Sermon: Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43 (Proper 11A)

17 July 2005

The Rev. Robert C. Lamborn, Rector

 ^NRS Matthew 13:24 [Jesus] put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; ²⁵ but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. ²⁶ So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. ²⁷ 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?' ²⁸ He answered, 'An enemy has done this.' The slaves said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' ²⁹ But he replied, 'No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. ³⁰ 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.'" ³⁶ 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." ³⁷ He answered, "The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; ³⁸ the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, ³⁹ and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. ⁴⁰ Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. ⁴¹ The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, ⁴² and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. ⁴³ Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!

Anybody who has farmed or tended a garden or cared for a lawn knows the feeling–you’ve done absolutely everything right, but there are still weeds, maybe dandelions, all over the place.  It’s frustrating–angering–and it might help to work out some of that anger to go yank those weeds out by the root.  Even though that would feel good, the question is, do you want to get rid of weeds, or do you want to grow wheat?  You see, the slaves want to get out there and pull weeds, but the householder has a different goal–to grow wheat.  When your goal is to grow wheat, you still get frustrated and angry about weeds in the field, because they compete with the wheat for water and nutrients and sunlight, but when your goal is to grow wheat, your first question is not, “How do I get rid of all of these weeds?” but “How do I harvest the most wheat?”  And the answer is to let the weeds stay, for now.  For one thing, when the plants are young, some weeds, like darnel, look a lot like wheat, so in weeding you might inadvertently pull some wheat.  What’s more, the root systems of the plants weave together, so that even if you’re careful just to pull weeds, some wheat is likely to be pulled up or damaged.  Come harvest time, you’ll have more wheat if you just wait and let the weeds grow, too, and sort things out only when you absolutely have to.

Now the first hearers of Matthew’s Gospel probably were experiencing some mixed farming of their own.  Christ hadn’t returned as soon as people expected–not visibly, at least, and as the wheat field of the broader church grew and matured, it’s likely to have shown not just wheat, but some plants that looked like weeds, and even turned out to be weeds.  So how do early Christians deal with this disappointment, with this loss of idealism, with the presence of sin in their midst?  Probably then, as now, there were people who want to root out what they saw as weeds, understanding the church as refuge of the holy, rather than hospital for sinners.  And Christians sadly haven’t ever lost that tendency to judge each other harshly--to identify each other as weeds.  Almost a thousand years ago, the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches excommunicated each other.  In the 16^th century, Anglicans and Roman Catholics fought with and killed each other, and Roman Catholic men weren’t granted the vote in England until the 1830s.  Anglicans and Presbyterians fought each other during the English Civil War; established churches used to drown Anabaptists to death, to ridicule their conviction that baptism must be by immersion.  Now of course every metaphor breaks down if you push it too far, and so does this idea of leaving the weeds in the ground.  The Ku Klux Klan’s claiming to represent Christian values or the abuse of minors by clergy or others in the church are behaviors that simply should not be left to grow.  But some in the church identify the people who disagree with them, or are different from them, as weeds that need to be yanked out, and thus have caused damage to the crop as a whole.  The kingdom of heaven, though may be compared with that patient householder who wants to preserve the wheat most of all. Ultimate judgment is left for God.

But patience seems to be less and less a part of contemporary life, with instant messaging, cell phones and all the rest making immediate reaction the norm 24/7/365.  You don’t see an important news event without immediately having analysts giving their reactions to the situation, and I do mean reactions.  If any of them said, “You know, I’m going to have to take some time to consider my response before I can say anything helpful,” or, “I think this situation may develop in such a way that it’d be best to wait and see what happens,” well, that person wouldn’t be invited back onto the program!  Yet even though we want more and more immediacy, the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who doesn’t react immediately to weeds and tear up the field, but is patient in order to get the best yield of wheat.  In his day, and for a long time afterward, Galileo was considered by the leadership, especially of the church, to be the worst kind of weed for hypothesizing, like Copernicus, that the earth orbits the sun rather than the sun orbiting the earth.  It broke down the entire cosmology to say that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, and some people saw their theology threatened, as well.  Yet now we consider Galileo to have been the wheat and the leaders who threatened him and suppressed his teaching to have been weeds in that situation.  It takes patience to focus not so much on getting rid of weeds, but on growing wheat. 

Eighteen years ago when I was a student teacher in a band program in suburban Atlanta, I learned that lesson very powerfully.  Now of course the high schoolers wanted to test me as a student teacher, see what they could get away with,          how far they could push the limits.  And of course I was not one to let them push too far, and wanted to yank some of those weeds at times.  Yet I learned that focusing too much on discipline itself wasn’t all that effective; what was more successful was to focus on the music, on doing what it took to get them to play the music well.  When we were focused together on that goal, most of the discipline problems went away; it was clear that the discipline served something else–the making of music.  My goal became not to get rid of weeds, but to grow wheat, and the weeds were fewer because of it.  So do we want to get rid of weeds, or grow wheat?  Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to the landowner who is patient enough to preserve the wheat.