Sympathy for Weeds

6 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 11, July 20, 2014

Genesis 28:10-19a,  Psalm 139: 1-11, 22-23

Romans 8:12-25 Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Lectionary Link

  Allow me to introduce myself, I'm a plant of stealth and distaste.  I was there when Adam and Eve were evicted from the perfect place.  Pleased to meet me you, hope you guessed my name. Being a pest is the nature of my game.

  With apologies to the Rolling Stones, you've guess my name.  My name is Weeds, and we are many.

  Today, we have read the well-known parable of the weeds and the wheat, or in good ol' proper English, The Parable of the Tares.  Now doesn't "Tares" sound more romantic than "Weeds?"

  Following the reporting style of the Gospel, we first have the parable of Jesus and then it is followed by an interpretation, given authority by being associated with the teacher.  One could see this as an example of teaching and learning.  A parable is told with many meaning possibilities and the first example of interpretation is given.  This is a pattern of teaching and learning. The wisdom teacher provided a story and then requires the students and disciples to project their meanings upon the allegory because we learn by continuing to seek to find meaning from the words of the people whom we respect to model excellence.

  And so we continue in this tradition of seeking meaning  in our efforts today.  Now some churches would like for you to believe that all of the meanings of the Bible are precisely fixed and final and so everyone should have the same meaning as prescribed by the religious authority of choice.

  The Bible is inspired because it encourages us by written example of practitioners of faith to work continually to come to applied meanings in our lives as individuals and as a gathered community.

  This parable of the weeds and wheat provides for us the occasion to come into many different meanings to give us insights about having faithful wisdom in the art of living today.

  One of the striking things about this parable is that it evokes the truth of how the great freedom of life means that the process of life is always a mixture of the values of human experience.

  Another striking thing about this parable is that like many parables it is perhaps wrongly labeled by many Bible scholars.  A label or title can give a pointing sign to get the wrong or incomplete message.  This parable is called the parable of the Weeds or Tares and the Wheat.  I think that it would better be called the Parable of the Patient God.

  We as people are mostly not patient for what we think is effective and immediate fix of things particularly if we have wealth and power. We often want quick resolution by intervention because something can seem so right and wrong in a precisely either/or type of way.  The majority of humanity the majority of time wants all of the issues of life served up to us in either/or answers for our convenience.

  If we really knew who all of the bad guys and the good guys were in Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan or Pakistan or anywhere, then we could just smart bomb the bad guys out of the way.  In Hiroshima, we did find the quick and catastrophic way to end the war, but not only weeds but lots of "wheat" was destroyed.  The strategic decision was made to sacrifice an entire field to stop the spread of war, we thought.  On the personal level one can know the terror of living with a person of rage who wants to correct someone or something with a sweeping fit of anger because the power of rage gives one the false sense of knowing precisely what is right.  There can be the false sense that an angry intervention can take out evil and establish good in one fell swoop.

  And then it is gotcha!  Because the anger that we used to correct the evil that we thought was so obvious ends up being as bad as what we thought we were trying to correct.

  The irony of Bible readers is that some many people today are possessed with apocalyptic fatalism because they believe the Bible to be a book which inspires such apocalyptic fatalism.  There is fatal wish that God would get really tired of all of the really, really, bad stuff in this world and just accomplish a final retribution where there would be a final sorting out and solving of the issues of what is good and bad in this world.

  There is always enough poverty and inequality and brutal oppression of people in our world that we would hope that God would act upon the world situation with the same clarity of what's right and wrong that we think we have.

  As it turns out God is a patient God.  And indeed the parable hints that there will be a sorting out and a resolution.  But the sorting out and the resolution is but a subsequent event of interpretation and re-interpretation of the conditions of God's garden of wheat and weeds.

   The world, each nation, each community and each one of us are made up of weeds and wheat.  In short, because of the truth of the process of freedom in this world we and life itself is a mixture of apparent blessing and curse.

  We should have great sympathy for weeds today.  Weeds really get a bad rap.  Weeds stand for plant life that rises up against God's perfect Garden of Eden from which Adam and Eve were evicted.  In the biblical story the weeds entered the picture as the result of the curse of the sin of the Fall.  When Adam and Eve were evicted from the garden they had to deal with weeds.  One can see in this story the frustration of every farmer: "Why doesn't Nature fully cooperate with my efforts to grow crops?  These pesty weeds hinder success and just require more work."  The origin story of weeds is the attempt of ancient farmers to give meaning to their hard work.

  People who study weeds today have a different view; if it weren't for weeds the majority of the soil of the earth would be eroded by wind and water.  When forests are cut down, weeds and brambles set in to keep the soil in place.  So the weeds that we want to kill out in one place are of great value in another.

  I think that the wisdom of this parable can also be about the wisdom of both a mythical and an actual understanding of the last days.  The last day is the day when the wheat and the weed are sorted out.  For literal apocalyptic interpreters one could see this as some return to conditions of a heavenly life of where only goodness and innocence can be known, a state of robotic goodness.  We can become so frustrated with the contrast caused by knowing good and evil that we would wish away the possibility of life being one without any judgments or comparison.  I don't think anything is solved by simply removing the very conditions for judgment and comparison.  This is not real to life as we know it.

  What is real is the fact that  "now" is always the last day, or more correctly, it is always the latest days.  And in the last and latest day, we have the responsibility to sort out the weeds and the wheat growing in our gardens of life.

  We are never absolved from the task of making judgments and comparisons.  And we most often do so poorly because of the nature of the process of life and because of our limited views.  Some thing that once was considered to be a worthless weed can become a composted matter for a better and redemptive outcome.  Life is ironic; every intended and unintended event in life can have intended and unintended good and bad consequences.

  The poor hard working family who suffers can end up making life easier for their children who turn out to be wasteful and unproductive because their suffering parent did not want them to suffer in the same way.  That is the irony of the parable of weed and wheat; every intended and unintended event can have intended and unintended good and bad consequences.

  What is the Gospel insight for us today?  We need to have the patience of God.  The wrath and rage of men and women cannot work the righteousness of God.  And having that patience is very difficult in the face of some great ills in our world where we feel helpless.  Another insight for us today is that we live in the last day or the latest day and we cannot avoid but be interpreters of the now and the past.  We are not infallible interpreters of life and yet we cannot avoid designating things in our life and world as weeds or wheat.  We ask for the wisdom of love and justice in interpreting what is weeds or wheat in our world and we know that receiving the patience of God does not mean being passively accepting of things that seem to violate justice and love..  We get out our hoes and weed our patches and we fertilize the good that we see to promote the growth of that which we regard to be just, loving, kind, creative, artistic, humane and joyful.

  And we thank God for the last day, our latest day in the garden of God's world.  Amen.