ARE YOU SURE YOU KNOW THE WEEDS?

(Preached on Sunday, July 17, 2005)

Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at the harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.                     -Matthew 13:30

 

Wheat and weeds, good and bad, lovable and unlovable — are we really sure we know the weeds?

On December 20, 1982, Arthur Rubenstein died in Geneva at age 95. A musical prodigy, he played the piano at age three, enrolled in the Warsaw Conservatory at age eight, and made his European debut in Berlin at age thirteen.  During World War I, he used his fluency in eight languages to work as a military interpreter in London.  After the war, he achieved international acclaim for masterfully interpreting such great composers as Beethoven, Mozart, Ravel, and Chopin.

Rubenstein moved to the U.S. during World War II, becoming a citizen in 1946.  He was awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom in 1976.  A charming raconteur who brought a showman’s presence to normally staid concert halls, he once expressed his philosophy of life this way: “I have found if you love life, life will love you back.”

Rubenstein was remembered by his daughter, Eva, as “a cruel father.”

Wheat and weeds, good and bad, lovable and unlovable — are we really sure we know the weeds?

 

Again we are in the fields with Jesus and like last week, Jesus is clearly not handing out farming techniques.

That is especially clear since most farmers would scoff at his suggestion to let the wheat and weeds grow together until the harvest before separating them.

While they would acknowledge the danger in weeding the field to be the possibility of pulling up good wheat with weed, they would also point out that weeds are always heartier and grow wilder than the wheat and will have a tendency to take over the field, crowding out the wheat.

So, if you let them grow to maturity together you will undoubtedly end up with a diminished wheat harvest.

Better to risk losing a few good plants early on in the process of getting rid of the troublesome weeds, so that the rest of the wheat can grow more robust and produce more grain, than lose many more good plants to choking out by the weeds and have the overall harvest be smaller.

 

But this doesn’t trouble Jesus.

For parables are not meant to pat us on the back, but to give a kick in the pants.

They are not intended to comfort us, but to challenge us and change us.

Parables speak out against the status quo.

Parables are demonstrators waving signs of protest, speaking out against our ways of thinking, our traditional ways of experiencing and obeying God, our spiritual institution.

This parable is challenging our sense of our responsibility and our duty as servants of God.

If God’s realm is like a field where both wheat and weeds are growing together, we want to identify with both the wheat and the servants.

We view ourselves as the good wheat growing toward providing God a bountiful harvest.

Of course we aren’t the weeds!

But then, we also want to identify with the servants who see it as their responsibility to rush into the field and yank out anything that looks to them like a weed.

 

We should be careful, though, about identifying with the servants, for they made several understandable errors in discernment.

First, they assumed that their goal, a fine field of pure wheat, was within their grasp.

Second, they supposed that the harvest depended on their efforts and strength — that the wheat couldn’t grow without their assistance.

Third, and most serious, they questioned the householder’s goodness and purpose.

It says in verse 27 that they went tot he owner and said, “Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field?  How then has it weeds?”

In essence, they were demanding that the householder give an account of himself, or risk being blamed for the weeds!

The servants no doubt had good intentions, but they wanted the owner’s approval to go ahead and do as they saw fit, which meant immediate action of weeding and purifying the field.

 

It isn’t so different in the church.

Very often people set goals for their local community, or bring an agenda to denominational meetings, assuming that they know what strategy God has in mind for their situation.

It is apparently easy to forget the words of Isaiah 55:9-10, which reads: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

How frequently we act as though the harvest depends on our manipulation of people and situations.

We proceed as though we were not living by grace, as though the Holy Spirit has little to do in the circumstances before us.

Yes, we often think of the field as ours.

We adopt an “us against them” mentality, speaking of my church or my class rather than God’s.

We tend to be suspicious of that church and those people who are seen as a threat to the safety of the acres entrusted to us.

They’re weeds, all of them.

We’d be better off without them.

This is the way of the servants int he parable, and we are guilty of thinking the same way.

 

But the parable shows us something else.

It shows us the field as God sees it, as well as from our limited perspective.

It shows us that God is infinitely and eternally more patient than we limited human creatures will ever be.

It shows us that God is concerned with ultimate outcomes, not short term appearances.

It shows us that God also knows that ultimately evil will not triumph and will be reckoned with, but at the proper time, in the proper way, by God’s actions.

 

This is not our way.

This is not the way that makes sense to us.

It makes more sense to us to purge and purify, to separate evil and its influences from those trying to live Godly lives.

But it is obviously not the way God works.

For this picture of wheat and weeds growing together is a good picture of life, as we know and live it.

This is life in our homes, our families, our jobs, our communities, and our churches.

This is a picture of our wives, our husbands, our children and our pastor’s.

 

The truth is, we never know where and through whom God is going to appear and be at work.

The Hebrew story of Jacob, encountering the very stairway to heaven on his way to exile with his mother’s brother provides us with a refrain for our lives, a mantra we should repeat over and over again: “Surely God is in this place — and I did not know it!”

If we human beings were weeding the field, just look at who we would have pulled out and trashed: drunken, naked Noah; Abraham with his squabbling family; old, conniving Sarah; murderer Moses; lustful David; bigoted Paul.

A rogue’s gallery.

Were God not the one making the judgment, would they have made the cut to become the exemplars of faith that they became?

Are we really sure we know the weeds?

 

For centuries it was assumed that slavery was acceptable to God, that slaves were less than human, closer to weeds than wheat, that God did not work through them.

Nowhere in the Bible is there a prohibition against slavery.

There are only guidelines for masters to treat their slaves with kindness, fairness and justice and for slaves to respect their masters and do their work.

But eventually people came to see that God did not view slavery as acceptable and God did not view any people as less than human and judge them to be weeds.

Eventually people came to see that love of God and love of neighbor and newness of life and freedom in Christ, did not sit well with the practice of slavery.

What we once thought were weeds, we now know to be part of God’s wheat field.

 

For centuries men could not imagine God working through or speaking through women.

At least, not to men.

Women were considered property to be bought and sold or traded; they were considered childlike, in need of guidance and protection and direction.

They were considered less than men, and there were even scripture passages that seemed to support this view.

But over the years we have come to see that the overwhelming witness of the Bible is to the fact that God clearly works through women; such as Sarah and Rebekah, Miriam, Rahab, Deborah, Ruth, and Mary.

Where would the harvest of God be without these women?

Are we so sure we know the weeds?

 

Hugh Coulter and Robert Wood met on May 14, 1962.

By October they realized their relationship was what each of them had been seeking for more than a decade: one of love, support, acceptance and common interests.

Robert was 39 and Hugh was 41.

They were both veterans for World War II and had both grown up in Christian homes.

Hugh was an artist, oil on canvas, and Robert was an ordained UCC clergyman.