No gardener wants weeds in his garden. But every gardener has them. Weeds are inevitable. Weeds cannot be avoided. So the question is, what will the gardener do to rid his garden of the weeds?
I love to walk around other people’s gardens. In other people’s gardens I don’t feel guilty about the work to be done. Now at our home, my wife is the real gardener, and I am just the go-fer. No, not the kind of gopher that makes holes in the lawn. I’m the kind you tell to go-fer the sack of fertilizer and go-fer the spade. But, still, when I look at our garden, I’m afraid I see a huge amount of work to be done. And so I’d rather walk through other people’s perfect gardens, where every plant is just right, every flower is complete, and no chip of mulch has spilled outside the boundaries. Other people have perfect gardens; at our house we have a work in progress.
On the first weekend in May every year the National Cathedral has a garden show, and you can not only go and buy little seeds and slips, you can also tour the Cathedral’s gardens. These gardens are, without fail, meticulously kept and beautifully manicured. Ah, but as I walked through the Bishop’s herb garden this year, I saw something. Something caught my eye as we rounded a curve. There, in the midst of all that beauty, all those carefully nurtured beds, a large, brassy, loud, flagrant dandelion! Aha, a weed! Right in the bishop’s herb garden! It made me feel just a little better about my back yard, where weeds flourish, though flowers fail. If even the Cathedral has weeds, then I guess it’s just part of the gardening experience, isn’t it? Just something to be expected.
And of course, it is. Weeds will show up in anybody’s garden. Weeds will show up, eventually, in everybody’s garden. No gardener wants weeds in his garden. But every gardener has them. Weeds are inevitable. Weeds cannot be avoided. So the question is, what will the gardener do to rid his garden of the weeds?
It was in one garden called Eden that the divine gardener planted trees and plants and vines yielding every good thing. It was in that garden called Eden that God created us and called us good. But into that same garden came an insidious, noxious, ugly weed called sin. Into that same garden came human sin, spoiling the perfection of the garden, marring the beauty of creation, and violating the will of the gardener. This weed, sin, was inevitable. It cannot be avoided. So what would the gardener do about the weeds in his garden? How would he rid his garden of these weeds?
It was in another garden, this garden called Gethsemane that the divine gardener worked out the answer. It was in this garden called Gethsemane that He dealt, once and for all, with this horrible weed that grows in every human life. In this garden, just outside a city wall, Jesus Christ came to pray, and in agony consented to do what must be done. In this garden they came to capture and to choke out the Rose of Sharon. But in this garden He burst forth from the tomb and destroyed that sin-weed, once and for all. I want you to know of that garden this morning. What happened in that garden tells us about ourselves and about what God is doing for us.
I
The first thing to see is that weeds can easily be overlooked, because they look so ordinary. Weeds can grow up in your garden without your even noticing, because they look so usual, so ordinary. I guess that’s why we have that phrase, garden-variety. Maybe it’s just a blade or two of grass, growing under the tomatoes. That’s what you see today. But tomorrow the two blades are a clump and next week a swatch. You hardly even notice it because it is just so common, so ordinary.
You see, sin is insidious because it is so ordinary. Sin sneaks up on us. It grows, little by little, day by day, and we scarcely even notice it. But it stays with us, it waits for the right opportunity, and then it strikes. Look at what happened in this garden:
Jesus ... went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to a place where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered. Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, because Jesus often met there with his disciples.
“Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, because Jesus often met there with his disciples.” Sin went there every day along with Jesus. Evil lurked along with goodness. Right alongside Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom, there was one determined to build his own kingdom. Right alongside Jesus’ communion with the Father, there was one in communion with Satan. Sin is right here, in the ordinary, day-by-day commonplace things of life, and nobody notices. Nobody notices because sin, once it gets started, tricks us. It makes us think it belongs there, just part of the garden, just normal. Sin is destructive precisely because it does not look destructive. It looks commonplace.
Tell a little lie today, and tomorrow it will be easier to tell two lies. Cheat a few pennies today, and tomorrow it will be easier to lift a couple of dollars. The day after that it will be just the ordinary thing to walk off with anything that strikes your fancy. Sin gets to us by compromising in small things and then letting them grow and grow and grow. Who knows how many times Judas had been to the garden with Jesus, and had thought little thoughts of betrayal? Who knows how many times Iscariot had entered the garden and had played around with the notion that thirty pieces of silver would certainly pay for lots goodies? Who knows how small the sin of Judas was when it began? But it was so ordinary, so common, and he just let it grow and grow and grow.
No gardener wants weeds in his garden. But every gardener has them. Weeds are inevitable. Weeds cannot be avoided. So the question is, what will the gardener do to rid his garden of the weeds?
II
Next I want you to notice another kind of weed in the garden. Discover with me that there is another weed that does not look much like a weed. But it is, for it is out of place. It doesn’t belong there. It’s a misfit.
When I was about 11 or 12, I was in a school garden club. I was taught something very interesting. I was taught that a weed was a plant that was out of place. It was in the wrong spot. It might be a perfectly good plant, it might even be an absolutely gorgeous flower. But if it is in the wrong place, it is really a weed.
I remember that in that garden club we grew a very interesting plant called “four o’clocks”. Do you all know about four o’clocks? Somehow this plant knew what time it was, and would open its leaves and its flowers at four o’clock in the afternoon. That fascinated me, so I grew four o’clocks, lots of them. By the way, I never did figure out how you got the plants adjusted to Daylight Savings Time, but anyway, I grew four o’clocks. But, you know, they began to spread. Some crept out of the bed and into the path, and some made their way over there into Lou Ann’s zinnia bed, next to my four o’clocks. You know what? Lou Ann didn’t like my four o’clocks in her zinnia bed, at four o’clock or at any other time! She said they were in the wrong place, she claimed they were messing up her flowers. She told me they looked like weeds! Weeds?! They weren’t weeds, they were my flowers, carefully and lovingly tended! But to her, they were out of place in her zinnias, they were just weeds!
Sometimes that’s what sin is too. Out of place, inappropriate. Misplaced zeal. Misguided energy. Doing the right thing in the wrong way. Priorities all out of order. Look at what Peter did there in the garden. When Jesus was about to be arrested by the Temple guards,
“Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. ... Jesus said to Peter, ‘Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?’”
Good old impetuous, hard-driving, fast-charging Peter! He did what his tummy told him to do, but it was out of place. His tummy and maybe even his heart were on target, but he hadn’t thought it through. He hadn’t seen that violence is not the answer to violence. He hadn’t heard Jesus talk about turning the other cheek. Most of all, he had not understood Jesus’ purpose, he had not grasped that the Son of Man MUST suffer and die. All Peter knew to do was to retaliate when he is provoked. Out of place.
And there is where much of our sin goes. There with Peter we are. The sin-weed in us looks like energy put into all the wrong things. It looks like priorities bent out of shape. Our sin is not always that we do wrong, but that we do okay things too much. Here is a man who is full of life, zestful, vigorous, always ready to go. But he puts himself into little things, petty things, meaningless things. He pours immense amounts of his time into recreation, and there is nothing wrong with recreation, but should it claim half his time and the lion’s share of his money? Here is a woman who is a housekeeping demon, whose home is spotless, whose taste is impeccable, from whose kitchen floor you would feel it safe to eat. And there is nothing wrong with cleanliness, nothing wrong with taste and style and comfort. But should these things claim first place in her heart, should cleaning her living room take over from cleansing her soul? Isn’t there something about seeking first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness?
Our sin-weed is not only doing wrong things, ordinary garden-variety sins. Our sin-weed is misplaced priorities, doing otherwise good things at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and in the wrong way.
No gardener wants weeds in his garden. But every gardener has them. Weeds are inevitable. Weeds cannot be avoided. So the question is, what will the gardener do to rid his garden of the weeds?
III
A couple of weeks ago, when we were in North Carolina, I saw what can happen to a garden. It’s not unusual in the South. I saw what had been an peach orchard, but no peaches grew there now. You could look at it and roughly make out the fact that there were trees under all of this stuff, this thick, rough, immense vine. What I saw was kudzu. Have you seen what kudzu does?
Kudzu takes over. Kudzu is a plant species that is not native to the America. It was originally from Japan, where it serves very well to enrich the land and to stabilize the soil. But guess what? Somebody planted it in Georgia and the Carolinas, and it took over. It crept out of its boundaries and it swamped everything in sight. Kudzu is out of control and is now nothing but a problem. It’s choking out everything that was worth growing.
Friends, the harsh truth about sin is that it takes us over. We cannot control our actions. We know what we ought to do, but we cannot do it. We know what we ought to avoid, but we cannot stop it. Sin is addictive. Sin is controlling. Sin manipulates. Sin is like kudzu, invading every aspect of our lives and smothering everything good.
Look at what happened to Peter when he left the garden with Jesus that night. Look at how his entire self was captured by his faithlessness:
Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus... Peter was standing outside at the gate. ... (A) woman said to Peter, "You are not also one of this man’s disciples, are you?" He said, "I am not." ... (Then) they asked him (again), "You are not also one of his disciples, are you?" He denied it and said, "I am not." One of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, "Did I not see you in the garden with him?" Again Peter denied it, and at that moment the cock crowed.
Did I not see you in the garden? Peter denied his Lord, but he also denied himself. Peter lied once, and having lied once had to lie again; and having perjured himself twice, had to do it yet more. He denied himself and all that God intended him to be. He wrote himself off. He let sin consume him. He let sin wrap him in its icy embrace, and smother every good thing in him.
And I suggest to you that that is exactly where most of us are with sin. We are damaging ourselves beyond repair. We are suffocating. The Bible has a word for it, a direct and ugly word: the word is “death”. The wages of sin is death. The payoff of kudzu-sin is strangulation and death. Don’t be naive about that! Don’t be casual about it! Sin, if it is not dealt with, will ultimately take us over and destroy us! Paul said it, “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”
No gardener wants weeds in his garden. But every gardener has them. Weeds are inevitable. Weeds cannot be avoided. So the question is, what will the gardener do to rid his garden of the weeds?
The other day I sat on my deck and watched my neighbor tackle an invasive vine in her yard. I don’t think it was kudzu, but it certainly was taking over. I don’t think it was poison ivy, either, but it certainly was very stubborn. I watched her tear and pull, dig and scrape. I noticed that she did not quit until she had gotten it all out, root and branch. It looked like her back was hurting. Her hands had to have been torn by pulling on those thin wiry vines. Her head perspired, for it was hot; I’m sure she was very thirsty. She struggled out there in that garden, but she knew that she had to get it all, or it might come back and take over again. She stayed by the stuff until she finished the task.
There is a green hill far away, outside a city wall, near that garden, where the very Son of God did go to fight and to struggle. There is a place called Calvary where His hands were torn and his feet and his side. He hung and suffered there, this Jesus. They drove great sharp thorns into His brow, and He thirsted. But there He stayed until sin was rooted out and thrown away. There He labored until we were cleansed. Though kudzu-evil had done its worst, and He lay dead, still He was not finished. For very early in the morning, on the first day of the week, came the women to the tomb in Joseph’s garden. “It is finished,” was His cry. “He is risen” was their witness. Love’s redeeming work was done. The garden is cleansed of its weeds. All we have to do is to walk with the gardener and share in His beauty.
“I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses. And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own, and the joy we share as we tarry there, None other has ever known.”
