And, the thing is, we can count on God to sort us out at some point. This is a reading of the parable that offers an alternative to being so certain that God and Jesus are just waiting to whack the bad folks, and we all should be so afraid that it might be us.
…So, I haven’t talked with you all about the graveside service that was held for my brother, Dave. Now, Dave was a good guy. He was a couple of years older than me and when we were kids, we would often get involved with projects of Dave’s making. Sometimes we would get into trouble, but most of the time we just had fun. As we became adults, somewhere along the line he just got a little too piously religious for me. So, I tended to steer away from those kinds of conversations with him. That was after we had had some run-ins over things like how could I be an ordained person when, clearly, God doesn’t call women to be preachers or the issue of evolution vs. creationism.
We still, though, were able to enjoy each other’s company for a lot of years. He was a fun guy, and I loved him.
These past years, though, he has become more intense, and as his disease of ALS progressed, he and his wife had lined up a retired preacher to officiate his graveside service. Don’t worry. I had no desire or expectation to be speaking at this service. Apparently, Dave had talked with the guy and told him what he hoped would be said at this time. The preacher spent a lot of time stringing Bible verses together to show us how sinful we were and how to make sure that we would be right with Jesus. Meanwhile, Dave was held up as a saint, and, reportedly, my brother was fervently hoping that the rest of us would not be burned up in the fires of hell.
Turns out, this graveside service did not work as a time of grieving for me, but, rather, left me wishing we could have heard about the real guy, the caring, loving, funny brother who sometimes messed up. That would have been a platform on which we could have begun our grieving and missing Dave.
…The Kingdom of Heaven is like a loving community of God’s children who try to do their best, sharing their joys and concerns, recognizing that we all have our own demons, and that we are all forgiven through God’s love in Christ. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a wheat field in which there are often weeds that trouble us and others, but we know that we can always depend upon Jesus and our faith community to help us to sort the wheat from the weeds.
And you know that there is no way that I am going to win the battle against my weeds. I’ll just do my best to make myself and my garden to be presentable. Because, there WILL be weeds in the garden and in life—in all of our lives…. Amen.
