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Agriculture and GraceA Sermon
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Blessings, friends, and thank you for the privilege of worshipping with you this morning and of playing the preacher’s part as together we all seek a word from God. There’s no place in the usual Presbyterian order of worship for “the disclaimer,” but since I have been invited to your campus as a representative of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, I think I ought to make clear that in my role right now as preacher, I am not speaking for my organization, but only for myself before God. I’ve never submitted a sermon for approval to anyone, and my Board is not responsible for what I say from the pulpit, so nothing I utter in this setting should be construed as “the Covenant Network position.” We are all here not as partisans, but as brothers and sisters opening ourselves to the presence of God. [Prayer for Illumination] The Gospel Lesson this morning is from Matthew chapter 13; listen for God’s word to you: 24 Jesus put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; 25but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. 26So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. 27And 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?’ 28He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. 30Let 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… Jesus’ disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” 37He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; 38the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, 39and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. 40Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. 41The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, 42and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!” The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. |
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A better gardener could yank with confidence – maybe Jesus’ point is that only God knows enough about the plants in God’s own field to do that weeding |
It’s spring, and a middle-aged homeowner’s fancy turns to… yard work. Some people can’t wait to get out in the garden, but for me it’s merely a matter of property-preservation and minimal neighborhood face-saving. I have lived in the same house going on 19 years, with occasional fits and starts in the landscaping department, for the most part aspiring only to keep the weeds and forsythia from entirely overwhelming my small patch of real estate. However, last year I contracted with a friend to dig some beds, plant some new varieties, and move beyond the previous goal of “not awful” to “attractive.” The improvement is remarkable, and once the new grass is planted I may actually enjoy being in the back yard, previous home of monster dandelions and shoulder-high goldenrod. My first major experience with gardening, if you can call it that, was in my spouse’s and my first call out of seminary, in rural Iowa. That first summer, Elder Roy volunteered to plow a plot for us in the back yard of the parsonage (we were serving an ecumenical parish, and that’s what Methodists call the manse). After he finished with his tractor, and I don’t mean the little riding lawnmower variety, we were looking at an empty area that seemed larger every time I tried to figure out how to fill it. I had every good intention, and we did plant vegetables in about two-thirds of the rows, but somehow after that there always seemed to be something more important to do than tend it. By the end of the season, we had one meal from the peas we grew, the squirrels ate every ear of corn before we could pick it, and we had to hack our way through thick jungle to get to the few ripe tomatoes. The only crop that could be called successful was zucchini, and when we moved to our next church five years later we threw out several dozen containers of that from the freezer. After the first year’s spectacular failure, we didn’t try again. We had also learned that, as the harvest came to the competent, grocery bags full of tomatoes and feed sacks of sweet corn would show up on the front porch, more vegetables than we could possibly eat. There are different gifts in the Body of Christ, and I decided to leave the food production to the farmers. I’m more comfortable digging in the Word than in the dirt. Still, I don’t think that the instructions of the householder in Jesus’ parable would be applauded as sound farming practice. If Jesus used parables to surprise his listeners into a different perspective, I’ll bet this one got their attention. Let the weeds grow unmolested till the harvest? Not a conventional method for increased yield per acre. But then Jesus was never that conventional. Part one of the lesson,
the parable itself, counsels patience when action seems indicated and
tolerance, even laxity, when you’d think quality control would
be the order of the day. It’s not as clear as it appears,
says he – hold off on rooting out those weeds, ’cause
you might get the good grain along with them. The entanglements
of good and evil are too subtle for the servants to discern with certainty. I
can relate to this when checking out my recently cultivated backyard
beds, as I’m pretty sure that some of the green poking up there
now is not what Karen planted last summer, but I can’t identify
which is which most of the time. A better gardener could yank with
confidence – maybe Jesus’ point is that only God knows enough
about the plants in God’s own field to do that weeding |
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Taken together, I hear an assurance that there will be a final reckoning, and a good harvest, and that it’s not dependent on our green thumbs or vigilance... |
Scholars often caution against allegorizing the parables, but Matthew apparently missed that lecture. The emphasis of the parable itself seems to be on forbearance – toleration of ambiguity and even of sin – but the explanation instead stresses judgment, separation and contrast. Taken together, I hear an assurance that there will be a final reckoning, and a good harvest, and that it’s not dependent on our green thumbs or vigilance – God is sovereign, and we can afford to chill. There will be a Judgment, and we’re not in charge of it. Neither the present nor the future of evildoers is our responsibility. There’s even a use for the weeds. This lesson is in the midst of a series of parables of the Kingdom. Jesus may have been thinking of the criticism he garnered for hanging out with the disreputable of his day and age; Matthew may have been concerned about the quality of the Christian community, with its very evident flaws. There is a tension between this command for patience, an acceptance of impurity, and the high standards to which the church is called, in but not of the world, the demand for justice, the summons to discipline and holiness. Contradiction abounds, or at least paradox. In Myers-Briggs I’m an INTJ, very ‘J,’ and I know about craving clarity – in the meaning of a parable, with a nice layer of mulch and neat rows… in the knowledge of good and evil. Yet there’s an old story about some problems attendant to that appetite. Taking godly action vs. trusting God to act – for Jesus’ community, for Matthew’s, for ours, it’s ever a challenge to discern the balance. Distinguishing faithful actions and attitudes from the unfaithful, cowardly, or self-righteous ones – we’re all hampered by limited human perspective, and the best of our motives are still mixed. It’s nothing new that in our day the plants are still arguing over which are the weeds and which are the wheat. Very few of us if any consider ourselves apologists for sin, but our identifications of sinfulness vary. In the sexuality controversy of our time, for some sin is primarily violation of a particular so-called “traditional” sexual morality, while for others sin is primarily prejudice against and exclusion of sexual minorities. One group claims holiness, their definition; the other contends for justice, “our” definition; each side has its own purity party, where virtue is uncompromising, and in their extremes neither will brook disagreement. We know what God demands, and aren’t we God’s servants? Yank out those weeds, for the very future of the church is at stake, and of course it matters how we live and what it means to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, that’s indisputable. But Jesus says… relax. God takes a longer view than do we. The harvest is already assured, and the wheat will endure despite the presence of the weeds, for good is in the intention and the result, and wheat is what God planted. “No opinion can be either more pernicious or more absurd than that which brings truth and falsehood upon a level, and represents it as of no consequence what [one’s] opinions are… [And yet] we also believe that there are truths and forms with respect to which [persons] of good characters and principles may differ. And in all these we think it the duty both of private Christians and societies to exercise mutual forbearance toward each other.” In case you don’t have the Book of Order memorized, those are excerpts from Form of Government Chapter 1, “The Historic Principles of Church Order.”
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I stake my life on the promises of Romans 8 – that it is impossible that a mistaken conviction could separate me (or anyone else) from the love of God in Jesus Christ. |
How do we reconcile Jesus’ parabolic plea for patience, tolerance, mercy, his insistence that we bear with imperfection, even evil, on the one hand – with the equally biblical bid for repentance, discipline, purity on the other? With fear and trembling; with care and humility; with a large dose of self-examination. My reading of Holy Scripture has me absolutely convinced that the gender of one’s partner is not a determinant of sexual sin, and that it would be sinful for me to pause in the struggle to make the church and the world safer for sexual minorities. I firmly believe that acting on my conviction is my call from God. Some of my sisters and brothers in Christ are equally convinced that homosexual behavior constitutes unrepentant sin that threatens the salvation of the sinner, earns me a millstone around my neck for leading others to stumble, and damages the witness and integrity of the church. They also perceive a call from God, I think. Some day we will all face the Judgment, whether the metaphor be harvest, or standing before St. Peter at the pearly gates, or being divided sheep from goats. I stake my life on the promises of Romans 8 – that it is impossible that a mistaken conviction could separate me (or anyone else) from the love of God in Jesus Christ. If I and my faction are wrong on this critical matter, I trust that error to be covered by the mysterious grace of Christ. How about if the so-called “other side” is mistaken, and the primary sin in all this turns out to be the perpetuation of the stigma against homosexuality, with all its attendant ills – including that it convinces some folks that God is cruel, that the gospel isn't good news, and that Jesus Christ should be rejected. Do they entertain the idea that they might be damned for their failure to repent of this sin, despite numerous warnings? None of us believes that God demands perfection in all actions, all attitudes, even all opinions – do we? When the dim glass is removed and we see face to face, each of us is bound to be surprised one way or another. Aren’t we all counting on forgiveness for something? Believing otherwise, it seems to me, is to presume that a sincere mistake could be more powerful than death, life, angels, rulers, things present, things to come, powers, height, depth, and everything else in all creation. I’m a “One,” the perfectionist, in the enneagram scheme of things, but I couldn’t live with that kind of pressure, to have to be right about everything. That we don’t have to is grace. |
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In God’s agriculture, letting both the weeds and the wheat grow together is grace. |
A couple of years ago, in another home maintenance project, we had our cracked driveway replaced – the old ripped out and new asphalt poured several inches thick. Not two weeks went by before a dandelion pushed its head right up through the middle of it. I didn’t know at the time whether to consider it a parable about the power of life or the inevitability of sin… and maybe, given human nature, it’s both/and. The sinless life only happened once. It’s not so much that weeds and wheat are descriptive of different people, perhaps, and the issue is telling those apart – it’s more a realistic farm report of what’s germinating within each of us, hopefully one more than the other, but both within the field of our life. I am praying that at the harvest, the ultimate and only true Judge will destroy the evil and save the good in me. In God’s agriculture, letting both the weeds and the wheat grow together is grace. I’m not sure it makes sense from the standpoint of sound farming practice, but then from a limited human perspective grace doesn’t make sense either – that’s one reason it’s so unsettling. Live in the same church with those people? How can we stand it? How can God allow it? In God’s agriculture, only Christ is qualified to do the weeding. If weed control were God’s first priority, we might all be surprised how little would be left in the field when the weeding was done. In a-grace-culture, by contrast, it’s even possible for weeds to become wheat. Thanks be to God in Jesus Christ! Amen.
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