A Weed Problem
Scripture: Matthew 13:24-30 & 34-43, Eric Vogt, Senior Pastor
Let us pray. Loving God, we are here not because we have it all together but because we don’t. We need you to plant something new in our lives, we need you to nurture and tend to us as the seeds you want to plant and harvest in the world, for the sake of your reign. God, strip away the things that divide us and separate us from you and one another. Set us free to live as your people and shine like the sun. Give us not only ears to hear now, but the hands and hearts and help around us to live in response to what we hear. We thank you that you want to meet us in this time, that you take the initiative to come to us. We look to you. Amen.
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I entitled today’s message “A Weed Problem.” And there may be many kinds of problems arising from weed or weeds, but I see at least a couple here in this passage. Last week we looked at Jesus’s first parable in Matthew 13, the parable of the soils. Jesus said in that story last week that some seeds fall among thorns, which he said represented the worries of this life and the lure of material wealth, and that is enough to choke out the growth of the seeds. Some seed falls on the path and never takes root, some seed falls in shallow soil among the rocks, where it can’t take root and falls away when trials inevitably come. But some seed falls among good soil, and bears fruit, multiplying itself as much as 100 times in an abundant harvest.
Today’s story reminds us that even good soil can come with challenges, because the soil is not only good enough to support the growth of the wheat that the sower has planted, that same soil also nurtures the growth of some weeds. And neither chokes the other out. There’s enough good soil, enough water, enough sun – call it a common grace, God’s provision for the righteous and unrighteous alike – that both weeds and wheat grow up together. God provides enough for both, and to take care of the wheat is also to care for the weeds.
The enemy is one problem – these weeds don’t come from God, and they’re not the harvest God ultimately wants. We don’t need to blame God for their presence in the first place. And yet, the gardener sowing the seed – in this CEB translation called “the Human One,” in most translations “the Son of Man” – says not to remove the weeds prematurely. Son of Man is a messianic title for Jesus, and for a while I thought the “Human One” was a confusing translation, since I believe Jesus was not only human, but also the fullness of who God is. But I’ve come around a bit on calling Jesus “the Human One,” because not only did he fully reveal God, he also fully revealed humanity as we’re made to be, that is, in the image of God. Jesus was the most Human One, Jesus shows us who God is and also shows us all humanity is meant to be. Anyway, God didn’t put the weeds there to begin with, but Jesus doesn’t want the weeds removed. The success, the growth, of the good wheat is dependent upon the survival of the weeds. You can’t remove the weeds and not hurt the wheat at the same time.
One weed problem, then, is that we have to let them be when we know they’re not the harvest we or God ultimately want. In our polarized culture, we are all quick to separate people into categories. We look around and decide quickly, are you weeds or wheat? Ally or adversary? Are you part of my tribe, one of the good ones, or do I want to weed you out from my field? We do this all the time. Don’t get me wrong – I think there are times we need to help each other use more constructive language, speaking up in the face of sexism or racism or homophobia. We need to resist bullying behavior, and the ways we don’t recognize but abuse privilege. This morning, I have some righteous anger from our local news this morning. Presumed human traffickers left 8 people [now 10, as reported on Monday 7/24] to die, including some kids, in the back of a delivery truck, right here in San Antonio. There are times to be angry, times to resist without violence the encroachment of the weeds that ensnare us and hurt the vulnerable among us. But these weeds, remember, aren’t hurting the wheat. In our shared politics, and in the church, we so often have a kind of purity culture, you see this on both sides conservative and progressive, where we can define ourselves over against the weeds, against a common perceived enemy, and concentrate on trying to remove them – whoever that “them” is – from among us instead of focusing on our own growth as wheat.
The weeds are clearly bad, we think, and yet the problem is we have to be patient with them. But maybe this waiting, this patience, is a good thing too. As I’ve said before, I’m not much of a gardener. I’m not sure I trust myself to know what’s weeds and what’s wheat when we’re looking at early stage growth. It’s a little like weeding in the flower bed with my 2 and 5 year old, it’s easy to just start pulling everything up whatever it is. So we might not yet know, or maybe what seems to be weeds now can actually grow into something good. And if I can’t always tell where the wheat is, what if I’m actually one of the weeds? Then I really need some forbearance, some patience, from the gardener and those around me.
Last week, with the soils, I said that I don’t think it’s that we’re each assigned to be one kind of soil forever – either path, rocks, thorns, or good soil. We’re all each of them, at different times and even in different parts of our life at the same time. Likewise, I think we can all be both wheat and weeds. We’re divided in our allegiances, in who we follow, in what’s growing in our hearts and lives. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn suffered oppression and was imprisoned as a critic of Soviet communism, and yet he didn’t see himself as all good and his captors as all bad. He said, “The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Every person has some capacity for both wheat and weeds, and we need patience for both ourselves and others.
So there’s a weed problem that we have to leave the weeds alone, and tolerate them when we know they’re not the harvest we want. A weed problem that I might not be able to tell the difference with wheat, or maybe some part of me is growing with weeds. But then there’s also a weed problem at the time of harvest. We who had so much righteous indignation, who wanted to remove the weeds in an early stage, some of us get to the harvest and suddenly we feel leniency, empathy toward the weeds. Wait, gather them up to be burned? Weeping and gnashing of teeth? That sounds awfully extreme, doesn’t it? Is that really necessary? Now we’re not so hard on the weeds.
Especially for those among us who know what it is to be oppressed and abused by the system, by those in power, it makes sense that we would want judgment to come. Not to be punitive, necessarily, but we recognize that justice can only come when the forces resisting our growth and freedom are removed. The captives need someone to judge the captors. Trusting that this judgment is indeed coming is what enables us to remain patient in the first season, when the weeds and the wheat are growing together. Ultimately, the harvester will take care of this, and all will be made right. We don’t have to remove the weeds now, because doing so would hurt the wheat, and also because we trust that God will sort it all out in the end.
Before we look at the wheat or weeds in others’ lives, we can do well to consider what’s growing in our own lives. We long to be the harvest God made us to be. And we recognize, if we’re honest, that there are weeds we need God to remove from us when the time is right. That weeding, when it’s not an excuse for us to self-righteously cut off other people, can be a good and necessary thing in our lives. God needs to prune away and remove the parts that aren’t what we’re made to be. We want a healthy harvest, we want protection for God’s good growth in our lives. And so ultimately we need some weeding done. And it may be that the weeds ultimately aren’t people but forces, the things, verse 41 says, the things that cause people to fall away, sin, do evil. God has to take care of these things so that the wheat is free to prosper and grow. Whatever is causing us to fall away, do we want it weeded out of our lives? Am I eager not to banish or weed out others in self-righteousness, but to seek out God’s righteous harvest in me?
Sometimes even the weeds have a necessary role. The weeds are allowed to endure because even what’s planted by the enemy can be taken up into God’s good plans. Sometimes there’s not a weed problem after all. When I was looking at this passage with the Bible study downstairs on Thursday, Lewis told a story of an uncle, I think, who told him not to pull up some milkweed growing amidst the tomato plants. Milkweed could protect the tomatoes from other bugs. And this so-called weed has lots of other uses – from rope and cloth to medicine and cleaning up oil spills. And you need milkweed if you want monarch butterflies to prosper; it’s the only thing monarchs eat.
I once heard missiologist Michael Frost talk about how we need weeds in the reign of God, the economy of God, the ecosystem of God. Our society tends to plant lawns, which are uniform and really rather boring. Lawns are not a healthy ecosystem, and weeds come in wanting to bring nutrition and life that diversifies the environment. This might be some of what Jesus is getting at with the mustard seed parable here in Matthew 13, which we’ll look at next week. One little weed might bring something new and needed to the life around it. As someone said, “we can count how many seeds are in a watermelon, but not how many watermelons are in a seed.” One seed can become a forest, one dandelion can spread something new along the wind. And weeds have to be hardy, resilient, enduring. Maybe the weeds are part of what God can harvest and make good of as well – the wheat needs the weeds, and maybe the wheat wasn’t ever the whole harvest plan. Go and be weeds, Frost told us, to churn up and freshen the soil, to change and renew this land that it might yield the life and beauty, justice and peace, unity and diversity that mark God’s ecosystem.
What does God want to plant and harvest in you and me? What does God want to weed out? That’s the rhythm we’re invited into in community every week, to look to center ourselves in Jesus, the Human One, and learn from him what the true humanity God is growing in us looks like. When we look to God, I believe we’re delivered from having to violently expunge the so-called weeds we label as other people in our midst. We can be free to build bridges and not walls, recognizing that we need the same grace and patience that our would-be enemies, the ones we can call weeds, rely on. We can trust that God has a plan for the harvest.
Looking at this passage, I was reminded of a short story called “Revelation” by Flannery O’Connor. In it, a woman named Mrs. Turpin sits in a doctor’s waiting room with her husband Claud, thinking highly of herself and her station in life while quietly judging each of the other people waiting there. The story ends with Mrs. Turpin having a vision. She saw a streak in the sky at dusk, it says, “as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black [folks] in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile. At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah."
For Mrs. Turpin, and for us, the harvest might not look exactly like we expect. We might come in at the end, even our so-called virtues may need burning away. I want to pray that we would be open to God’s cultivating work among us.
Let us pray.
God, when we want to root up and cast aside weeds we identify in others but not in ourselves, forgive us. Keep us clinging to your grace and patience both for ourselves and for others. Work in all of us your good harvest, a harvest that strips away all that is not from you, all that divides and hurts and causes harm. Set us free to grow and share as one people together, not homogenous but with a diversity that comes from you and makes us all more whole. Make us to shine like the sun, and so reflect your goodness. It’s by your gracious care and power in our lives that we look to you to do this. Amen.
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Matthew 13:24-30 & 13:34-43 (CEB) – skip 31-33 for next week 7/30
24 Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like someone who planted good seed in his field. 25 While people were sleeping, an enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat and went away. 26 When the stalks sprouted and bore grain, then the weeds also appeared.
27 “The servants of the landowner came and said to him, ‘Master, didn't you plant good seed in your field? Then how is it that it has weeds?' 28 “‘An enemy has done this,' he answered. “The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us to go and gather them?'
29 "But the landowner said, ‘No, because if you gather the weeds, you'll pull up the wheat along with them. 30 Let both grow side by side until the harvest. And at harvesttime I'll say to the harvesters, First gather the weeds and tie them together in bundles to be burned. But bring the wheat into my barn. '"
34 Jesus said all these things to the crowds in parables, and he spoke to them only in parables. 35 This was to fulfill what the prophet spoke: I'll speak in parables; I'll declare what has been hidden since the beginning of the world.
36 Jesus left the crowds and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field." 37 Jesus replied, "The one who plants the good seed is the Human One. 38 The field is the world. And the good seeds are the followers of the kingdom. But the weeds are the followers of the evil one. 39 The enemy who planted them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the present age. The harvesters are the angels.
40 Just as people gather weeds and burn them in the fire, so it will be at the end of the present age. 41 The Human One will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all things that cause people to fall away and all people who sin. 42 He will throw them into a burning furnace. People there will be weeping and grinding their teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in their Father's kingdom. Those who have ears should hear."
Parable of the mustard seed
31 He told another parable to them: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and planted in his field. 32 It's the smallest of all seeds. But when it's grown, it's the largest of all vegetable plants. It becomes a tree so that the birds in the sky come and nest in its branches."
Parable of the yeast
33 He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast, which a woman took and hid in a bushel of wheat flour until the yeast had worked its way through all the dough."