In the Weeds

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

July 19, 2020 Yr A

St. Michael’s Episcopal Church

The Reverend Canon Michael J. Horvath

Gospel: Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Weeding is a fact of gardening life.  I love hearing about people’s weeding methods.  Some undertake weeding their gardens with a military precision that is sustained throughout the entire growing season.  Some folks have a look of madness about them as they stalk around with bottles of unpronounceable chemicals which instantly kill the weeds, while others love to spend hours methodically moving from area to area hand-pulling each and every bit of nuisance.  Others absolutely loathe it and only do it when the greater part of their garden is made up of weeds rather than the plants they originally intended to grow there. For me, I like weeding in the early months of the season.  The plants in the border are not yet very large and there’s a lot of space for weeds to grow.  Getting them out is a lot easier because I don’t have to fear about damaging any of the surrounding plants, and I feel a great sense of accomplishment after a few hours of weeding.

Today’s Gospel reading is known as Jesus’s Parable of the Weeds.  At its most basic, the parable seems to be about how difficult it is to distinguish wheat from weeds.  The weed Jesus is referring to is the darnel, or cockle, a noxious weed that resembles wheat and that is prevalent in the area that’s now Israel-Palestine.  As they grow, their roots intertwine and you really can’t tell them apart, so farmers leave them.  It’s only when the plants mature and the wheat ears appear that you are able to tell the difference – the ears of the real wheat will droop due to their weight, while the darnel ears remain straight up.  

When Jesus tells the parable, his disciples are just as confused as the slave was who asked the landowner, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field?  Where, then, did these weeds come from?”  All that hard work, all that planning, all that tending, and we have a field of wheat filled with darnel that will be hard to separate?  The work is never ending!  

To give them some clarity, Jesus tells them what the parable is about.  “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; and the weeds are the children of the evil one.”

The reality that Jesus lays bare for us in this parable is that we live in a world with wheat and weeds.  Ours is a world in which happiness and sadness, good and evil, life and death grow side by side. If you recall the sermon from last week, one of the take-aways was that, as Christians, God sows us wherever we are with the hope that we will live our lives full of the Good News of Jesus Christ, regardless if we are sown in good fertile soil or in poor soil. Yet evil and things that take us far from God are equally in the mix.

In the face of these contradictions, in the reality that evil exists in our world, Jesus asks us to grow more into what we believe ourselves to be – messengers of the Good News.  And we are called to be messengers not in spite of, but because these contradictions exist, and we cannot enjoy the good bits at the expense of the bad bits.  They are intertwined like the roots of the wheat and the darnel.  

But what about the weeds, you ask?  If we are trying to grow like wheat laden Christians, why does God let the weeds of evil grow amongst us, bearing fruit like hypocrisy, racism, and poverty?  Why is God making our work that much more difficult? Well, despite the weeds in and around us, the kingdom of God is still present.  The weeds don’t overshadow or make absent the Kingdom of God.  The kingdom may not have yet reached its full completion, but it is in the process of becoming – like a seed planted in a field.

One of the things I love about our garden at this time of year is that the plants that I want to be the main focus of the garden are big and lush and are starting to grow into one another.  In the early days, when the plants were small weeds would easily appear and working to keep the flower border weed free was a bit more of a chore. Nowadays, because the plants that I want to thrive are in fact thriving and covering greater patches of soil, it’s more difficult for weeds to get the sun they need to grow.  The weeds have less of a starting chance and the ones that don’t get enough sun die away.

So it is like us.  The deeper and bigger we grow and thrive in a Jesus-centered life, the more we can overpower and shade out the weeds of this world.  The more we can proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ, the more the weeds of greed and selfishness will be stunted in their growth.  The more we can seek and serve Christ in all persons, the more the weeds of poverty and marginalization can be cut down in size.  The more we strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being, the more the weeds of racism, homophobia, and sexism can wither and die.

We can thrive amongst the weeds.  We don’t have to separate ourselves from them and we are not called to stamp out evil vigilante-style. Remember, our one job is to sow the seeds of the Good News.  The job of judging and meting out punishment, whatever that may look like, is the reserve of God and God alone.  Remember what the owners told his slaves when they asked if they should pull up the weeds?  The owner said, “Let them grow.”  The Greek word for “let” in this instance can also be translated as pardon, forgive.  It is the same word Jesus used on the cross – “Father, forgive them.”  And in this calling to love and to forgive, perhaps the wheat can begin to disentangle itself from the weeds and show itself to be the good seed cultivated by a life in Christ. Amen.