Sermons
"Seeds and Weeds"Pastor Russell Norris |
My wife and I have a little garden out behind the house - mostly tomatoes and herbs, a few blueberries - sometimes a few flowers. And every spring I go out there with my garden tools, and I dig, and I hoe, and I rake, and I put on fertilizer and mulch. And when I'm done, that little plot of ground looks pretty impressive - at least, it does to me! And then we put in the tomatoes, the peppers, the flowers.
Well, here it is July, and the other day when we got back from vacation, I went around the back of the house to check on the garden, and what do you know! I'm sure I remember planting tomatoes and basil and sage and oregano. But it's kind of hard to see them in all those weeds! I didn't plant any weeds! But it was pretty clear that without a lot of work, the things we did plant were going to get crowded out by the things we didn't plant.
Another example: We had a flower bed in front of the house, and Dixie decided she wanted to take out the flowers and put in grass. So I dug up the flowers and the weeds and everything else that was growing in there, raked and leveled the soil, put on manure and lots and lots of grass seed. Then we watered the heck out of it and waited. Here it is July and the grass is up. But so are the weeds. And the grass is so fragile and new that you can't pull up those darn weeds. It would pull up the grass too! Nor can I put on weed and feed to kill the weeds, because it would kill the grass. And it's too short to cut! All I can do is wait.
Now Jesus doesn't talk about tomatoes and he doesn't talk about grass, but he does talk about seeds and weeds.
"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 slaves said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' He answered, 'No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest...'"
Now why is Jesus giving us a lesson in first century farming? Well, of course, he's not. This is not a lecture on primitive agriculture. It's a parable - a story meant to teach us something. What Jesus is really talking about is the problem of evil - something that our generation has come to know through bitter experience.
Seven years ago, my wife Dixie looked out her office window in Brooklyn where she worked, just in time to see the second plane fly into the World Trade Center. And life changed for all of us. How could it happen? Who could have done this? The 9/11 hijackers were able to succeed in their plan because they looked like everyone else - they blended in - there was nothing unusual about them.
Four years later, the target was the London subway. Four young men who looked just like everyone else - four young men on their way to work, or maybe to school, carrying their backpacks, no different from thousands of other men and women rushing to catch the train or the bus. But that morning was different. And the backpacks were filled not with lunches or books, but with high explosives. And in an instant, without warning, hundreds of lives were changed forever.
The most terrifying part of it is figuring out who the enemy is. When Dixie and I flew to Chicago last week, Homeland Security treated us all like potential terrorists. We had to take off our shoes, throw away our toothpaste, pass through a metal detector. Why? Because the enemy looks just like everyone else! As old Pogo Possum used to say in the funny papers, "We have met the enemy and he is us!"
These are scary times we live in. In the words of Thomas Paine, who lived not far from our old house in New York, "These are the times that try men's souls." William Butler Yeats, writing after the carnage of World War I, and the deaths of 37 million people, put it this way in his poem The Second Coming (1921):
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
He could be describing the times in which we live. And all of this stands as background when we read the lessons this morning, and try to learn from them, and find strength in them, and live by the hope they offer.
The prophet Isaiah, for instance, writing to a people in exile, a people in despair, offered just such a word of hope - hope in troubled times:
Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel,and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts:I am the first and I am the last;besides me there is no god....
Do not fear, or be afraid;have I not told you from of old and declared it?Is there any god besides me?
You are my witnesses!
There is no other rock; I know not one.
St. Paul offers a word of hope in his letter to the Romans: "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. The whole creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.... For in hope we were saved. ..... but if we hope for what we do not yet see, we wait for it with patience."
And in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus gives us this parable, what we used to call the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. But just call it the parable of the seeds and the weeds. The servants wonder where the weeds came from, and they ask permission from their master, the sower of the seed, to go out and pull up all those weeds. But the master says, "No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest....."
I find a lot of comfort and hope in these verses. In the world we live in there's so much confusion about right and wrong - good and evil - wheat and weeds. All around us we see these enormous polarities between Christians and Muslims, Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Muslims. We see divisions between fundamentalists and moderates in all the religions, those who read into the Bible what suits their convictions, and those who believe that reason and tolerance can help us live together in peace.
These are not good times for hope, for reason, or for patience to allow the wheat and the weeds to grow together side by side. These are not the best of times for understanding St. Paul and his promise that the whole creation will be redeemed and renewed. And so we flail and flounder about and don't know where to turn.
All around us we hear voices clamoring for the evil to be punished, to be destroyed. Root them out! Track them down! Make them pay! We forget that during World War II the same kind of confusion and anger and fear caused thousands of Japanese Americans, loyal Americans, to be interned in concentration camps. In the end we found how difficult it is to separate the weeds and the wheat.
These daily reports of bombings and kidnappings and terrorism undermine our hope. They lead us to think that we can be saved by our own cleverness, by spying on our enemies, having the smartest weapons, living in constant fear and suspicion of strangers. Oh yes. The enemy has indeed sown the seeds of fear in our hearts - no matter who we think the enemy is!
And the cleverest, the most sinister ploy of that enemy is to make us forget that we are not in this on our own, that we belong God - to the God who created us, the God who redeemed us, the God who loves us and has compassion on us. Human efforts will not save us. Trust in God, in God's promise, is what saves us.
We can draw hope from the lessons this morning. Listen again to the words of Isaiah: "Do not fear; do not be afraid! Have I not told you from of old and declared it? Is there any other God but me? Is there any other source of hope or security but me? I know not any!"
You see, it's not our job to pull up the weeds, or take vengeance on the enemy. Thinking we can distinguish between the wheat and the weeds - between the good guys and the bad guys - leads to exactly what Jesus warns us against: "In gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them."
Be patient, says Matthew, "The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers." And lest we think that sounds naïve, remember: the Gospels were written in a time of doubt, a time of war, of political upheaval, and of persecution - in other words, in a time very much like our own.
All three lessons this morning are words of hope - hope in the face of fear - hope in the face of evil - hope in the face of the unknown. The truth is that God, the Creator, cares for all that he has created ... even the good earth and the world of nature. It's all God's. And we are God's. And God will not abandon us.
The reality is that life is not black and white, but shades of gray. We don't know all the answers, and part of what it means to be human is learning to live with that ambiguity. We are going to continue to live side by side with those who are different -those who don't believe in God, or who don't believe in God the way we do. We're going to have to share this good earth with believers and non-believers alike, with those who do good and those who do evil.
God knows all this, and God says, "Trust me! I won't abandon you. I won't leave you without hope."
I draw hope from all those little deeds of kindness and compassion, all those little acts of love that remind us we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same heavenly Father - no matter how different we may be. A year ago there was a story in the paper about a Jewish family in New York who lit their Hanukkah candles and put them in the window. They happened to be the only Jews on the street. That night their house was vandalized, and someone threw a brick through the window. It's an old story, one we've probably heard before - a typical story of fear and suspicion and prejudice. Another attempt to separate the weeds and the wheat.
It's what happened the next night that was remarkable. In almost every house on that block, all up and down the street, there were Hanukkah candles in the windows. Nobody else was Jewish, but they were all neighbors, and they all stood in solidarity with the family that had been singled out by the vandals. A sign of hope. A promise of the kingdom, if you will.
Paul reminds us that our fears and suspicions and prejudices do not have the last word. God will have the last word. The world we live in may be full of pain, but it is the pain of new birth, the labor pains of a new world about to be revealed. The creation itself waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. "Behold," says God in Isaiah, "I am doing something new!" That's the promise. And that promise is what gives us hope.
And so we pray, and so we sing, and so we live in the promise of the prophet Isaiah: "Do not fear, do not be afraid." God is our refuge and strength, our hope and our redeemer. Amen.