There is a woman
in our congregation who loves to engage in all kinds of friendly competitions
with her husband, and he with her. It’s all in good fun, but I hear that things
can get pretty cutthroat, and they love to have bragging rights over each
other. For example, they really got into competitive horseshoes a few years ago
and put together a professional-grade horseshoe pit in their backyard. They
played every single day, husband versus wife.
This year I was
informed they have engaged in a pretty intense gardening competition. Each of
them got to select a part of the yard they thought would produce the best
results for vegetables. I’m sure not about all of the plants they’ve grown, but
I know tomatoes are involved, and I know that the winner will be decided by a taste
test. The woman told me back in May that he had been talking a little smack
about her plot, saying he was sure it wouldn’t get enough sun. But she had a
little glint in her eye and muttered something about soil quality and afternoon
sunshine.
My own tomatoes
have started to come in, so I checked in with her the other day and asked her
how it was going. She informed me that the Great Garden-Off was definitely
still on, but that she might have to forfeit one whole plant because a warbler
built its nest in it and it doesn’t like to be disturbed. Some people just let
tomatoes grow and leave them alone. Sounds like she might be doing some pruning
or weeding, staking and caging to get the best results possible. I suppose if
taste is the sole criterion for winning, then size and color aren’t important. She
just wants a tomato that tastes better than her husband’s.
I’m not sure
about all the methods and criteria for growing good wheat in Jesus’ day, but
it’s clear that there is a gardening competition going on, and it’s not just
limited to someone’s backyard. The whole world seems to be engaged somehow. Someone
is trying to sow and grow good wheat and someone else is clearly trying to sow
weeds. And what’s worse is they haven’t staked out separate garden patches for
this. It’s all mixed in together, the unwanted weeds growing right in there
with the wheat. How are we going to know who’s winning?
This parable of
the wheat and the weeds is how Jesus chooses to explain to his disciples the
presence of good and bad in the world. Jesus has just finished explaining in
private to his disciples about the purpose and meaning of parables and how
sometimes the word of God finds good soil in people and takes root and grows. Sometimes,
however, the seed hits rocky ground or a place where thorns will choke the
plants as they come up. It’s not the fault of the word that faith doesn’t
appear in some people, and it’s often not the fault of the person who does the
sowing of the seed, the sharing of the word. Some people at certain times just
aren’t receptive to it.
Now Jesus uses
another common image to explain why Jesus and disciples can work and work and
still not get results that are 100% good wheat. The advancement of God’s
kingdom among the people of this earth is affected not just by the
receptiveness of all kinds of people to hear it and understand it. It is also
affected by the presence of those who are actively working against God’s
goodness.
This isn’t
rocket science. We look out at the world and we can see plenty of good, plenty
of examples of people showing forth godly love for one another. And yet we look
out at the same world and can be overcome by the sight of lots of evil.
I remember years
ago in one confirmation curriculum we used, back when people were still reading
newspapers to get their news, we gave groups of confirmation students
newspapers and two big pieces of posterboard. Their tasks was to cut out all
the headlines that seemed like good news and paste them to one sheet of
posterboard and the bad headlines on the other. Year in and year out when we
did this, they always filled up the bad headline posterboard first. Granted,
news media generally makes more money on bad headlines than good, so it
probably wasn’t the most statistically fair exercise for this, but the point
was still clear: there is such a mixture of good and evil in the world, and yet
God still loves it. We have faith that God is still working to bring about the
day when all will be good and new in Jesus Christ.
Until then,
however, we are often left with this sense of frustration and confusion about
so much of it. Like the slaves in the parable, we wonder how it all even got to
be this way. If God is so powerful and so loving, why would God let the weeds
continue to grow like this, especially when they can do us such harm? We wonder
is there something we can do about getting rid of the weeds before they spread
too much. The challenges and problems that lie before us in any day and age—the
debate over health care and health insurance, terrorism, drugs and narcotics,
care of the environment, immigration—are all so complex, riddled with deeper
issues that are difficult to unwind and untangle.
And that’s just what
we see in the news about the world. The church is not immune to the power of
the evil one. If you think that those who follow Christ are 100% whole wheat, dream
on! Although the church is the community called out to proclaim the good of
Jesus and to embody his mercy and love, there is still an issue of weed control
in the body of Christ, too. We had a seminary professor who liked to remind us
of the danger of harboring the fantasy that the church was free from all sin
and wrongdoing, and to be on guard against running to the church or to seminary
to be free from the problems of the world. He said that the devil’s favorite place
to build his own seminary and conduct his business is right next to one of
Jesus’ seminaries.
This is all what
the apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, calls “groaning in labor pains.”
That sense of despair and dread mixed with hope, sorrow and pain tinted with
optimism, and anger jumbled together with promise that so many of us grapple
with is a sign of that longing that all of creation is dealing with a longing
to be made completely new.
And the reality
of this all, of course, is that the line between wheat and weed, ripe and
rotten, good and evil, goes right down the middle of us all. The frustration and
confusion we feel about the presence of all this in the world, the challenges
and problems of thorny issues is really a frustration and confusion with
ourselves, isn’t it? To uproot and destroy evil is somehow going to involve
shredding ourselves apart. The creation groans with longing, and we groan
inwardly, too, for our redemption.
It’s easy to
listen to Jesus’ parable and get the impression that this Master, this wheat
farmer, is distant and removed from this complicated mixture of good and evil because
it will all just get worked out in the end. What really happens, of course, as
the story continues is that Jesus, the master, the one telling the parable, plants
himself right in the middle of it all. On the cross, he offers himself up to
the tangled weeds and the wheat. In his own death, God’s judgment upon evil
reaches its harvest. He lets himself become part of the tangled mess of this
world, and bears the brunt of a system that thinks it can weed out all the bad,
a system that thinks, wrongly, it is able to successfully root out the
wrongdoing and crucify it so it won’t be a problem anymore. This way of dealing
with evil dies with Jesus and something new rises in its place: the triumph of
forgiveness…the victory of mercy…the supremacy of love. Jesus’ own resurrection
from all that evildoing is God’s down payment on the glory that is about to be
revealed to us.
As we wait, we
pray for patience and the grace to understand that the issue is not that God is
content to let evil run loose. God just doesn’t need us to go about dealing
with it in the amateurish ways we’re prone to. God is ultimately concerned that
no good be harmed. The master doesn’t want any wheat uprooted! So, if we’re
interested about how to counter evil in the world, the answer is to plant more
wheat. Do more good. Point to Christ as often as we can. As the 105 children at
VBS proclaimed at the top of their lungs each day this week, all of them in
their best superhero poses: “Do good! Seek peace! And Go after it!” In fact, we
call can try this. Striking a superhero pose does something to your sense of
well-being. (Thumbs up: “Do good!” Peace signs: “Seek peace!” and superhero pose: “And go after it!”).
They weren’t
exactly those kinds of superhero poses, but we did see this week a powerful sign of planting more wheat out of Iraq. It was more like the poses of praying hands. The
city of Lourdes in France sent fifteen statues of the virgin Mary to Erbil in
northern Iraq to replace ones that had been destroyed by ISIS. They processed
with them around the city, singing hymns and praise to God, as they placed them
in each church where they will stand. Beginning in 2014, when terrorists gained
control of a region of northern Iraq where Christians were the majority, churches,
monasteries and schools have been bombed and the population decimated. Now that
ISIS has lost ground and retreated, Christians and other groups are starting to
move back into the rubble and rebuild. They could, I’m sure, rebuild with
revenge, uprooting what they find evil, but instead they are cautiously, but
optimistically, putting a peaceful foot forward. May those statues and the
people who worship around them be a sign that God is replanting the area with
wheat.
And may all of
this—our congregation’s ministry, our personal pointing to Christ, our
superheroic compassion—be a sign of the new creation that God has in store for
us all, a sign of hope and joy amidst the groaning, because, don’t forget, the days
of the weeds are numbered! As it turns out, they’ve chosen the bad garden
patch. They’ll lose the competition. And we, the heirs of God, will get to taste
the harvest that God is tending, and it is promised to be delicious.
Thanks be to God!
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
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