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.
“I know that I belong. I know that I’m wheat, but what are you? Can you prove your credentials to me? Do you belong here, or do you need to be expelled? Tell me of your identity!”
When we appoint ourselves as the cullers of the wheat, several things happen. First of all, we take on a mindset of superiority. Dana Carvey didn’t invent the Church Lady out of thin air! Remember her superior dance? She was righteous and very few others were equal to her. Who would be left in the church if Church Lady did the culling? Not many. And the remaining community would all look and think very much the same.
The people left out would be everyone on the fringes, the people not like us. But Jesus’ own selection of his inner circle was definitely not from the cream of the crop! His top 12 team was comprised of the uneducated. They were dirty fishermen, they were a corrupt tax collector. They included a radical zealot and someone who stole money from their group funds.
Jesus specifically chose his select group from the fringes of society. Why? Because fringe people know other fringe people. They would understand the struggle, the plights, the sufferings. They would see and not judge. They would accept people for who they are, warts and all.
Mother Theresa observed, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
The second thing that happens is that we become blinded to our own need for grace. That pride of goodness creates a bubble of false righteousness around us. We can’t see our own shortcomings and character flaws. And we can’t see that false superiority for what it is: pride, arrogant conceit. We’re blind to the spirit of contempt breeding within.
Good and bad are not so easily discerned. Their roots are hopelessly entangled!
In his novel The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn addresses their enmeshment:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Good and evil dwell side by side in this world. They’re so closely enmeshed that you can’t destroy the one with out harming the other.
Our core Lutheran theology agrees. Luther coined the phrase: Simul iustus et peccator, simultaneously justified and sinner. We are born in sin, we live in sin, and we die in sin. AND we live under the umbrella of God’s righteousness even while we are chained to sin.
No, Jesus’ parable tells us to hold up on that Roundup. Don’t douse the field! Let it grow. Do not judge, do not destroy. Do not pluck up and cast away. Let it all grow together. Judgement will come at the harvest.
Thank goodness judgment doesn’t belong to us! It’s God who judges! We won’t be judged by others, nor by ourselves. That self-guilt and self-damning can sometimes be the deadliest. No, it is God who judges.
And, good news! God’s judgment already took place at Calvary. That was God’s call: God so loved the world that God sent God’s Son. For the Son did not come to condemn the world, but to save it!
Friends, when you stand before the judgment seat of God, God will say, “Haven’t we already dealt with this case? Yes, here it is. This soul was cleared at Calvary. Case dismissed.”
We are each wheat and darnel. Both of them grow in this earthly field. But one day, our souls will be purified at last.
I close today with a charming poem by Mavis Williams. It’s entitled “The Perfect Church.” It’s written for the Church Lady in all of us!
If you should find the perfect church
Without one fault or smear,
For goodness sake! Don’t join that church;
You’d spoil the atmosphere.
If you should find the perfect church
Where all anxieties cease,
Then pass it by, lest by joining it,
You’d mar the masterpiece.
But since no perfect church exists,
Made of imperfect men,
Then let’s cease looking for that church
And love the church we’re in.
So let’s keep working in our church,
Until the resurrection.
And then we each will join that Church
Without an imperfection!”
