The Rev. Bernard W. Nord
Pastor
DESERT PALMS PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Sun City West, Arizona
Back On The Farm Again
July 20, 2008
(The Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
24 He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; 25 but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. 27 And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ 28 He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29 But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. 30 Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at 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.’ ”
36 Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” 37 He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; 38 the field is the world, and the good
seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, 39 and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. 40 Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. 41 The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, 42 and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!”
Sometimes I wonder. Is it possible for such a story, a story originally told to people living in the villages of ancient Palestine in the last decades of the first century, to have any meaning at all, any real meaning anyway, for us who live so far away and so differently at the beginning of the twenty first century? Is it possible? Sometimes I wonder.
If for example, you take the principle metaphor that Matthew uses in the story he tells us this morning, there seems to be very little for us to connect to. An ancient Palestinian farmer’s field has been sowed intentionally with good seed but has become infested, overnight, with weeds, weeds that look an awful lot like the wheat, apparently. Very few of us here can relate to that, I bet, back yard gardening and landscaping and weed-control that we have done (or do, or have our landscape guys do) notwithstanding. Even in downstate Illinois, as I think about it, where agri-business is done in rich, black topsoil that is chemically adjusted -- daily, practically -- to keep the weeds and bugs out and the nutrients consumed by the plants in –even there they couldn’t relate to this story very well. Even my parishioners back there who were farmers had never worked with Middle Eastern desert soil. Nor have most Americans, I’m pretty sure. When weeds are taken care of by Chemlawn and Scotts and landscaping guys, how can we relate to the kind of metaphor the story we’ve just heard uses? Sometimes I wonder.
Or, theologically and emotionally, how can we relate? We are so far removed from the circumstances of the people to whom Jesus preached, or for whom Matthew wrote his gospel just a few decades later. For one thing, they, like Matthew, believed the end of time was about to come. We don’t, I think. Matthew and his people believed God was about to usher in the wonderful after-era promised by the rabbi Jesus when all would be flipped flopped, the poor would become rich, the sad and lonely would be filled with joy, human tragedy would be replaced by God’s peaceful city, all injustices, including those caused by the occupation authorities, the Romans, would be made right. They believed the apocalypse was imminent. We don’t believe that. It hasn’t come for 2,000 years, and we’ve made peace with its delay and the fact of the continued existence of evil. How can we relate to a metaphor that assumes an audience who believes the end of time is about to come? I wonder.
On the other hand…and pretty amazingly, actually… there are in almost all of these stories told by the ancient Gospel writers certain thematic truths that aren’t limited by any disconnections between the frameworks of reference of one audience and another two millennia later...or by the difference between expecting time to end and not expecting it to end. Last week, for example, in the story that we heard in the first half of Matthew 13, there was present and powerful truth in a story about the importance of context and environment for the well being of good seed scattered by a good sower. The environment into which seed that is good from the git-go is cast turns out to be the determining factor as to whether the seed will survive and grow into what the lord-sower of the good seed intends. And the environment is controllable and changeable, by human endeavor. All human history testifies to that. And we heard the text calling us to pay attention.
And we heard in the text last Sunday a final word of assurance that in spite of all other things, God’s good intention for God’s good creation does and will prevail. Some seed does land in good soil and is nurtured and multiplies. Goodness does win: an appropriate word for the discomfort and insecurity that we Americans feel at the moment. We were assured last Sunday that all of the seed scattered by God, the sower and caretaker is good seed from the git-go, all of it. There’s no such thing as genetically formed evil: another important word for this community to hear. It would be so, so easy to explain terrorists away that way, except all of the seed that the sower scattered was good seed. It was other things that made the difference. Who knows what for sure? But we do know that some of creation’s good seed did fall into good and healthy soil. And it multiplies -- thirty, sixty, a hundred-fold. We began to get somewhere with all of this!
Today, in Matthew’s sequel to the story of seeds scattered into diverse environments, the themes are also eternal-but-relevant for this moment of our history. Two, particularly, jump out at me. Let’s take them one at a time.
The first theme, a lesson also importantly offered to us right now, I think, is that only God knows the difference between wheat and weed. We don’t. Only God knows the ultimate and true values of each (wheat and weeds) -- separately and also in relationship to each other. We think we do a lot. We like to play God and pretend we’re God, fooling even ourselves. We like to think, some of us, we know who the wheat is and who the weeds are and how they should be sorted out. White supremacists, for example, or just any of us who think that somehow we’re entitled to particular shares of creation’s wealth and space because of how we were born, the thinking that Anglo-Saxon folks are the good wheat of heaven; all others are the tares. But, in truth, every time humankind or human communities have attempted to sort out the good folks from the other folks, they’ve gotten into trouble almost invariably.
When I was in Evanston before coming here eight years ago, a white supremacist newspaper called Sword of the Gospel, or some such thing, would show up on the doorstep of the church occasionally and also on the front steps of the homes in the neighborhood. The publisher, who also did most of the writing in the thing, was a man named Matthew Hale. And when Ricky Birdsong, who was the head coach of the Northwestern University men’s basketball team and happened to be a Black man, was killed by a drive-by shooter as he walked in front of his home in Evanston and several Hasidic Jews were also killed as they walked to their synagogue in North Chicago just a few minutes later, it turned out the shooter, Benjamin Smith, was a disciple of Matthew Hale and a devotee of his hateful white supremacist philosophy.
Now Matthew Hale believed, so far as I could tell from the little I could stand to read of his philosophy, that some folks, white folks, are destined by their Creator for roles of leadership and power in the larger community of humankind, which is what Hitler and Mussolini, and all of the leadership of the Third Reich also pretty much believed. As did others, Napoleon, for instance; as do some of the would-be leaders of our own time. The truly scary ones are those who, unlike Matthew Hale, are quiet, even secretive, about their elitist predispositions and the theological justifications for their elitism. “I have all this wealth, power, and charm,” is how the rationalization goes. “God probably wants that for me and intends for it to be that way. I have my country; founded by white folks of Northern European descent, and we have a manifest destiny to be all that we can be and to rid ourselves, discreetly but firmly, of all of the weeds that emerge in our garden of goodness.
Well, precisely such posturing was the role of the misinformed servants in Jesus parable, the ones who ran to the farmer-master and said, “What has happened? An enemy has sown weeds in our garden of purity. We know where they are and we will root them out.” To which the farmer-master-god says, “No, leave them be. You don’t know which plants are the wheat and which are the weeds. Only I know that. It’s what makes me God and what makes you something other than God in the divine but universal scheme of things. And for you,” God says to the would-be servants of the farmer and also to us, “to presume you can be God or to pretend you’re God is to sin most grievously!”
But we do it all the time, don’t we? And it’s not just Matthew Hale and Benjamin Smith and their grossly misinformed ilk. We engage in exercises of sorting the wheat from the weeds as well -- in subtle ways and not so subtle...by erecting, within the norms and mores of our cultures, standards for behavior that citizens must live up to in order to be “good” citizens, even standards and measures that have nothing to do with anybody else’s business and pose no threat to the well being or rights of the rest of the citizenship. We must keep them out, or cull them out, because “they” simply are not like us. We must keep them separate in order that the fields and corn rows of our lives will be neat and orderly and weed free and, should I also say, very, very boring, if not hurtful to life generally in the long term, in spite of the weed-cutter’s best intentions.
But, shhhh, listen. Heaven’s flute plays even through the harsh warning this lesson contains. Listen.
“at the end of the age the Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the son…”
Listen hard enough and long enough to hear the good news that also is to be heard in this lesson, news that, though there are weeds, ugly, thorny, deserving to rooted up and pitched out weeds, the wheat ultimately wins the battle in God’s garden. In the end, it is the wheat that prevails.
These days the news media are bringing us bad news every day about the sad state of the United States’ economy , as if we didn’t already have enough things to worry about. Daily, there’s speculation in the newspapers and news channels about the egregiously high cost of gasoline, and air travel, and food, and all of the things that used to be relatively cheap for all us Americans, and about the effect that all of this, along with the precipitous decline of stock market indicators, is having on the lives of us Americans, and especially us senior Americans. More evil weeds have made their way into the gardens of life that God gives us and gives us responsibility to maintain, as though there weren’t more than enough weeds already.
Like many of you, I suppose, I got a statement in the mail this past week on the activity of my retirement annuity account during the last quarter, the fund that was McCormick Seminary’s retirement program during the eight years that I worked there. Yike! Talk about weeds in the garden that choke out the production you anticipate when the harvest comes. That was Tuesday, I think. Then came Wednesday and the worst news since the 1970’s about the Dow-Jones, then Thursday and the news about IndyMac and FreddyMac and FannieMae, and newspaper and television accounts of the impact of recession on charitable institutions, like churches, and the impact of all of it on the abilities of the most generous generation in all American history, the World War II generation…this one … to continue to be generous.
Give me a break. It’s like you go to bed one night, and you wake up the next morning, and the garden of your dreams is filled with weeds everywhere you look. Then you read the lectionary and discover that God has a sense of humor, or a true sense of meting out grace when grace is needed. You read of an ancient garden filled with weeds, mysteriously, overnight. And you read, in the end, that the garden produces nevertheless. The good wheat remains, amongst the weeds. The weeds just happen to be getting all the attention and are producing all the angst in the household of the gardener, except in the gardener himself.
One commentator on this text, Don Denton, tells of his experience as a pastor in rural Indiana where most of the families, like those I remember in downstate Illinois, we’re farmers with big houses with neat fields of corn and beans all around them. “But the place was abundant with shame,” Denton says, “because of weeds, but more precisely because of things they understood as weeds but really weren’t: cerebral palsy, but also Down’s syndrome, ALS, schizophrenia, manic-depression, genetic obesity, Parkinson’s disease, and Hodgkins Lymphoma had all taken root in families within the township; so had alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, incest, persistent bereavement and depression. There was even a resident bully. One bright young lady developed anorexia during my period as pastor,” he says. “And mingled right in with the same people who walked through the door of the church and guided its mission there were some pretty intransigent strains of good old fashioned sin.”
Yet the wheat was there too, Denton says, sometimes too well hidden by the weeds to be noticed and appreciated, but it was there. The church and its purposes for advancing God’s will for that place were advancing. There was no denying. Nor is there any denying that God’s wheat is here in the Sun Cities and at Desert Palms too, despite the weeds, despite the challenges that life contains and the constant inner whisper inside our heads that the best we can do isn’t good enough. I’ve got to remember and so do you that the wheat is here too, growing, pushing toward the time of God’s harvest. God has planted a good earth in God’s garden. And those plantings will produce, thirty, sixty, a hundred-fold, in spite of the weeds. I’ve got to make peace with the weeds at the same time that I continue to contend with them. And so do you. I may never be OK with evil. I’m called always to resist it. But I can make peace with the fact that this creation of which I am a part remains unredeemed. There are weeds, and there is the good wheat, and I’m not always going to know which are which. But I can make peace with God’s sovereignty above all things and all people, even the weeds. Let anyone with ears listen. Amen.
