| Sermon
for All Saints-by-the-Sea, Proper 11, July 20, 2008 In Godly Play, parables are contained in golden boxes. The storyteller tells the children that parables are old, very valuable and mysterious. They are told that the parables are gifts for each of us from Jesus. The storyteller continues by pointing to the lid on the box and explaining that, often, the lid stops us from opening a parable. Even if we are really ready to explore a parable it is sometimes hard to open it. Even if we are able to open a parable we may have to go back to it many times to fully sift through its many layered spiritual realities. They are just like that. Unless our hearts are closed like the lid on the box, parables can give us something each time we go back to them. Parables challenge our everyday view of life. They wake us up to what we have not seen before. Parables question the status quo, the order imposed by tradition, power or class. They are meant to disturb…to make us squirm a bit…or maybe to make us squirm alot. This is the reason that parables often got Jesus in trouble. It is the reason that Christians have sometimes redefined parables in ways that comfort rather than challenge. So let’s see if we can take the lid off the parable of the wheat and the weeds. I wonder what mysteries we might find inside. Today’s Gospel is about a field in which the wheat and the weeds are growing together. They were not meant to be growing together. This happened through the evil intentions of an enemy of the farmer who planted the good seeds of wheat. In Jesus’ time this was such a common way of exacting vengeance that the Romans passed a law against it. These weeds or tares are said to actually entwine their roots around the roots of the wheat. So the good and the evil plants are actually enmeshed both above and below the earth. The slaves of the householder want to do immediately what any good gardener would want to do…yank out those weeds! This is somewhat akin to our eagerness to remove the speck from our neighbor’s eye, ignoring the log in our own. We rush to solutions, especially those that involve another person’s faults. But in today’s parable, the farmer instructs them to do what is counterintuitive. He tells them to let them grow together until the time of the harvest. Only then - at harvest time- may the good wheat be separated from the evil weeds that have literally tried to choke the life from them. In the explanation of the parable we are told that there will definitely be a harvest time but we are not told exactly when that will be. Since it will be in God’s time is there not the possibility that weeds can become wheat before then? This would indeed be a mystery, and a miracle grown in the good earth of God’s mercy! Today’s Gospel calls for patience and mutual forbearance to be exercised among those who await the harvest. Rather than being at odds with one another over who is more worthy or more prepared or more right the Matthean Jesus advises leaving such decisions to God. The parable calls us to be careful about labeling others as the label can become so enmeshed in a person’s psyche that it chokes the life from them. Such labeling disallows the possibility of grace, of growth, and of transformation. Conversely, the labels we often affix to ourselves, good, upright, exemplary, can also be something of a burden in that we tend to identify with those labels and then neglect to do the daily and deliberate work that might make the label true. Aware as he was of the human condition, Jesus encouraged his disciples to forego the desire to label themselves or others: wheat or weeds; Jew or gentile; servant or free; heretic or saint. Rather he taught that if we are to be his disciples we should be working fervently and faithfully to welcome the good seed of God’s word so as to be ready to welcome the eschatological harvest in God’s good time. It is not hard to find contemporary examples of what Jesus is teaching in this parable. We find this labeling happening in the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church is certainly being labeled a weed by many in the Global South. The discussions at Lambeth continue the dialogue surrounding the choices that have been made within the American church. Some call those choices weeds and others call them wheat. If we are to be faithful to the teaching of this parable we must find ways to be prayerfully patient and forbearing with one another. This is not just a good way to be or the right thing to do it is what God is commanding us to do. I realize that being so is counterintuitive to us but if we are to take the hard sayings of Jesus to heart it is what we must do. By loving one another and letting God be God we tend our fields and prepare them for the harvest. Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted that a weed “ is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” Perhaps this is the hope in which we are saved! Certainly, this is what is meant by grace. Realizing that the harvest could come at any time we need to be with God in Christ by hearing and living his word, by being the Body of Christ in this place and in the world, by sharing in the sacraments and prayers so that we can be helped to remove the weeds of sinfulness that consume and choke us. Instead of all our striving as we rush to judgment, as we attempt to plant weeds in our neighbors’ fields might it not be possible to change or to transform the outcome? If we practice forbearance, patience and love we could reconcile ourselves to each other and then arrive at God’s harvest as whole wheat worthy of being gathered into the Master’s storehouse.
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