July 20, 2014
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Before we moved into our home in Sausalito, it was a rental property for over 20 years. I divided the garden areas around our house into 5 sections. The two sections that border our house entrance, I quickly weeded, planted, irrigated, and maintained to provide greenery and flowers. The other three sections that are farther from sight and not in my consciousness are left with little maintenance. Weeds were a constant enemy. Even when I had planted some bushes and laid out weed-blocker, the weeds came up year after year.
This year I decided to do something about it. When weeds were allowed to grow and drop their seeds back into the ground year after year, it didn’t matter if I pulled out the visible weeds, the seeds were already in the ground. This year, after I weeded, I laid down clear plastic to finally and hopefully kill the seeds. I’ll wait an entire year for the weed seeds to die before I decide to put anything in these sections.
When I was clearing the sections, I found all kinds of items left from the past. There was broken glass perhaps from the broken windows of a previous house that stood on this land before. I found broken pieces of ceramics from dishes that were once used by people for their meals around a dinner table. I also found an unbroken ashtray perhaps an antique, of someone who once used it and may have given up smoking that can destroy one’s health. Among the weeds and the seeds of weeds, there are also symbols of troubled and maybe broken lives of past days. In my garden, there are weeds.
The Parable
Jesus said the Kingdom of heaven is like someone who sows good seed in a field. The sower sows wheat, wheat to spring up and grow golden in the sun, wheat to harvest and mill and bake bread, wheat to feed hungry men and women, bread to nourish our children. The sower sows good seeds.
Someone else comes along, however, and sows weeds in the very same field. This enemy sows darnel, a recurring weed that grows in the wheat field and would have been well known to farmers then and now. What makes darnel particularly nasty is that it looks almost exactly like wheat. In fact, it looks so similar that the only time it can be distinguished is at the harvest when the ears of the real wheat will become heavy and droop while the ears of the darnel remain upright in the field.
The seeds are sown, they sprout and grow, and after a while the servants notice the difference. “Master, there are weeds in the garden!” they announced. The sower explains this was not the plan at all but some enemy has sown the darnel.
Anxious to please and immediately set things right, the servants suggest the sensible thing: weed the garden. Get rid of the weeds; wage a holy war against evil. For me, it is weed blocking the sections in my garden.
Much evil can be and should be uprooted before it takes over the garden and destroys it, but not all evil can be successfully weeded out. I know that to be true too; I still need to weed small areas where I couldn’t weed block. Get rid of the weeds, we cry, but the evil is always out there; out there in secular society, out there in those other people; out there especially in those people who are not like us.
Get rid of the weeds, the servants say, but the one who sowed the seeds says, “No.” Let the wheat and weeds grow together for the time being. Until they mature you’re likely to mistake one for the other. Even now the roots have grown deep and are intertwined. You start pulling up weeds; you’ll pull up wheat too. Let them grow together until the harvest, then, we’ll burn the weeds for fuel and gather the wheat into the granary.
Mixed Bag Church
The Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds is a story about the church. Matthew’s congregation was asking the same questions that church people like us are still asking today: “How did the world, which God created as a Garden of Eden, get into so many problems today? Why are things so messed up?”
According to Matthew 13:38, the first gospel has a larger world in view. While the church is still in the world and that it is the light to the world, it too contains elements of unfaithfulness. In view of the coming apocalypse, and the fact that everyone will be judged, how should we respond to the presence of unfaithful people both in the church and in the larger world?
Every church is a mixed bag of saints and sinners. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between the two. This parable urges us not to spend too much time attempting to tell the difference. It asserts that it is not up to us to attempt some purification and rectification of the messy mix that is found within any congregation.
And the point that impresses me is that Jesus is the one who addresses this parable to his disciples, the insiders. The implication is that even within the inner circle of the disciples, even among the first called to follow Jesus, his own disciples, there is a mixed bag. It is not only a mixed bag because Judas is one of his disciples, but also because all of the rest of the disciples are sometimes faithful and often quite foolish and cowardly. We know how this story will eventually end—on a cross, with all of his disciples fleeing into the darkness.
The church is the Body of Christ. Even with its flaws, even with its mixed bag of saints and sinners, this is the way the risen Christ takes up room in the world. When we say that Christianity is an incarnational faith, we mean that God refuses to remain vague, indistinct, aloof. God comes close to us. Sometimes too close for comfort and we see that God is messing with our lives. And the primary way God comes close is through the church, the body of Christ.
There are people who think of Jesus as only “spiritual.” Jesus is that vaguely divine something that enables you to pump yourself full of helium and rise above the dirt and dirtiness of life. But Christianity, taking its cues from Jesus himself, is insistently material, corporeal, and incarnational. The Word became flesh; God’s Word has become a person. Jesus is God Almighty daring to get physical: God with a body.
But this gets even deeper into one of the greatest scandals of this rather scandalous faith—Jesus has a body. I didn’t say that Jesus had a body. Everybody knows that Jesus slept, ate, wept, bled and then agonizingly died. What everybody doesn’t yet know is that the tomb was empty of Jesus’ body, because Jesus wasn’t only raised, he returned to the same ragtag group of betrayers and losers who so disappointed him in the first time.
Lots of people are attracted to Jesus, saying they admire him or are attracted to his teaching. What they just can’t stand is Jesus’ body, the church, us!
If we take this as a parable about the kingdom of heaven, and by implication, a parable about the church, we can see it’s challenging meaning for us. If you think being religious means to separate yourself out from the common herd of humanity and join with all of the good working, unbelievably righteous, and morally upright people, you wouldn’t be a Christian. In this faith, being religious means to meet God where God meets us. And we firmly believe that God meets us—not on some high, misty mountaintop, not through long, lonely walks in the forest, but in the church. God meets us here in the church, in this way to a group of saints and sinners, a group of people who absolutely have nothing to hold us together, or nothing to keep us working together, other than the risen Christ.
As the body of Christ, we are God’s answer to what’s wrong with the world. You are the primary means whereby the world will meet Christ. You and me—the body of Christ.
Patience
In view of the way that the faithful and the unfaithful are mixed together this way, what should the church do? The church can trust God to sort out things at the apocalypse: who are the faithful and who are the unfaithful. The church is not responsible for bringing in the Kingdom of heaven or for punishing the wicked—that is God’s job. But we are also not to just passively wait for the apocalypse but to continue to live and witness faithfully in the world. And when there are occasions when the church disciplines unfaithful people within the community, the aim here is not punishment but is to prompt the unfaithful to repent.
Our passage assures the church that God is the final arbiter. If the church makes a mistake, God will make it right in time. God will be the final judge whether the church mistakenly disciplines those who are faithful and when members of the church mistakenly think they are faithful.
It is more satisfying to spot the weeds and go after them! Our impulse is to come up with strategies to purify the church by recruiting saints and purging sinners. One pastor had a plan to announce that their church was closing its doors and no more worship services would be held. Then he would go home and telephone his favorite members to tell them that they are re-opening the church at a different location the next Sunday! That might be an effective weeding strategy but it’s not the church!
According to the parable, our best witness is not our purity as a weed-free church but rather our patience as the mixed bags we are as individual sinners and as communities of faith. The parable of the weeds pushes us to patience as God says to us, in effect. “Wait. Trust me. I will do the sorting.”
We are to love. Sometimes loving one another takes the form of discipline when we restrain ourselves from hurting each other and work hard for reconciliation among very different people inside the church as well as in the community at large. We are tasked with growing together in the fields of our mixed and broken lives, our mixed and broken churches, and our mixed and broken world. We are invited to let go of the burden of always having to be “right” and to grow instead toward each other in God’s field.
Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds is not a message of despair. It encourages us to be patient. It does not accept evil, does not confuse evil with good. The Sower knows the difference between wheat and weeds and has plans for both, but in the meantime, be patient.
Let things grow. Wait for God. Be patient. The parable is not an allegory for us to choose to identify with wheat or weed, one or the other. Life is never that simple; people are never that simple; there is the saint and sinner in all of us. Separating weeds from wheat is never that simple—that’s what the parable is about.
Jesus’ parable is very realistic about the complexity of life. Let both the wheat and the weeds grow together until the harvest. Let them continue to grow side by side until they shall be known by their fruit and then harvested and separated.
Yes, there is evil in the world, evil in us; yes, there are weeds among the wheat, weeds in your gardens and weeds in my garden too. God is not finished, not with the world, not with us. Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart because God is not yet finished with you, with this world. Be assured that God is the Master Gardener who knows exactly how to harvest everything that grows in the fields.
I will still try to weed block and kill off the seeds of the weeds so that I might be able to manage my garden easily. But when I do come across another weed and surely as I am standing here today I will, I will have a second thought that not only did God made the weed but that it’s ultimately in the end, up to God to decide what the wheat is from the weeds.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, just about every time we gather as the church to worship you or to engage in the work you give us to do, we are reminded that we fall far short of being the people you would have us to be. We have differences in our congregation. We have some people who are self-sacrificial in their faith and we have others who don’t seem to be that interested. Some of us do a remarkable job of living out our faith in the world. Others of us really could use improvement in our discipleship.
We know this is nothing new to you. We are your bodily presence here in this world. We are your representatives before an unbelieving humanity. We think we have faith in you that is noteworthy. But your faith in us is even more amazingly! Thanks be to God. Amen.