Hold Up On That Roundup!

July 19, 2020

Hope Lutheran Church

Pastor Mary Erickson

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Hold Up on that Roundup!

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

My father loved tending a garden and he passed that love along to me. When I was about 7 years old, I was “helping” my father in the garden in a way that only a small child can. Dad had planted the garden a couple of weeks previous. Now he was removing the weeds that were emerging around the new seedlings.

Daddy assigned me a row to weed. I distinctly remember: it was carrots. I began working my way down the row. I pulled out each weed as I saw one. One particular weed presented as a repeat offender. “Gee, there’s a lot of this one weed in this row,” I told my dad.

I continued my progress down the row. Yes, indeed, this one weed kept cropping up! “Wow! There sure is a lot of this one weed growing!”

My dad stood up. “What does it look like? Show me.” He came over and I showed him the perpetrator. In an alarmed voice he announced, “Those are the carrots!”

Dealing with weeds in agriculture has changed over time. Nowadays we have crops which are bred to be resistant to the herbicide Roundup. After the crop has begun to grow, the farmer douses the field in Roundup. The crops look a little anemic for about a week, but then they snap back and continue growing. But every other plant in the field is eliminated.

We have chemicals for everything: herbicides, pesticides. They can kill off the good with the bad. Especially pesticides, they have wreaked havoc on the bee population, adding to the collapse of colonies. And the chain of poisoning tracks its way up the food chain. After seeing very disturbing videos of the neurological effects of pesticides on songbirds who have eaten bugs doused in pesticides, I refuse to use them.

Killing the good with the bad. That’s the point of Jesus’ parable. In trying to eliminate the bad, our actions end up destroying good as well.

In Jesus’ parable, the field hands notice that something besides wheat is growing in the field. What they have discovered is the weed darnel. It’s nickname is “false wheat.” Darnel looks indistinguishable from wheat when it first emerges. It isn’t until the plants reach the point where they create their respective seed heads that you can tell them apart.

The big problem is that darnel seed has toxic qualities. You can’t risk harvesting the darnel seed along with the wheat. It’s inedible and people will get sick if they consume the darnel.

The field hands see that there’s not just a little darnel in the field. It’s all over. The whole field has been corrupted by this weed. There’s only one conclusion: someone has purposely sown this bad seed into the field. How wicked is that!

The field hands ask the farmer what they should do. They want to walk the field right now and pull out the darnel while it’s still relatively young.

But the farmer says no. Nothing is going to be pulled up right now. The roots of the darnel are so enmeshed with the wheat, to pull up the one plant will destroy the other. No, the field will continue to grow to its maturity. Then at harvest, the good wheat will be gleaned.

Jesus doesn’t tell the story to impart agricultural wisdom. He tells it to reveal characteristics of the Kingdom of God. The kingdom isn’t obsessed with eradicating evil, and neither should we.

Our human tendency is to categorize and sort. We value good order. When things are out of sorts, we want to correct them. Good and bad, right and wrong. Our consciousness is filled with maxims that play this out:

• Cleanliness is next to godliness

• One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch

We’re programmed to identify evil and eradicate it! I think that as members of a faith community, that urge may even be magnified in us. We are the standard bearers of the holiness of God! We are the workers of the heavenly kingdom! It’s up to us to present the world with a witness of the good and godly way!

There’s an urge to hold the line of holiness. It’s our duty to keep our ranks clean and pure. And how does this happen? Who is it that sifts the righteous from the unrighteous?

When we adopt this mentality, we align ourselves in the camp of the righteous. We appoint ourselves as the cullers of weeds And something happens to our self-understanding. We take on the mindset of rightful ownership. We set ourselves squarely within the realms of God’s good kingdom.