Transcription
Today, I’m going to be reading Isaiah chapter 44, verses 6 through 8.
Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts, I am the first and I am the last. Besides me there is no God. Who is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and set it forth before me. Who has announced from the old the things to come? Let them tell us what is yet to be. Fear not, nor be afraid. Have I not told you from the old and declared it? And you are my witnesses. Is there a God beside me? There is no rock. I know not any.
And our New Testament lesson from the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew chapter 13, verses 24 through 30, and then picking up again at 36 through 43, on Pew Bible page 789.
Brothers and sisters, hear God’s word. He 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 weeds 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 seeds 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 up? 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. Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field. He answered, The one who sows the good seed is the son of man. The field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom. The weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned with fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The son of man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father. Let anyone with ears listen. This is the word of the Lord.
Let us pray. Loving and gracious God, we thank you. We thank you for your word today that leads us and keeps us, that guides our hearts and helps us to serve you in your world and for your kingdom. Watch over us, Lord, and guide us, so that we might lead your people, call them, and serve them. In your name we pray. Amen.
So before we head off on vacation, I normally read the scriptures for the week when I get back. That way, all week long, it’s percolating in the back of my head, especially when you have an eight-, nine-hour drive, and outside of traffic, you’re kind of zoned on the road, and your brain can do the work. And so as I kept on going with that scripture, as we kept on going from A to B and down the road, and sure, there were the distractions of, He’s looking out my window. I have to go to the bathroom. I’m hungry. That’s all we have for snacks. All of those distractions happened, and yet it kept on rolling through my head. And at one point, as we were going through Delaware and coming into Maryland, I saw this absolutely gorgeous wheat field. And as I looked at the wheat wave and move, I thought of this. I thought of this parable and how absolutely beautiful it was, and then I thought about weeding that wheat field. Several acres of wheat field, mind you. And I could feel my back tighten up and start to hurt. My knees started to swell, I swear. It was not a good moment. And then I started to think a little more, and I was like, well, you could always spray it, you know, get one of those pump sprayers, dump a gallon of vinegar in that thing, add your salt, add your soap, pump it up, mix it up. Oh, wait, you’re going to hit half the wheat as you go along. You’re going to have overspray. You’ve got to watch where you step because if you step in it, you’re tracking it with you. No, no, no, no. There’s really no good way to fix the problem this man in the parable has.
Now, growing up in the Midwest with a grandfather and a great-grandfather and a grandfather-in-law who grew up on farms, I’d like to think I know a little bit about farming, at least from them. The fact that I’ve had a raised-bed garden since I was like, well, some of the little kid’s age doesn’t hurt. But the reality is the modern conveniences of farming that we look out and see, the tractors, the combines, the sprayers, those are all new. What I learned as I was walking from the Visitor Center in Colonial Williamsburg to the actual town, there’s this walkway as you walk back in time. And one of them says that back in the 1800s, 90% of your food would have been locally grown. The size and the scope of farming has grown. Imagine having no tractor and 200 acres of land to plow and harvest. It’s a lot. Think about Jesus’ time when guess who’s going to be plowing? Well, if you’re lucky, you don’t have a tractor. You have a pair of ox, and you’ve got to hitch them up and plow the field. Oh, but if you can’t afford the oxen, you’re doing it all by hand. Now, this particular parable is the parable of the weeds and the wheat, or the wheat and the tares. I know, real original names for parables. But in that, we should start to wonder, what kind of weed is this? Is this like crabgrass? Is it dandelions? Well, a tare is also known as a darnel. And imagine this nightmare for those of you who are gardeners. It’s a weed that looks in its early stages exactly like the wheat. So you plant your flowers, and it looks exactly like the flowers in your garden. So what do you do? You can’t tell the difference between the two of them. What do you do? Well, you can wait. But here’s the insidious thing about the darnel or tare. When it’s old enough and mature enough to not look like the wheat, it’s wrapped its roots around the roots of the wheat. So what can you do? If you pull up the wheat or the weed, you kill them both. So you could pull up the weed, and if it pulls up a piece of wheat, you can’t stick that back in the ground, can you? You pull up a pepper plant because it looks like a weed, can you put the pepper plant back in and have it grow? What about your green beans? If there’s a weed that looks like your green beans, are you going to be able to pull that up with the green beans and have the green beans last? No. So you’re forced to wait. You’re forced to sit there and trust the process to let it happen. Because this situation is one where you could destroy your entire harvest by being too much and too hurried in this. So you sit and wait with the wheat and the tares growing side by side until harvest time.
Now, some of us, as we look at this process play out, might be worried about the wheat. After all, why do we pull out the weeds usually? Because they’re taking nutrition and nutrients, water from the wheat. We pull it up because we’re concerned about the life of the wheat. But which is worse? Which is harder? Killing it or the worry about it losing nutrition and nutrients? Losing your whole harvest or losing some? It’s one of those pieces where you’re not faced with good choices. You’re forced to look at less bad gradients. Sort of like, we’ll put it on the good end, if you’re given a choice of a million dollars, a million dollars in gold or a million dollars in stocks, which are you going to pick? Well, it’s three choices, three pretty good choices, but three different levels of choices. So think about it. You could rip up your entire harvest because you can’t tell the difference between the weeds and the wheat. You can pull up the harvest early in the hope that when you identify the weeds, you’re not pulling out the wheat or you stand pat and let them grow and let them show what they are.
Now, Jesus does us the favor with this parable and explains it. Explains it so that we know who the one who plants the seed is, who the one who sows the bad seed is, what the bad seed is, what the good seed is, who are the harvesters. But one of the challenges for us is to remember and look at this parable and see where we navigate within it, where we have to wonder whether we are wheat or whether we are tares. Now, we can go through the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and understand that those are fairly accurate and good markers for whether or not we are. But there’s a challenge here. Do our eyes see everything? For us, they do. For us, our own lives, yes, they do. But for others, that is where the rub comes. Because the challenge for us is to understand that we know who and what we are. We can adjust our lives based on those fruit of the spirit. We can know what and who we are, but we don’t know who the tares in our world are. We don’t know who the wheat in our world are. What we know is what we are. That’s the challenge, because we’re flawed. We can look out at the world and say, I know who that person is. How many times in the last 30 years have we heard on the news something about somebody, and you hear the neighbors say, well, he was never like that around us. Well, okay, you couldn’t see what was in here. You couldn’t see what was in his heart. You don’t know that the person who’s a bit standoffish as a neighbor has the most kindest giving heart and volunteers at a soup kitchen. You don’t know that. You could talk to them and find out, but for the most part, we don’t know. We don’t know that the person we view as upstanding and great is in their heart seedy and deceitful. We don’t know. And our human blinders, the human condition that we exist in, prevents us from seeing the full truth. We can’t see all, and if we could see what all of us all are doing 24-7, it’s kind of creepy. I mean, let’s be honest. If I found out that somebody was watching me and the family 24-7, it would be weird. It would be weird. Honestly, when I hear somebody tell me I popped onto the cameras and watched, it’s like, okay, that’s a little weird. It’s one of those things where we aren’t watching our friends and neighbors 24-7. At least we shouldn’t be. We are watching ourselves. And you know who is watching us, though? God. The person who knows our hearts, knows what and who we are, above all else, is not us. It’s God. It is God who sees who we are. It is God who places valuations on us. It is God who sees everything and knows what is in the hearts of everyone.
So, as I look at this parable, there’s this element of trusting in God. Trusting in God’s plan and knowing that God is in control and God knows who is weed and who is wheat. And God is trustworthy. God is just. And God is going to do the right thing. And that’s frustrating at the same time. Because we want to know. Or, some of us behave like we do know. We behave like we know what’s in someone else’s heart. But we don’t. We don’t know who others are. And the comforting part is, with our flawed human condition, I’m glad that we don’t. Because how many of us are always perfect, just, kind and compassionate when needed to be, and just downright good all the time?
No, no, no one. But you know who is? God. God is perfect. God is always just. God sees the small things. And that’s the key. Humans, we are at our best flawed. God is not. And so I read this parable and I find this great level of comfort within me. Because I’m not in control of who is in and who is out. Who is a weed and who is a wheat. Because I know I’m flawed. And I hope that you all find comfort in that as well. Because we are all flawed. And most of all, we have this God. We have a God who is just. Who is great. Who is good. And who knows our hearts better than even we do. And so as we read this parable, there is a whole element of trust being called on us to exist. Called on by us from God. To trust that God knows. To trust that God is just.
John Calvin once wrote that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone. We are not the arbiters or gatekeepers of God’s kingdom. We are the recipients of God’s grace. And that is a huge difference. Because the only arbiter of the kingdom is God. And I would rather our imperfections stay away from that. And God’s perfection to be in that at all times. And so brothers and sisters, this parable teaches us not to beat one another down. Not to wag our finger at one another’s faces. Telling us we need to be better Christians. Telling us we need to do more for God’s kingdom. What it does is tell us that we control how we serve God. We choose to serve God. And God sees that. And all we can do is keep on serving. Keep on being the wheat that we are. And trusting that God will know that we are. Trusting God that God will be just. And knowing that God’s grace is for us. So don’t worry. But keep on going.
Amen.