Last Sunday as we were looking at the Parable of the Sower I told you about moving in to a new parsonage at Lovelady and with that new parsonage came a new yard. One of the men in the congregation, the chair of the board, thought that the lawn needed to have grass so he bought Bermuda grass seed and broadcast spread it over the yard. As a result much of it went on the lawn where it was supposed to go, but some of it went in the flowerbeds. Then I asked the congregation a question. For those of you who weren’t here last week, I ask you the same question. Do you know what grass is called when it is in a flowerbed? That is correct, it’s a weed. And, I spent the next two years pulling those weeds out of the flowerbeds at the parsonage at Lovelady.
This morning’s lesson is one of my favorites of Jesus’ parables, the Parable of the Weeds. I am not a big fan of working in the yard. I never have been. Imagine my delight when, as a child who was often sent outside to weed the flowerbeds, I learn in Sunday school one week about the parable of the weeds. I went straight home and told my mother that I wasn’t going to weed the flowerbeds any more. She asked me how I thought I was going to get out of it and I told her that Jesus said I didn’t have to, that it was a bad thing to pull out the weeds. I really don’t remember my mother’s reply to that, but I do know that it wasn’t long before I found myself out in the flowerbeds again, on my hands and knees pulling weeds.
I also remember watching my mother and my father working out in the yard, pulling weeds out of the lawn. At least as I remember them, most of them were dandelions. I wasn’t allowed to pull the dandelions because I never got the whole root and it would just grow back again and the last thing that my parents wanted were for those weeds to grow back in the yard again.
I grew up thinking that a dandelion was nothing but a useless weed that nobody really wanted around and the only one who really knows why these plants are around at all is God himself. Why did God create weeds anyway?
Imagine my surprise when years later I learned that there are people in the world who don’t view dandelions as weeds at all, they view them as vegetables. They call them greens. I personally have never eaten them, I am not real crazy about other more common greens like mustard greens, collard greens, and turnip greens, but I have learned that some folks actually prepare dandelion greens and eat them. Would you imagine that, people eating weeds?
That is quite a paradox. It is all the same plant, but to some it is a weed and yet to others it is a vegetable. So do we weed it out of the yard or do we pick off the leaves, boil them and eat them and let the rest continue to grow for the next harvest?
When I was a kid and out weeding mom’s flowerbeds I often had difficulty. I would look at the plants that were there. Some would have flowers and she would say to “pull that weed” and others didn’t have any blooms, at least not yet, and she would say, “Oh no, don’t pull that one, it is a flower.”
For many people, if clover is growing in your yard it is a weed that needs to be pulled or at least chocked out. Yet on March 17th every year there are shamrocks, clover hanging everywhere. At that one point of the year it would seem everyone around us wants clover, at least the four leafed kind because it is supposed to be good luck.
Like I said, it is all quite a paradox. I am reminded of something that I was once told by a man named Ted Hand who was a member at Pleasant Retreat and one of Tyler’s principle rose growers. “A weed is simply a plant that no one loved.”
It would seem that the paradox is, one person’s plant can be another person’s weed. Without question, there are weeds in the world, plants that probably any of us would consider weeds. There are even plants that have the word weed in their name. I have an acquaintance that has a master’s degree in Biology, botany to be more specific. He wrote his master’s thesis on the milkweed. I am not clear, however if he actually thinks that the milkweed is a weed.
The same is true for people in the world around us. There are some that we think are really bad people and some that we think are really good people. Yet even those that we think of as really bad, someone thinks of as good and those that we think of, as really good, there are those that think that they are not worth the time of day. It is the dandelion paradox all over again.
In addition, that doesn’t even begin to include those that we look at and rush to a snap judgment. All too often, we will take one look at someone and immediately decide if they are good or bad, totally based on their appearance.
Here is an example. A seminar leader recently showed a class of government workers a series of pictures. The pictures began with a view of a person’s face, and then broadened the view to reveal the person’s entire body. It was only when the entire picture was seen that the class could make anything approaching an accurate judgment.
The first picture showed the face of a grizzled man, scowling and straining. He looked to be a member of a motorcycle gang, perhaps gripping the handlebar of a chopper. But when the entire picture was revealed, it became clear that he was a maker of customized wheelchairs for the handicapped, and he was pushing one of his creations.
Picture two showed the face of a lovely woman with a beautiful smile. She appeared to be a flight attendant or a hostess at an upscale restaurant. But when the view was expanded, what the class saw was an exotic dancer, ready to do a pole dance.
Way too much of the time, we don’t see the whole picture and rush to judgment. We need to stop and pull back and take a longer look at the situation.
IV This morning we continue our series “Principles from Parables” with the Parable of the Weeds. A farmer puts in a field of wheat. Under the cover of darkness one of the man’s enemies comes in and plants weeds among the wheat. When the farmer’s servants discover the weeds they come and tell the farmer asking, “do you want us to weed the field?” The farmer is a man after my own heart. “No,” he says, “Let them grow up together. If you try to pull the weeds you will probably take some of the wheat out as well.” At harvest time we will separate them. We will take the wheat to the barn and we will burn the weeds.
Like last week’s Parable of the Sower if we were unfamiliar with the parable the meaning might be pretty cryptic to us and we might respond as I did to my mother a number of years ago as a child, “Jesus says not to weed the flowerbed.” Because many of us have heard the parable numerous times, we can read this much and have some sense of understanding what Jesus is saying.
Even if we don’t, however, this is another parable, like last week’s that Jesus takes the time to explain it to the disciples and to us. Our text ends this morning at verse 30. Verses 31 through 35 are the Parables of the Mustard Seed and the Yeast. Then beginning in verse 36 Jesus explains the Parable of the Weeds. Read Matthew 13:36-43.
Jesus himself is the farmer. The world is the field. The wheat represents people of faith. The devil sows the weeds and the weeds are his children. The harvest is the end of time.
To me the parable of the weeds is also a frustrating story, weeds and wheat together. But it’s also very real to our world. We raise our children, and we pray with them and for them. We bring them to church — we surround them with good friends and even more important, good influences. And then they go to school, and they come home with words that we hoped they’d never hear much less learn. And they watch television and they experience a world of extramarital affairs and uncommitted relationships and rape and drugs and alcohol. And what we start to see is like wheat being surrounded by weeds.
It is real, and what we really want to pray to God is this: “Lord, take the weeds away!” Take away all of the evil and all of the temptations and all of the anxieties. Pull those weeds out of my life. Take away the wars and the human hunger. Take away the divisions between humanity. Yes, our prayer would be no less than Jesus’ prayer, “Father, if it be your will, take this cup from me....”
But the kingdom of God is here on earth and wheat and weeds grow side by side, lest in pulling out the weeds we disrupt the wheat as well. Weeds and wheat — side by side. We are not afforded a monastery — where we could get away from the problems of this world. We have to live in the real world.
The point of this parable is not that Jesus is going to go easy on the weeds. No, he fully intends to put evildoers into the furnace of fire, “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” There should be no question, the end of the age will come and judgment will come to everyone, both weeds and wheat.
What Jesus is really trying to teach us in this lesson is that the judgments aren’t our job. We are to leave that to him. He knows that we are consistently off the mark when we try to make an accurate assessment of the moral character of a friend or a neighbor, or any one else and so he orders us to put our energy elsewhere.
The challenge for us is to put our energy into being good wheat, instead of trashing the weeds around us. Weeding the field isn’t our job. Rather than erecting walls, building boundaries and trying to purify our community of faith from the impurities of the world around us, our job is to grow up healthy and strong — and leave the judging and the weeding to Jesus. The problem with us trying to pull up weeds is that we might easily grab some wheat by mistake and unintentionally pull it out, and thereby hurting others who are part of the wheat and not part of the weeds. We also just might hurt ourselves in the process.
The best news is that growth and maturity are probably the most effective forms of weed control around. I am told, if you are responsible for taking care of a lawn, that healthy grass is extremely competitive and will crowd out most weeds that surround it all by itself. If your lawn is healthy, you shouldn’t have to dig out many weeds at all — in fact, the presence of weeds is a sign that your grass is weaker than it probably should be. If you find yourself dealing with weeds, one of the best things to do is simply let your grass grow.
When we let the grass (or more scriptural, the wheat) grow we don’t have to worry as much about the dandelion paradox. We don’t have to worry whether it is a weed or a vegetable because the good plants will surround us. Yes, weeds will be part of the world, but when some of them see the life of the wheat, they too might become one of the good plants. They may look a bit different, but in the long run the dandelion paradox becomes a mute point.
