July 22, 2007 

Rev. Dr.  Jon Smoot

Romans 8: 12-25 and Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43.

 

This parable of the weeds among the wheat is, at first blush, a confusing story, especially when you place the interpretation in the later verses alongside of the parable itself in the earlier verses. Is this parable a parable of grace and patience? Or a parable of judgment? The answer is probably, “yes.” In any case, one commentator notes that maybe Jesus should stick with carpentry instead of agricultural metaphors. Allowing weeds to grow up among the wheat seems headed for an agronomical and economic disaster. That’s no way to run a farm, let alone the way to run a kingdom. It makes no sense to embrace Jesus’ parable in which he asserts that the good wheat of the kingdom of God is to dwell alongside of the bad seed. After all, isn’t that a huge reason we go to church – to be with other good people like ourselves?

 

But, churches are after all, a human institution – and just like any other human community, they are a mixed bag. The world itself can be a shimmering place of wonder, but it has alleys of cruelty, too. Families can be places of great pain and of great joy. Churches can be incredibly courageous one moment, and petty and faithless the next. In everything in human life, good mixes in with the bad. No wonder the perennial human cry is, “Where did these weeds come from?” I’ll bet that’s exactly what Pope Benedict 16 was thinking when he says that we Protestants aren’t real churches – we’re just pesky weeds among his one true church’s pure wheat. Where’s Martin Luther when you need him? I still alternate between amusement and annoyance at his seeming ignorant and arrogant comment. Maybe I should write him and say, “Wheat and weeds are us, just like you, pal.”

 

Back to our parable. It is paramount to our understanding this parable to know what weed Jesus is talking about. This weed is a particularly tricky devil. In the Greek it is Zizania – or Bearded Darnel. It is a wheat wannabe and darned if darnel doesn’t just look exactly like young wheat as they come up together. Worse, its seeds are poisonous and its roots wrap around the wheat roots, like a tumor around an artery. Pulled up together and ground into flour, you will get sick as a dog from the bread you bake. No wonder the servants asked the owner, “Do you want us to go and gather them?” That seems the logical and prudent thing to do – go find the weed, the enemy, and cleanse the field. Call it a form of agronomic cleansing, or ethnic cleansing. Go name an enemy and purge the world of them.

 

“Do you want us to go and gather them, master?”  Nope, he says, leave them alone. If you get all zealous for purity in your field and start ripping up what you think are weeds, you are just as likely to be destroying the wheat along with it. That is a stunning statement, and completely counter-intuitive. Is Jesus condoning resignation or passivity in the face of clear evil or harm? No, Jesus is commanding us to leave the ultimate judgment to God, and until then, aggressively and joyfully live the Christian life to which we’ve been collectively called. We are not called to waste all of our passion and time in community on whether others are wheat or weed, for us simple field hands are in no position to know the difference.

 

After all, we’re all a bunch of contradictions. The hands that serve food to the homeless are the same hands that falsify tax information on the 1040. The mouth that praises God on Sunday rips a co-worker to shreds on Monday. Wheat and weeds are us. The church in Matthew’s day and in ours, was and is at risk of ripping itself apart in the name of purity. We don’t like living with the tension of putative good seeds and putative bad seeds co-existing in our fellowships. Throughout human history and the history of the church there have been knock-down drag-out arguments as to who is weed and who is wheat; who is in, who is out, who is friend, and who is foe.

 

Case in point: The endless hours and countless amounts of energy wasted at Presbytery and in Presbytery committee meetings, arguing about moral and sexual purity, whatever that is – with lots of finger-pointing and saber-rattling, instead of working together toward evangelism and for muscular social and political advocacy in the face of hunger, homelessness, economic injustice, and environmental melt-down We have given far more passion and energy to supposed weeding, than we have to planting or watering the field, and the resultant crop is about as healthy as a drought-stricken cornfield on the Eastern Shore. I figure if Jesus had wanted for his workforce homogenized and sanitized and perfect people, he’d had a dickens of a time getting a church going.    

 

There is nothing that I’ve said so far that would cause even one of you to raise an eyebrow. So far, maybe I’ve been preaching to the choir, so you are likely to either be bored at this point, or feeling pretty good about yourselves on the weeds and wheat thing. Bradley Hills is a tolerant, progressive church willing to embrace moral ambiguity and to give people the benefit of the doubt. I don’t see much finger-pointing or weed-pulling going on around here, and I commend you for that.

 

What I fear for you is not the destructiveness of finger-pointing, name-calling, or weed-pulling. What I fear for you and for your future is not understanding that you are even in a field to begin with – more specifically, a mission field that is the DC Metro area. In this parable, as in the entire New Testament record, it is assumed that we already understand that we are in the midst of a mission field, and that we are willing and able, for God’s sake, to get over our internal differences and to get back out into the field to sow the good seed of God’s gospel.

 

Our Visioning Task Force report more than hints at this looming problem and incredible opportunity for Bradley Hills: “From our reading, the advice from our consultant, and our work together, we saw the challenge to be the development of a vision that would transform Bradley Hills from a “Place where…” to a “People who.…” By this we mean being the Body of Christ and understanding that everything we do is a witness to the world. The task before us is the continuing process of aligning the congregation with the vision and mission that God is calling the church to be and do -- the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. Our vision for Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church is that we move evermore completely, with clarity and passion, toward the mission Jesus gave the Church: MAKING DISCIPLES!”

 

Which brings me to say this: This church has got to get over its instinctive and reflexive horror and distaste for the word, let alone the practice of, Evangelism. In the name of and under the guise of tolerance, we have a knee-jerk reaction to the very idea of Evangelism. Folks, tolerance and evangelism are not mutually exclusive terms. I understand the fear, or rather, I understand the fear of evangelism in all of its caricatures – but they are just that, for the most part, unhelpful caricatures – and that makes it easy for us to pooh-pooh the whole deal.  We do so at our own peril, and to our helpfulness to God’s reign.

 

Let me tell you this: I do not believe that this church will live, let alone thrive unless and until we individually and corporately embrace our calling to be first and foremost disciples of Jesus Christ. And in being Christian, embrace the fact that it is our joyful responsibility to tell Bethesda and Montgomery County and the world, in word and deed, what God in Christ has done for us and for them.

 

We’re afraid of evangelism, because we are afraid of being Christian, because we’re afraid to be labeled as intolerant for having a spiritual conviction and identity. I tell you again: tolerance and evangelism are not mutually exclusive terms. In fact, this church could learn to become a model for others in what it means to love God and love neighbor in word and deed, powerfully, respectfully and evangelistically.

 

Let me also tell you that Evangelism is not un-Presbyterian. The very first instruction to churches and sessions in our Book of Order states that we are: “to provide opportunities for evangelism to be learned and practiced in and by the church, that members may be better equipped to articulate their faith, to witness in word and deed to the saving grace of Jesus Christ, and to invite persons into a new life in Christ.”

 

Sure, we in this church can spend the next years of our life focusing on our navel, building a better mousetrap, scraping to pay our bills, rearranging the deck chairs, and dying as a church, as a result – or, we can break free and break into God’s freedom and joy for ourselves and others.

 

How about telling session that’s what you want to learn to do? There are as many ways to undertake evangelism as there are people in this faith community. Find your voice, find your hands, and find life – for yourselves and for this community, this field into which God has placed us. No, we will not pull up weeds – that’s not who we are; but we must learn to plant the seeds that God has placed in our hands, in our everyday lives, for God’s glory. That’s why we’re here.

 

Thanks be to God.