Rev. Eugene Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
June 30, 2002
Matthew 13:24-30
Several years ago, a colleague was vacationing in Florida during the Christmas holidays. He happened to see the Christmas edition of the St. Petersburg Times. He was startled at the layout of the paper. All the good news of the day had been carefully collected on the first ten pages and all the bad news - AIDS epidemic in Africa, fighting in Bosnia – was confined to the back pages. In a box on the front page, the editors explained that they had arranged things “in deference to the spirit of the season.” For at least twenty-four hours, only the pleasant was immediately apparent. The threatening and foreboding was hidden away.
My colleague later commented that while this was very interesting, it stood in striking contrast to the way the New Testament reported the original Christmas story. There, good news and bad news stand side by side. In Matthew’s Gospel, for instance, the account of Jesus’ birth is found literally on the very same page with the story of Herod’s slaughter of male babies in Palestine out of his fear of a competitor for the throne. The Gospels make no attempt to separate out the good news from the bad. And that is true throughout the Bible as well. Evil always seems to exist side by side with the good, more often than not, frustrating the good, trying to unmake what God has created. We never find it neatly gathered up and put on the back pages. And what is true of the Bible is certainly true of life.
Fred Craddock preacher and teacher, tells this story: “When we lived in Columbia, Tennessee, I had a friend who was the pastor of the largest church in town. In many ways, he was a very successful minister, except that his church was full of problems. Whatever happened in that church, whatever anybody said or did, there was always a big problem – at least that is the way my friend reported it to me. He got sick and tired of it. I saw him downtown one day and I asked, ‘How’s it going?’
“’Terrible,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of quitting.’
“’Aw, you’re not going to quit.’
“’Well, why not?’
“’Because you don’t want to quit, that’s why!’ I said.
“’You know what I’m going to do?’ he replied. ‘I’m going to buy a little piece of land over in Arkansas in a rice field, and I’m going to build my own church. There’s going to be a study where I can do my work, and the church will have a beautiful tall spire, and that will be it. No sanctuary, no Sunday school rooms, no fellowship hall, no church members! Just me and God.’”
Not that I would ever say or even think such a thing! Just as I’m sure no one here would ever dream of a church without clergy! And yet we can sympathize. How tempting it is to get rid of everything and everyone who drags us down, gets in our way, frustrates us, hurts us; how tempting it is to want to just clean it all out, separate evil from good as quickly and efficiently as possible. Put it all on the back pages! But then Jesus speaks. I swear, sometimes things would be a lot easier if he would just keep quiet.
“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.”
There you pretty much have it – life as we experience it. There always seems to be weeds among the wheat. No matter how noble our intentions, how lofty our goals, or how loving our actions, we always seem to discover weeds. We somehow manage to shoot ourselves in the foot! People get in our way. We have what we think is a great idea but someone else thinks it s a horrible idea – how often does that happen in the church! – and in recent days the morning paper constantly reminds us just how prevalent selfishness, greed, and abuse of power are here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There are going to be weeds in life. It is inevitable. In fact, the parable really spends little time wondering why the weeds are here. Jesus seems far more interested in exploring what we are going to do about these weeds.
“And the slaves of the householder came and said, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where then, did these weeds come from? Do you want us to go and gather them?”
They are speaking for me. We have weeds in the wheat, so let’s get rid of them as fast as possible. It’s a natural impulse, isn’t it? Pull out the weeds, get rid of the undesirables, lock ‘em up and throw away the key; if they don’t like it, let them start their own church! Soon after 9/11, I saw this headline: “Bush Vows to Rid World of Evil-Doers!” Perhaps just a bit of hyperbole, and yet, not a bad idea. Find out who is evil and get rid of them. Let’s clean out all the weeds, the sooner the better. End of story. Trouble is, it isn’t the end of the story. Oh, if only Jesus would have stopped there. But he goes on, and as he goes on, things begin to get difficult.
“But the master replied, ‘No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest.”
“What? Just leave the weeds in there with the wheat? Have weeds and wheat together? It makes no sense. Isn’t there such a thing as right and wrong, good and evil, true and false? We need to take a stand. We need to draw the line!” But still the response is, “Leave the weeds alone.”
“But they’re cluttering everything up, getting in the way. maybe even choking the good plants.”
“Leave the weeds alone.”
“Why?”
“Because you will do more harm than good. If you start pulling out those weeds, you’re inevitably going to pull up some wheat.”
Our Men’s Bible study went around and around with this parable and when we were done, we were still scratching our heads. Just what is Jesus saying here? Could there be a suggestion of moral quietism? “It’s an ambiguous world out there, goodness and evil close together, so perhaps it’s best if we just leave it alone. It will all work out in the end, in the great by and by.” Drug dealers working a block from a high school campus…just leave it alone. The young boy always comes to school bruised after his mother’s boy friend visits…just leave it all alone. But such an attitude seems to fly in the face of the main themes of Jesus' ministry. “You Pharisees are hypocrites. Oh, your words sound wonderful, but you neglect the weightier matters of the law – justice and mercy and faith…as you did to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, so you did it to me.”
Moral quietism? Ignoring evil? Not hardly! Jesus never left it alone. When confronted with evil, he refused to sit on the sidelines and would seem to strongly suggest that neither should we.
OK, then, what do we make of this parable? Two things come to mind. “If you go after the weeds, you will inevitably destroy good wheat as well.” Should we tolerate evil in our midst? Of course not! However…humility, caution, discernment are called for.
In May, coming home from a preaching conference in Chicago, I watched the Jim Carey film, The Majestic. I am not sure I would call it a great film, but it did a good job of showing the devastating impact on innocent lives of Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunts in the 1950’s. In a season of fear, McCarthy said, “I am going to pull out all the weeds in the country. All those pinko, Communist sympathizers will have to go.” People were considered guilty until proven innocent, the constitution was set aside as freedom of speech and thought were bulldozed, lives and reputations destroyed and for what, really? From my reading of history, I cannot see that any contribution was made to the welfare of our country through the pulling of all those suspected Communist weeds. A lesson we need to remember as we are now living through another time of fear and suspicion. Jesus speaks a word of caution. It is so easy to be convinced of our own righteousness, of our own moral rectitude. It is so easy to stand in judgment. But do we really know weeds from wheat? Do we really know?
Seems there was a teen-aged girl in a church who caused nothing but trouble. She was only sixteen, but she had been there and back more times than anyone cared to count. This was a small town, small church. Her behavior was a continual source of embarrassment. So the church membership met and decided to do some weeding. She was told she was no longer welcome in the church; she was not to sing, to pray, or take communion. The decision tore the church up. It tore up two or three families. Yes, a weed was pulled, no doubt about it, but so much good wheat was lost with it. Do we really know weeds from wheat? It is so easy, when weeding the garden, to make horrible, horrible mistakes.
“You can’t change a leopard’s spots,” we say, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” But is that true? For people who believe in God, is that really true? Because when you are dealing with God, even what looks like a weed can become wheat. Page through the Gospels. Look how people changed when they were confronted with the love of Jesus, people who had been written off by everyone else as weeds. Look at our own church. Over the years I have known a number of people who have emerged from a variety of addictions to become creative and generous church leaders. The world may have only seen weeds, and maybe at one time they saw themselves as only weeds, but God saw only good wheat.
Do we give in to evil, just turn away? Of course not! But, for God’s sake and your own, be careful. It is so easy to do more harm than good, to make a terrible mistake. Sometimes we just need to give each other time. We need to give God time.
And one final point. “Let them both 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.’”
This parable finally is a word of hope; a word spoken to the church and to people of faith for times when life just seems full of weeds, when nothing seems to go right for us in spite of all our efforts. So often, it seems, we fail in the church. We pray for peace – there’s no peace; we work for justice – there is so much injustice; we seek reconciliation even with our own loved ones, but nothing seems to work. Evil seems to have the upper hand. Must it always be this way, O God? Are we doomed to failure? Do weeds always have the last word? In this parable, I hear Jesus say a defiant NO!
At this year’s graduation at Emory University, Hugh Thompson was honored. Most of you have probably not heard of Hugh Thompson. I had never heard of him. In 1968, near a place called Mi Lai in Vietnam, Thompson was flying his helicopter on a routine mission. At Mi Lai, he looked down and couldn’t believe what he saw – American troops firing on people who clearly were civilians, women and children. He landed, literally placing his helicopter between Lt. William Calley and the Vietnamese civilians. He confronted Calley, telling him this was very wrong. He then loaded as many of the civilians as he could into his helicopter and took them to safety. For over 30 years, Hugh Thompson was vilified as a traitor. After he spoke at Emory, he was asked what gave him the strength to do what he did, especially when so many either refused to act or were afraid to act. He said simply, “‘I only know what my parents taught me since I was a young boy: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”
When all is said and done, says Jesus, this is what will be left standing – this kind of goodness, this good wheat. Yes, our efforts may not seem to produce much now. But remain faithful, patient, and confident. Don’t get yourselves distracted by fearful and destructive inquisitions. There is every reason to hope. And what a wonderful harvest it will be.
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