Scripture: Matthew 13:24-30
I seem to have developed a tendency recently to choose topics for sermons that are impossible, that is, way too much to talk about in one sermon. Two weeks ago it was “Jesus”, just “Jesus”. Today it’s “Good and Evil”, an equally impossible, I suppose I should say equally ridiculous, topic to propose to cover in, say, 17 minutes. My defense in the case of Jesus was that sometimes it’s important (and Lent seems a good time) to stand back and ask some basic questions of ourselves, which often do turn out to be very large questions in every sense, such as, “what role does Jesus play in my faith, or in our faith?” And, of course, I didn’t pretend to be able to answer the question, just to say a few things about it. Today my defense for the topic of “Good and Evil” is that even though it’s an impossibly large topic, that is pretty much what the scripture is about, and I wanted to look at the particular scripture we heard, the parable of the wheat and the weeds, because it not only immediately follows the parable of the sower, which we looked at last week, but it’s almost a part of it. And again, I don’t propose to “cover” the topic, just say a few things about it.
I don’t want to go back over too much of what I said last week, but I do want to say again that the context here is that Jesus is talking about the kingdom or the reign of God. Matthew reports Jesus as saying that that is what the seeds the sower was sowing were. They were not just seeds of generalized kindness and good intentions. “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart. This is what is sown on the path.” The word of the kingdom is what we are talking about here, what Jesus was talking about here.
The parable of the wheat and the weeds follows immediately on the parable of the sower, and quite clearly to me the wheat in our reading for today is not supposed to represent “the good people” and the weeds “the bad people”. The wheat has grown from the seeds of the kingdom. It is the fruit of the kingdom or the visible signs of the kingdom, if you will. However, what Jesus reminds us of in this second parable is that the reign of God in this world never comes to us in pure form. It is always muddled, not so clear to the naked eye, not so easy to put your finger on, and all in all a pretty messy affair.
I hesitated to use the example I’m about to use for reasons you will understand in a minute, but decided to go ahead with it. Every so often—this has happened not a huge number of times but more than just a few—every so often someone who is a visitor or who is relatively new to Sojourners has said to me something very much like the following: I just wanted to tell you that I loved being part of your worship service today and I was really touched by it. You know I’m not sure what I think about heaven, but if I could imagine heaven, I think it would be something like I experienced here this morning. Or sometimes people actually use the language of the kingdom of God. This was, some have said to me, as close to what I think of as the kingdom of God as anything I have ever experienced, certainly anything I have experienced in a church.
When people have said things like this to me, I have a very mixed reaction. On the one hand, I want to say yes, I’m glad you had that experience, and I know what you mean because I feel that way sometimes too. Right in the middle of a worship service, I’ll look around the room as we’re singing a hymn or sharing prayer concerns or who knows what will trigger it, but I’ll get this sense that in spite of all our human imperfections and indeed because of them that this is pretty close to what God must hope for the church to be, that is an expression of God’s reign.
And sometimes when I’m not in the middle of a worship service but am in a mood of reflective gratitude, I will think how fortunate I am to be part of a community that is as inclusive and embracing as Sojourners is, which is to say not perfectly so, far from perfectly so, but given how inclusive most human communities are, which is to say not very, given how really rare meaningful inclusivity is inside or outside the church, anywhere, I can’t help but be grateful to be part of a faith community as inclusive as this one is. Of course I don’t say all that when someone tells me that they have had some little glimpse of heaven or the kingdom of God while visiting Sojourners. But part of me wants to say: I know. Me too.
But that’s just part of me. The other part of me wants to say: No, don’t even go there. It’s dangerous to go there. Not to be too dramatic about it, but it’s dangerous to the soul to go there. There are some obvious dangers: falling into prideful attitudes, being self-congratulatory or self satisfied. None of those qualities, I think we would agree, is particularly conducive to spiritual health. But even just being self-conscious about it begins to taint the reality a bit. It’s a little bit like the difference between just doing a good deed of some kind, say helping someone out of a jam, vs. thinking while you’re doing that good deed, “Here I am doing a good deed.” Even if you don’t think any excessively good thoughts about yourself because of it, if you are self-conscious about doing a good deed while you’re doing it, it becomes a little bit less of an act of love or even of simple kindness. So if at Sojourners, we start thinking of ourselves as “here we are offering some kind of a misty glimpse of the kingdom of God,” it begins to get a lot more misty as soon as the thought creeps in.
And so if I thought we could completely avoid being self-conscious about whether we are in any remote way embodying some kind of vision of the reign of God, I would not have even brought up these thoughts I’ve been rambling about these last few minutes. But people do say such things, and I do think about such things, and many or most of us have some self-consciousness about trying to create and sustain an inclusive community and a peace seeking community and a justice loving community—whether we use the language or imagery of the kingdom of God or not. I decided it’s better to acknowledge the problem and try to deal with it somehow, as opposed to pretending it doesn’t exist.
And so here we are, trying our best to do our part in living toward the reign of God and trying our best to achieve some distant approximation of a kingdom community. No need to have illusions of grandeur about it. We know that really the best we can do is to weave one thread into the fabric of justice or put one small tile in place in the mosaic of God’s reign, but the trick is to will it, to be intentional about it, and yet to do it un-self-consciously.
Jesus knew this problem. He said once: When you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret, by which he meant apparently not only not flaunting it in order to impress other people but not even letting yourself know what you’re doing, not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing. It’s a paradox churches need to live with. If we aren’t being intentional about trying to do something as ambitious as building a kingdom community, then we aren’t aiming nearly high enough. If we are being intentional, there is the problem of self-consciousness, which also happens to spill over easily into self-satisfaction and self-congratulation. As I say, it’s a paradox built in to the church’s life. And, of course, as Jesus points out, it’s built in to our personal lives as well.
All of this in my mind has to do with the parable of the weeds. You may have lost my train of thought here, but I haven’t. What Jesus gives us is an image of a field in which the wheat and the weeds are hopelessly mixed. In fact the commentaries say that the Greek word that is translated in this text as “weed” is really a particular kind of weed or plant that looks very much like wheat. The picture Jesus paints is one where the wheat and the weeds are not only hopelessly mixed but practically indistinguishable.
To imagine the kingdom growing right in front of you or among you, does not require any romantic ideas of what that ought to look like or any notions of exceptional goodness. The weeds are always there. But by the same token, the presence of weeds does not mean there are not signs of the kingdom present as well. It’s all part of the package and it’s a pretty messy package at that. And it is about the mixture of good and evil in our lives, with the added understanding that what we mean by “good” in this context is what is part of and contributes to the growth of God’s reign on earth and “evil” may not be just outright nastiness or mean-spiritedness, but anything which chokes off or prevents or works against the growth of the kingdom. And it’s all mixed together in our lives, outwardly all around us, inside us too.
Note that in the story the servants of the owner of the field, the sower, who I take to represent God in these stories, the servants come and report to the sower that there seem to be weeds growing in the field. How did this happen? they want to know. Didn’t you sow good seed in the field? Why are there weeds here? It’s the age-old question. If God is good, and if God is the source of all creation, and if God is furthermore all powerful, why is there even such a thing as evil in God’s good creation, and even if there is somehow, mysteriously evil in God’s good creation, since God is all powerful, why doesn’t God just do something to get rid of it, just wipe it out? Why do the good suffer? Why does the kingdom suffer? Why does evil prosper? Why are those weeds out there growing like they are? People have written books about such questions. Countless people have spent countless words trying to provide some satisfactory answer to such questions. In the parable the answer comes in just five words: “An enemy has done this.” I hear the sower saying, “I (God) do not plant weeds. I’m in the business, it is my nature to plant wheat, to plant seeds of the kingdom. That’s all there is to be said. An enemy has done this.” No fuller explanation is possible or necessary.
At which point the conversation turns to the more relevant question, not the abstract question of why but the concrete question of how do we respond. “Then do you want us to go and gather the weeds, root them out and destroy them?” No, the sower says, you’ll end up making mistakes, cutting down the wheat along with the weeds. Better to leave them be, put up with the messiness for now. Purity will have to wait until the coming of the far edge of time.
I hear in all this something that I guess I could risk putting into the form of a “moral to the story”. God declares that she is in the business of planting the seeds of the kingdom; he is not so interested at all in pursuing an anti-weed agenda. Likewise the servants are told not to be very bothered about the presence of weeds and certainly not to bother themselves with going around trying to eradicate weeds. In doing so, they are told, they may do more harm than good. Moral of the story: The church is being much more itself, much truer to its calling when it is doing its best at providing space for the kingdom to grow and nurturing its growth, not when it is engaged in an all out war against evil.
That doesn’t mean that the church is never called to protest or to resist evil. Clearly voices of conscience will need to be raised about many things. But this is not so much a matter of resistance to specific evils when necessary as it is of attitude and mindset. The idea that the church is all about declaring what is evil and fighting against it is what leads to crusades, inquisitions, and heresy trials, to say nothing of your more ordinary, everyday, garden variety moral judgmentalism. Not only are human beings and therefore Christians often mistaken or misguided in what they determine to be “evil”. If your spirit is all wrapped up in fighting evil, if your heart is devoted to fighting evil, there is always the danger that little by little we become what we think we are fighting against. There’s always the danger when your spirit is all engaged in fighting weeds of becoming a weed yourself. Better to set your heart, better for the church to set its heart, on the reign of God, knowing that sometimes along the way resistance to evil will be called for, but that such resistance will need to be done with fear and trembling and with as little self-righteousness as possible.
So how do we respond to evil? The parable essentially says “let it be”. Which may not seem a very satisfactory or satisfying answer, or an answer that can apply in every situation, or an answer that is realistic, possible, or desirable in every situation. It is an answer though that has some advantages. It leads us away from the impulse to tidy up the world around us by dividing it into neat categories of good and evil, or to tidy up our theological house by providing explanations and theories about evil. It leads us toward a more ready willingness to live with questions that don’t have answers and to live in a reality that is ambiguous and filled with paradox. And it leads us toward another topic that is way too large for a sermon or a series of sermons: forgiveness. That of course is a notion that was very much at the heart of what Jesus had to say to us and indeed who he was. I want to move in that direction next week, especially as we move in the Biblical story to Palm Sunday and the events which followed and which led to the execution of a sentence of capital punishment on Jesus. I want to reflect next week a little bit further on the question of how we are to respond to evil and on forgiveness as it specifically touches on the question of capital punishment. Until then…Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 29, 2009