Another Seedy Story

(Scriptures:  Genesis 28:10-19a;  Romans  8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43)

In this week’s Gospel reading, Jesus once again tells a parable about seeds.  Last week’s parable was about seed that landed in four different type soils – a beaten-down path, rocky ground, weedy ground, and prepared soil.  This week’s parable is about one piece of soil and two types of seed – wanted and unwanted, wheat and weeds. 

We’re told that a landowner planted good seed, but that along with the good seed came up weeds. This wasn’t discovered until the wheat started forming heads.  The servants asked the landowner where the weeds came from, and the landowner said, “An enemy has done this.”  The landowner’s servants asked if the landowner wanted them to pull up the weeds.  The landowner’s response is perhaps unexpected:  no, in uprooting the weeds, you’ll hurt the wheat.  Let them both grow together until the harvest, and then at the harvest you can yank the weeds first, and then harvest the wheat.

This parable is not primarily about wheat – this is not an episode of “You Bet Your Garden” from NPR - but about people.  Again, as in last week’s parable, along with the parable Jesus provides an interpretation….the good seed represents the good people, and the bad seed represents the bad people.  Rather than having the bad people struck down, God allows them both to live, side by side, until the last day, when they will be separated. 

This parable and interpretation seem fairly cut and dried….but Jesus’ parables always mean more than may appear on the surface.  For one thing, why did it take as long as it did for the servants to notice the weeds, and why didn’t the landowner want them pulled right away?  One reason might be that the wheat and weeds looked similar.  In fact, it’s thought that the weeds sown by the enemy were darnel, also called ryegrass, a kind of grass in Europe and Asia that looks a lot like wheat until it’s fully mature.  The problem is that the heads of darnel grain are poisonous, so you don’t want it mixed in with the harvested wheat…..and in fact, apparently situations like the parable happened often enough that Rome actually had a law against sowing darnel in the field of an enemy.  So, anyway, had the weeds been something that looked nothing like wheat, such as dandelions or poison ivy, perhaps the landowner would have wanted them pulled right away.  As it was, there was no reliable way the laborers could have separated wheat from darnel until both were fully mature.   It’s a galling situation – after all, the weeds are taking up ground and soaking up nutrients that were intended for the wheat.  But for the landowner, it was more important to preserve the wheat than it was to get rid of the weeds.

We know that, in our lives and even in the church – and I’m talking about the worldwide church, “Big C” church – there are people who are good and those who are not so good.  Our human impulse is to want to get rid of the bad people. The problem is, since we can’t know everything about other people and can’t see into the future, in this life there’s no way to sort out the good people from bad people.  People with bad intentions can camouflage themselves well enough to pass as good, and sometimes people’s good intentions aren’t easy to tease out.  Further, like St Paul, who went from persecuting the gospel to spreading the gospel or St Francis who started out life wealthy and carefree, and went on to live a life of poverty, a life dedicated wholly to God and others, by the grace of God, peoples’ lives can change, so that we can’t predict how peoples’ lives will end up based on where they begin.  We see this clearly in our Old Testament readings from last week and this week, in which Jacob is anything but a model of integrity….and yet is blessed by visitations from God at various points in his life, as in this week’s reading, while, when on the run from his brother Esau, he receives a divine vision, and afterward says, “This is none other than the gate of heaven and the house of God.”

 Still further, sometimes people with good intentions can do incredible evil.  This happened during the Crusades, when Christians slaughtered non-Christians, and during the Inquisition and other times when Catholics and Protestants tortured and killed one another, all in the name of a loving Christ.  A more recent example is prohibition, when well-intentioned attempts to outlaw alcohol consumption instead succeeded only in driving it underground, taking it out of the hands of law-abiding citizens and putting it into the hands of the Mafia.    Or, in Germany in the 1940’s, when Hitler’s attempt to create the perfect Aryan society led to his killing some six million Jews, along with gypsies, homosexuals, and others deemed by him to be undesirables.  Or, much more recently, with our country’s “War on Terror” mostly succeeding, not in killing all the terrorists, but in driving formerly harmless people to despair and, finally, to terrorism – that is to say, our “war on terror” has created terrorists faster than it’s destroyed terrorists.  Our human impulse is to want to kill or banish all the “bad” people, but such attempts always, pretty much without exception, are more effective in harming the innocent than in punishing the guilty.  Inevitably, such attempts become driven by self-righteousness, as we can usually see the speck in other peoples’ eye more clearly than we can see the beam in our own.  Inevitably, we forget that in fact the garden is God’s garden, not our own, and it’s not for us to say what does or does not grow there. That decision is above our pay grade – it’s in God’s hands.

So if we’re not called to purge the unrighteous from our midst, what are we called to do?  Basically, we’re called to endure, to concentrate on bringing forth good fruit rather than focusing on the bad fruit of others.  Instead of trying to pull out those in our midst that we see as weeds, we’re called merely to outlast them.  This parable also gives us confidence that, indeed, we can outlast the weeds; that the weeds can threaten us but in the end by God’s grace will not destroy us.

One of the challenges of the parable is that it seems to portray humans as being all bad or all good, weeds or wheat.  But that seems a bit simplistic. From our own experience, our lives are like fields that contain both wheat and weeds – and often the roots of the weeds are tangled up in the roots of the wheat.  By God’s grace, we have faith that, over time, the wheat will prosper and the weeds will diminish – but that process won’t be finished this side of heaven.  We are each of us a mixed bag – as Martin Luther put it, simultaneously justified and sinner – and our churches are likewise mixed companies of saints and sinners.  As Christian and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the line between good and evil passes not between states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but right through every human heart.  In all of our hearts, there are seeds of evil and seeds of good. Which seeds will we water? 

And which seeds will we plant?  Will we ally ourselves with the landowner, planting good seed, or with the landowner’s enemy, sowing seeds of trouble.  Through our actions, good and evil, we plant seeds of good and evil, not only in our own lives, but in the lives of others and in society.  Which is to say, our actions have consequences.  Certainly, God can intervene to deliver us from the worst consequences of our sins – but nonetheless, consequences remain.  Our words can be life-giving or death-dealing.  Our lives are connected, so that the consequences of our actions can reverberate indefinitely in our own lives and in the lives of others.   We may never have a chance to see the full outcome of our simple, random acts of kindness – or of our random acts of unkindness.  What seeds will we plant?  What seeds will we water?  What seeds will we harvest?

These questions apply, not only on a personal level, but on a societal level.  We’ve heard of thousands of children from Latin American, many from El Salvador, Guatamala and especially from Honduras, traveling alone, facing all manner of obstacles, to get to the US border.  These children are fleeing horrific poverty and violence in their home countries – and our nation’s Latin American policies in decades past have unfortunately had a role in creating these situations.  For example, the School of the Americas, located in Ft. Benning, Georgia, created during the Cold War to combat the spread of communism, since the 1960’s has trained Latin American military leaders implicated in numerous political killings, such as the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero,  and human rights abuses over a period of decades – at the School of the Americas, torture techniques were on the syllabus as part of the curriculum – and some of these military leaders, such as former Panamanian president Manuel Noriega and the current Guatamalan president Otto Perez Molina, went on to become dictators of their respective countries.  More recently, US policies in connection with the so-called War on Drugs have empowered thugs and murderers who have made these three countries nearly ungovernable.  And so to some extent the child refugees we see at our borders today are the fruit of the seeds sown by our country in decades past to the present.  What will we do in response?  We are already responding, through our long connection to the Bethany Children’s Home, which is providing short-term care for a number of refugee children in the process of being reunited with family.  There are copies of an article about Bethany’s work, and another article about the UCC’s response to these refugee children.   I hope you’ll pick up a copy, and respond as you feel led.

Jesus said, “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”  May we at Emanuel Church be among those who will shine in God’s kingdom, and may we plant seeds of good in the lives of all we meet.  Amen.