Home  ›  Audio  ›  “Pulling Weeds,” Jeff Wright, 7/20/14

“Pulling Weeds,” Jeff Wright, 7/20/14

Pulling Weeds

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church

(Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, Colorado

July 20, 2014

 The difficult part of this parable is the fact that the boss said, “Leave the weeds alone.”  What?  Just leave the weeds in there with the wheat?  Have wheat and weeds together?  Isn’t there any such thing as right and wrong, good and evil, true and false?  We need to take a stand.  We need to draw the line.  We need to say, “You stay and you go.”  I mean, after all, what are we here for?  But the boss said, “Leave the weeds alone.”  Why?  “Because you will do more harm than good.  If you start pulling on those weeds, you’re going to pull up some wheat.”

Fred B. Craddock, The Cherry Log Sermons

Texts: Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24 & Matthew 13:24-34

Have you walked through our community garden lately?  The cultivated plots are coming into their own.  Lettuce, squash, zucchini and peppers are being harvested by the handfuls.  You wouldn’t believe what I can gather up after dark, before I head home from the office.  Even the plots not spoken for this year, they’re producing an incredible harvest.  A harvest of weeds.

Weeds are bad.  They can mess up a garden, competing for water, sucking up nutrients, overtaking the good plants.  So it’s surprising that in Jesus’ parable the householder says, “Leave ‘em alone.  Let the weeds be.”  Really?  Leave the weeds?  Even if Jesus is making a point about the kind of community God is shaping, it sounds like poor agricultural advice, which makes for a lousy illustration.  Turns out, Jesus knows what he’s talking about – in practical matters as well as spiritual ones.  The weeds that have been sown in the parable are darnel.

Darnel is an annual grass that with long slender bristles looks a lot like wheat.  It’s actually called false wheat and its poisonous.  It isn’t until both wheat and darnel mature that a lay person can reliably tell them apart.  Hence, the counsel to wait, to let the weeds grow alongside the wheat.

But Jesus isn’t talking about a community garden.  He’s talking about the kingdom of God: the world, the community in which we live, the church.  We think there must be some standards to decide who’s in and who’s out.  Jesus says it’s not our business.  I say that the abusive people, those who’ve never bothered to get their stuff together, they choke the good plants, they rob life of its spontaneity and joy, they reproduce noxious seeds of discontent.  Jesus looks me straight in the face and says, “Really?  What about the weeds invading your own life?”

In an effort to redirect the conversation, I say, “Who planted these bad seeds in the first place?  If God planted the garden, where did the weeds come from?  Not just the little irritating weeds – the big ones: materialism, racism, fundamentalism.”  It is a question of the ages.  It goes all the way back to the account in Genesis, where when Adam and Eve decided to take matters into their own hands, one of the consequences was their having to earn their bread through the sweat of their brow working a garden infested with thorn and thistle.  We want to know why.  The householder in Jesus’ parable responds, “An enemy did it.”  That’s all he says.  An enemy did it.  In the end, this is the Bible’s only answer to the problem of the origin of evil: “An enemy did this.”  We may not like Jesus’ answer.  We may wonder about a God who, like the householder, suffers not only the weeds but the enemies who sow them.  But for the time being this is all we get.

Unless, of course, you and I do something about it, which is precisely what the servants in the parable suggest.  “Shall we gather the weeds and destroy them?” – just what the enemy is hoping we might think to do.[1]  In fact, this may be why the enemy sows the seeds at night and disappears.  He has no need to hang around.  He knows that when the bad seed appears, good people will go nuts.  Confused, self-righteous and ready to retaliate, our frantic efforts to pull up all the weeds will accomplish the very thing the enemy hoped for in the first place.  “No,” the farmer says, “You’ll destroy the wheat along with the weeds.”

None of us are as pure as we think.  One morning, two monks were walking through the forest.  They came to a stream that was overflowing because of heavy rains.  There was a young woman standing stream-side, wondering how she’d get across.  One of the monks took her in his arms and struggled across the stream, where he put her down on the distant bank.  The monks continued their journey in silence.  That evening, when they reached the monastery, the second monk said to the first, “I can’t believe you picked up that woman.  You know we’re prohibited from even talking to women, let alone touching them.  You’ve disgraced the entire community.”  “Dear brother,” the first replied, “I put the woman down on the other side of the stream.  It seems you’ve been carrying her all day.”  The enemy loves it when we look for the faults in others, when we find reasons to distant ourselves, to judge and exclude.

The predictable result of a concerted effort to get rid of evil is the getting rid of a lot of good.  Consider the crusades, the Salem witch hunts, KKK efforts to keep a pure race, and the church’s historic mistake of deciding who can come to the Table and who can’t.

In Scotland for our son’s wedding, I found several of the tokens that the Scottish Presbyterians used to use for communion.  In the 17 and 18 hundreds, a person had to be examined by the elders and determined to be worthy to receive the Lord’s Supper.  If they passed the examination, they were given one of these tokens, which they’d set on the Table as they came for communion.  It’s a defining moment for our denomination when Alexander Campbell, a theology student at the University of Glasgow, came to the Table and offered his token, but when offered the bread and wine, he refused and walked out of worship.  He argued that no one is entitled to judge another’s worthiness to receive the sacraments.

We’re doing it internationally now in the so-called War on Terrorism: dividing the world into the evil and the good.  But as people of faith, we know better.  It’s a false division.  You remember the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn?  He wrote that “The line dividing good from evil runs straight through the heart of each of us.”

I don’t think Jesus is suggesting that we aren’t to resist those who do wrong, that we just lie down before the march of evil.  But we do know that most of the ends to which you and I go to resist the weeds – just wars, capital punishment, buying a gun to protect ourselves, belittling our kids, correcting those who are here to connect to Jesus; these means – drag us into the brokenness and violence, make of us weeds too and don’t inevitably make the world a better place.  We can get pretty nasty trying to “nicen” up the world.  Jesus teaches us to keep expanding the circle of God’s love, not to draw it smaller.  Edwin Markham was a Disciples poet in the late 1800s.  He wrote,

He drew a circle and left me out:

Rebel, heretic, a thing to flout.

But Love and I had the wit to win.

We made a circle and drew him in.

Jesus says, “Let them be, the weeds.”  The Greek word for the verb let can mean “permit”, “allow”, even “suffer” (Capon).  You remember when the disciples were trying to prevent children from bothering Jesus, and Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.”  That’s the way it’s translated in the King James Version.  But Jesus wasn’t suffering the children’s presence.  All Jesus meant was, “Let the children come to me.  Allow them in.”  The Greek word has a second meaning.  When applied to debts, trespasses, sin and weeds, it’s translated in English as forgive – as in Jesus on the cross, saying, “Father, forgive them, let them be, for they don’t know what they are doing.”  The indifference and malice in people, in the world, are not to be dealt with by attacking or abolishing, but by forgiving.  On the cross Jesus didn’t threaten his enemies or call down legions of angels to destroy them, as one of his detractors tempted him to do.  He “let them be”, he forgave them.

I had my container of weed killer out the other day, circling our yard, looking for signs of the enemy.  At the corner of our house, I came across a lovely plant.  Delicate stems.  Little blue flowers.

But I paused, not sure if it were a weed or a volunteer flower left from a planting by the home’s previous owners.  That’s when the weed spoke up.

“You’re not going to eliminate me, are you?”

“You’re a weed, aren’t you?”

“No.  Yes.  Maybe.  I don’t know.  Do you?”

“Well, I’m not sure.  But I’m guessing you are.  A lot of weeds are attractive at first, but then… I don’t think you belong here.”

“Let me be.  Maybe I can change.  Maybe if you give me another season.”

“Nice try.”

“No, really,” the plant said.  “It’s in your book, the Bible.”

“What?”

“Yeah, Jesus said it in one of his stories, the one about man who planted a fig tree in his vineyard (Luke 13:6ff).  But it didn’t produce any fruit, not for three years!  So he said to his gardener, ‘Cut it down.  It’s wasting space.’  But the gardener said, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year.  I’ll see what I can do with it.  If it bears fruit, great.  If not, you can cut it down then.’”

I said to the plant, “Okay, one more year.  But I’m taking a picture of you and asking David Hartley[2] if you’re a weed.  And if you are…”

“Wait!” the plant said.  “How do you know the gardener didn’t come back to the owner of the vineyard the next year, and the year after that, if there still weren’t any figs, and made the same plea, ‘Sir, one more year’?”

“You’re a minister of the Gospel, right?  You preach change and transformation, right?  You know God can change a weed into a flower. You believe that, don’t you, preacher?”

Jeff Wright