Sixteenth Sunday In Ordinary Time, Cycle A; 16th Sunday , Year A-- Weeds And Wheat

If we ask, "why is there evil in the world?" we must also ask "why is there good in the world?" We get our answers this Sunday: Beginning with pre-history “while everybody was asleep” (Matthew 13:24-30), the weeds represent the enemies of God, who are: Satan, demons, and humans who definitively choose self-exclusion from God, and the wheat are those who cooperate with or are open to God.

This parable doesn’t mean that we tolerate all sorts of bad behavior. Jesus doesn’t condone weed (pun intended). The weeds are toxic. The type of weed in the parable is called darnel, and it is a poisonous weed. The name comes from the French word, Darne, which means, stupefied. The symptoms of eating darnel grain were dizziness, slurred speech, vomiting and diarrhea.

Nevertheless, this is a parable of hope that weedy tendencies can decrease or be weeded-out.

e.g. I’m recalling the life of a teenager who was smart but very rebellious, he didn’t listen to his mother, made fun of her. He moved in with a girl as a teenager and got her pregnant as he sought popularity and recognition. After living with her girl for 15 years he dumped her and moved in with another. He became engaged to this second woman, thinking it would advance his career. The engagement was a long one, two years, and during the engagement he hooked up with a 3rd woman. In the midst of all this licentiousness, he left the church he was brought up in by his mother and joined a cult. Eventually he became bored with the cult and he became a skeptic.

Is he a wheat or a weed? He was a major weed, but is there any hope for someone like that? Well, his name was Augustine of Hippo, named after a place in North Africa, which was a Roman colony. Augustine of Hippo would later be called St. Augustine, one of the most important theologians and church leaders of the first 500 years of church history. His mother is St. Monica, and St. Augustine wrote a tell-all autobiography called “Confessions” which is widely seen as the first Western Christian autobiography ever written and is the most complete record of any single person from the 4th and 5th centuries.

God is giving us time now to change from weeds to wheat, or to weed-out sinful tendencies as wheat, i.e.

Please Be Patient With Me, God Isn’t Finished With Me Yet.

To illustrate, the Indian poet Tagore, who was upper class, told of the day his servant arrived at work late. Like so many of his upper class, Tagore was helpless when it came to menial things because servants did all the household tasks for him.

An hour went by and the servant hadn't arrived. Tagore was getting angrier by the minute. He thought of all the punishments he was going to inflict upon his servant when he finally arrived. Three hours passed. Now he no longer thought of punishments, he knew that he would fire him when he got there.

Finally, noon arrived. The servant came to work and without a word, proceeded to do his work. He picked up his master's clothes, began to make a meal and do other chores around the house. Tagore watched all of this in silent rage. Finally, he said, "Drop everything and get out of here. You're fired." The man kept working, quietly, diligently. Tagore said, "Get out of here."

The man said, "My little girl died this morning."

We often don’t know what goes on in other people's lives. We do not know the burdens other people carry around with them. Yet we think we know enough to make snap judgments that someone is a permanent weed.

e.g. A man wrote about someone he had viewed as a Weed…

He said: One of the best Christians I’ve ever known was a Roman Catholic who cursed and smoked and had a heart as big as the Gulf of Mexico.

She was not the kind of person you would find serving at the parish breakfast in the church fellowship hall. But she started the shelter movement for homeless people in Atlanta, Georgia.

I remember when she stopped a knife fight at our night shelter by walking calmly between two combatants and saying, “You guys know better than this.” And that was the end of that.

When one of our homeless friends died on the street, she claimed his body, paid for the cremation, and waited for someone- either a friend or a family member- to come.

No one ever came. She drove around for weeks with his ashes in the backseat of her car. Finally, she asked the rector of a downtown Episcopal church if the ashes could be placed in the church’s memorial garden.