It’s interesting that over the past few weeks and months there’s been a huge amount of interest in the economic crisis facing our world, but very little about the moral and ethical state of the world. Yet our state government is about to pass legislation that will allow women to terminate babies well past 24 weeks with the consent of two doctors. What’s more it’ll force doctors who are opposed to abortion to refer women on to doctors who are happy to do them. And the media has greeted this with general applause. In our own Diocesan Synod a motion related to this issue was put aside, I assume because it might cause division in the church or maybe because if it had been put it might not have passed anyway.
You’ll no doubt have seen reports of a series of recent year 12 muck-up days that have shown clearly what a loss of respect for people and property there is among some, at least, of our population. And of course we’re in the middle of the Spring Racing Carnival where going to the races has become an excuse for getting drunk on champagne - all in the name of sophistication!
And it’s not just here. The continuing influx of migrants from war-torn parts of the world, from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, is a testimony to the terrible state of the world at the moment.
And not just the world in general. The Church itself is a total mess. The recent conference held by a large group of Anglicans in Jerusalem was called GAFCON: the Global Anglican Future Conference. It was called to discuss what could be done to ensure that the Anglican Church has a future when it’s faced by internal forces that want to dilute the gospel and deny the key elements of the Christian faith, not to mention condoning practices that the Scriptures have always condemned.
Does it bother you or embarrass you to think that the Uniting Church has been ordaining practising homosexuals for the past 5 years? Or that the Anglican Church in America had no problem with consecrating a practising homosexual as a Bishop? Are you ashamed to think that in our own Diocese we seem to have had an endless list of cases of sexual abuse of young boys and girls by priests and other ministers?
And what about the ordinary sorts of ungodliness that seem to go on in most churches: factionalism, gossip, backbiting, etc. Does it make you wonder whether there’s any hope for the church, or whether you even want to be part of a church that behaves like that?
Or do you just wonder why God doesn’t do something about it? Why does God allow such evil to continue in his church? Why doesn’t he get rid of those people who don’t believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, bishops who don’t believe that he died and rose again so we could be saved?
Well, Jesus knew that this sort of situation would arise. He told the parable we’re looking at today precisely because he knew the sorts of questions that people would be asking. He says to his disciples, "What is the kingdom of heaven like?"
Can you see what it’s like? It’s like someone has just sowed good seed in his field. Notice that the seed is good. It’s not the fault of the seed that things go wrong. If you were here last week I assume you know what the seed refers to. In last week’s parable the seed referred to the word of God, the gospel. When it was sown in good soil it bore fruit a hundredfold. Well here Jesus has developed that idea a bit more. Now he’s thinking a little further down the track. Now the seed has borne fruit and its fruit are the children of God.
So God has sown the seed of the gospel and people have been brought into his kingdom. But then along comes an enemy in the dark of night whose aim is to spoil the work of the gospel. And what does he do? He sows weeds among the wheat.
Now notice that the enemy can’t do anything about the good seed. The wheat is growing naturally and will bear fruit in due course because it’s planted in good soil. But the enemy can confuse the issue by planting weeds in the middle of the wheat. Can you see what this tactic is aimed at? It’s aimed at diverting the workers from their task of tending the wheat. If they’re busy pulling out the weeds they might forget to tend the wheat. Secondly, it’s aimed at discouraging those who tend the fields.
I guess there’s also the chance that the weeds might choke out the wheat, as we saw in the parable of the soils last week.
Next, notice that what he does is done in secret. No-one knows that he’s sown the weeds. No-one even knows they are weeds. They’re just left there among the wheat seeds. It’s not until the plants grow up and begin to bear fruit that anyone notices. But then, what do the workers ask? "Master did you plant good seed in your field? Could you have made a mistake?"
This is the BIG QUESTION isn’t it? If God is good, if God is a God of love, why is there so much evil in this world? OR, has he made a mistake?
But no, there’s no mistake. God hasn’t done it. This is the work of an enemy.
But hang on, isn’t God omnipotent? Surely he can at least control who gets into his church, and who stays there! Surely he can control who rises to positions of influence in it! Why doesn’t he just send in his servants to root out the evildoers and purify his church again?
Now of course plenty of people have tried that. The trouble is, it’s very hard to distinguish between good and evil in the Church. What criteria do we use? e.g. A man I once knew, who was head of CEBS and state director of SAMS, turned out to be a paedophile. A man who was a state secretary of EFAC had to resign because he had an affair with one of his parishioners. The President of IVF (AFES) in USA had an affair with someone he met in a hotel during a preaching tour. A strong evangelical minister who was in a Parish not far from here, had an affair with his curate and left his wife and family, as did she.
So what’s going on? Is Jesus compromising? Is he just turning a blind eye to the evil in the world, in the Church? Was Jesus really a liberal? Here’s one of the great dilemmas for those who have a strong belief in God’s word. Is the appropriate response to the evil we see in the church a response of strength, even of violence - to root out the evil we see with whatever means is available to us? That’s certainly what some sections of the church would say. Cut off all contact with them. Turn your back on them. Cast them out from your presence. Or is it something else?
I took a funeral a few years back for a man whose children were Christians. The trouble was, only one of the sons was there. The other sons hadn’t spoken to him or their brother for many years. Why? Because he and their brother were considered unclean. The other sons had cut off fellowship with their father and their brother because they didn’t agree with some of their beliefs. Now in fact, the brother I dealt with wanted the funeral to have a distinctly Christian flavour, because he was a strong Christian. You see, what had happened in that family was that a church had tried to pull out some evil weeds but in the process some of the wheat had been pulled out as well.
If you think back to the parable of the soils, the wheat growing up is likely to encounter weeds that’ll be stronger than it is. That’s the nature of weeds, isn’t it? They tend to be harder to pull out than the good plants. So it’s almost inevitable that if you try to pull out the weeds, you’ll damage the roots of the good plants in the process. And that’s what Jesus wants to avoid.
So is he just a liberal compromiser? Does he not care what goes on in the church? In fact does this mean there’s no hope for the Church?
Yes and No. For now the Church will continue to be an imperfect organism, prone to disease, prone to attack from weeds and parasites. But that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t care about it. It doesn’t mean that he turns a blind eye to the evil in its midst. It just means that he’s postponing judgement until a more opportune time. Nor does it mean that we should be discouraged by what’s happening in the Church.
You see, this is part of Satan’s strategy. He plants these weeds to discourage us, to make us want to give up. I remember hearing a story some years ago of a long-distance swimmer trying to cross the English Channel. The day he set out was a typical English summer’s day: overcast and cold. And as time wore on a heavy fog came down over the channel. Finally it got so thick that visibility was cut to a few metres. The further he swam the more tired he became until eventually he couldn’t go any further. His support team urged him to go on, but he just couldn’t. So he climbed into the support boat, defeated. The sad thing was that only then did they discover they were only a few hundred metres from the shore. He later commented that if only he’d been able to see the shore in the distance he would have kept going. But the discouragement of the fog was too much for him.
This is what Satan is trying to do with us. He wants us to be blinded by the sad state of affairs in the Church. He wants us to so concentrate on how bad things are that we become discouraged to the point of just giving up. But Jesus wants us to see that God has things in hand. He will get rid of the weeds in the end, but only when the harvest is ready.
The owner says: "Let 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.’" So be patient. Wait until the time is ripe, then you’ll see things put right.
When Peter was asked why Jesus hadn’t returned as he’d promised, he said: "The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance." (2 Peter 3:9) There is a day of reckoning for the weeds. The day will come when God will remove the weeds from the midst of his people. There will be a day when he’ll purify his Church, when the evil doers will be taken away and destroyed. But that’ll be a day of judgement for the whole earth, a day that God is holding off for as long as possible. In the meantime we live in the time between the coming of the kingdom and its fulfillment, when answers are sometimes not as black and white as we’d like, when evil is a present reality wherever we are and sometimes there’s little we can do to get rid if it.
By the way Jesus isn’t saying here that evil doesn’t matter. The weeds are not just a pest. They’re also a danger to the wheat as we saw last week. So we need to have our eyes open to the evil in our midst. We need to do all we can to promote the growth of the good seed. But we don’t do that by trying to kill off the weeds.
So how do we do it? Think back to the parable of the soils. What is it that makes the seed grow? It’s not dependent on the seed is it? No, it all depends on the soil. So if we want to defeat the weeds, we need to promote growth of the good seed by providing healthy soil. By fertilising the wheat so the weeds can’t choke out the word once it’s sown. If you want to stop weeds growing up in your lawn, one of the ways is to fertilise the lawn, so it outgrows the weeds. So knowing that the Church is an imperfect organism, that there are always going to be people within it who are opposed to Christ, what can we do? We can continually promote good theology. We can teach people how to think Biblically and theologically. We can continually be asking ourselves how the ideas we hear fit with God’s revealed will, with the mind of God. We can continually return to God’s word, to the gospel. We can encourage people to feed on the spiritual food God has given us in the Bible, knowing that in the end that sort of feeding will produce good fruit: 30, 60 or even 100-fold.
Finally, let me ask you, do you pray for God to purify the Church? Well, that may be a good thing but it also might be a dangerous thing, because the purifying might affect the good as well as the bad. Far better to pray that God would strengthen his Church to stand against the ploys of the evil one. Pray that those in leadership in the Church would be alert to the forces of evil in their midst. And pray that those who are young in the faith, who are still growing to maturity would be kept safe from those forces in the church that’ll try to choke them and stunt their growth.
I think this is why Paul in his letter to the Philippians urges them to guard their minds by only feeding them with good food: "Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.’ (Phil 4:8)
Let’s pray that we’d be a church where the good seed of the gospel is fed and nourished until it comes to fruition, where God’s people are kept safe by the word of God, and where the evil one will find no foothold for opposing the work of God.
For more sermons from this source go to http://www.stthomasburwood.org.au
