Wheat or Weed?

Readings: Genesis 28:10-19a, Psalm 139:1-12, 23-2, Romans 8:12-25, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Preached at First Presbyterian Church, Baldwin, NY on July 20 2014

A printable PDF file can be found here

Light - Darkness
Hope - Despair
Faith - Unbelief
Good - Evil
God - Devil
Beauty - Ugliness
Commitment - Apathy
Truth - Lies

All these things, mixed together, are forces that shape our world, shape our beliefs and shape our lives.  Wouldn't it be great if we could throw out all the negatives and only have the positives?

There were those who, when Jesus came along and people started saying, 'This is it, He's the Messiah, God with us', thought that's exactly what Jesus would do - get rid of the bad and make the world a place filled only with the good things and the good people with good intentions.

In particular they identified the bad and evil side of life with the occupying, godless, Gentile, Romans who controlled the Jewish homelands.  Surely God knew what sort of people they were and surely it was time they got what was coming to them. Jesus would raise up a mighty army of the righteous to drive them out of the land and restore to the throne a King like David, ruler of Israel and champion of the World; Jesus, the Mighty warrior King, who took no prisoners and wiped the scum off the face of the earth.

Now don't think that this idea of Jesus being some great political King of all Creation is confined to a few misguided individuals a couple thousand years ago in Jerusalem.  Throughout the churches history there have been numerous groups, even nations, who saw the Kingdom of God in terms of earthly domination and political power.

Around 312 AD Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the State religion of the empire and intended to force it on the whole world.  With Jesus on His side how could he lose? I dare say a policy of 'Be baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit or I'll beat your brains out’ may create nominal church members, but it doesn't make for genuine disciples! 'Conquer the world for Christ and Constantine' proved a rousing battle cry - but ultimately the Roman Empire crumbled in the dust.

In the Middle Ages the Crusaders waged war against the infidels in an attempt to wipe the Christ-Killers and Christ-Cursers from the planet and reclaim the Holy Land for God's holy ones. Instead their empires collapsed and the Holy Lands remain claimed by opposing religious and political groups as their rightful home.

When any nation sets itself up as the being the one most likely to usher in the reign of God, you can be sure of one thing. Trouble. Both in the world and in the nation. The Kingdom of God is not meant to be some great nationalistic political force that wipes all out all other kingdoms and eradicates all the negatives by the irresistible force of the positives.

There have been those, who in the belief that most of the world is so hopelessly tainted by evil that it is beyond being redeemed, have taken a different stand.  They have interpreted the command to "Be in the world but not of the world" by seeking to withdraw from the world altogether.

They were around in Judaism at the time of Jesus earthly ministry.  The ‘Essennes’ were a Jewish Sect who led a monastic existence out in the desert.  In an attempt to guard their souls from corruption they simply tried to get away from everything and start over again, regulating their lives by strict rules.

The Christian Church has embraced this idea throughout its history.  Groups of folk have renounced all earthly pleasures, and withdrawn from the world to pray and study the teachings of Christianity, usually by following the rule of a particular teacher or Reformer. Sometimes their withdrawal from the world has produced great treasures for the world in terms of creativity and spirituality.  Some times such communities have indeed been an oasis of holiness within a corrupt church and society. Yet not always.

Others found that monasticism was not enough of a withdrawal and sought to live a solitary life as hermits or lone pilgrims. But they discovered an uncomfortable truth, a truth that many also discovered in their ordered existence in monastic communities. Withdrawal from the world was no escape!

Light and darkness, hope and despair, faith and unbelief, commitment and apathy, truth and lies; they weren't just aspects of life out there in the wicked world; they were forces that were shaping their own personal worlds, their own internal kingdoms.  The prayer "Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven” became 'Thy Kingdom come in my heart as in the heart of Christ'.

This Kingdom business was the problem. Wasn't the coming Kingdom supposed to solve everything?  If a person invited Jesus into their hearts wouldn't that mean no more problems, no more struggles, dead to the world, alive to Christ, grace would drive out the devil and godliness would be victorious?

Matthew's gospel talks a lot about the Kingdom. At times Matthew is gloriously ambiguous. Yes, the Kingdom had come in Jesus, but no, it wasn't here yet.  Yes, you are citizens of the Kingdom, but no, you won't always live that way.  Many Christians feel that tension in their spiritual lives! St Paul writes of how he longs to do the right, but often seemed to do the wrong thing.

Let's remind ourselves of the parable Jesus told us about the Kingdom in today's reading.

Matthew Chapter 13 beginning at verse 24 "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well."

The Servants want to cut the whole thing down, the wheat and the weeds, but Jesus tells them, "Let both of them grow together until the harvest". The harvest, He later explains to the disciples “is the end of the age", a time when collected out of the Kingdom will be "all causes of sin and all evildoers” leaving "the righteous to shine like the sun".

To the Kingdom seekers who wanted Jesus to blow away the opposition and remove from their own lives every taint of darkness, this was not a good news parable.  There would be no resounding once and for all victory. There would be no sudden overthrow of the forces of evil. There would continue to be, as Jesus elsewhere says, ‘Wars and rumors of wars’, they would ‘always have the poor with them’; the final harvest would come, but not yet.

The world today continues to have places of wonder and alleys of cruelty. The families we are born into can bring us great joy, but also great pain.  Our churches can be one moment inspiring and courageous and the next moment petty and faithless.  In our own lives we have moments of inspirational faith and moments of crashing failure. Good mixes in with bad.

Are we then lost forever in a hopelessly compromised world? Not at all. We are not told to be passive in the face of evil.  It is not a divine command that we ignore injustice in the world, or violence in society or evil in the church. The parable is a realistic reminder that those who seek to be disciples of Jesus Christ do not have the ability to get rid of all the weeds and that sometimes trying to do so causes more harm than good.

Are any of you like me in the sense of being botanically challenged? My late mum back in Great Britain had a wonderful garden. However, growing up, she never encouraged me to help with the weeding.  Sometimes what looked like a weed to me turned out to be some prize bloom.  I’d pull it out and throw it on the fire. What I thought was a flower turned out to be the weed so I left it there. You can imagine my mum’s anguished cry as she surveyed her patch of prize weeds blowing in the breeze - “What have you done to my garden!”

In a similar way we are incredibly undiscerning when it comes to the things of God’s Garden in the world.  If judgment were left up to us, then a lot of mistakes would be made. I’m glad that at the final harvest it is a righteous, loving, holy God who calls the shots.

If we try and elude the wicked world by withdrawing into our own little shells or even going our own solitary way, we will find that the good and the bad still resonate within us. We can not escape them.  But we can decide whether we are going to nurture the wheat or feed the weeds.

To feed the weeds we just have to go our own way and not take the time to care. To nurture the wheat is to concentrate on those things that build us up in our faith. 

Things like worship and being faithful members of our church communities and prayer and service and getting to know God’s Word. Things like looking after each other and helping those less fortunate than ourselves.

As to saving the world by systematically eradicating every stronghold of darkness, .... forget it. That’s not what the Kingdom of God is about. There is going to be wheat and there are going to be weeds and we are not always going to even know the difference between them.

150 years ago there were those who predicted that by the 21st Century Christianity would have taken the world, poverty would be eradicated, war at an end and Christ enthroned as King of the nations. The daily news never fails to remind us that the wheat and the weeds are still growing together.

All is not lost.  If we can concentrate on doing the good we know, then by the grace of God, the Spirit of God will nurture our lives and we will see good things springing up in all sorts of unexpected places. That’s how it seemed to work for the first disciples. So that’s how it’s meant to work for us. In Christ’s name let us seek to make it so.

The Reverend Adrian J. Pratt B.D.