Hope you find this sermon from 2011 helpful.
Proper 11 A
Transcribed from a
sermon given at
St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
July 17, 2011
By Rev. Valerie Hart
They say there is one sure way to
tell the difference between the weeds and results of the good seed. If you go
into a garden and you don’t know which are the weeds and which are the plants that
are intentional just rip them all out, and the ones that grow back were the
weeds.
We have this wonderful parable
about the weeds; actually it is about the sower and the Weeds. He sowed the
wheat, good seed, but somehow all these weeds grew up around it. It is
interesting that the weeds that grew up around it were of a specific kind. It
just says weeds in this translation, but the kind of weed is a wild rye that
looks exactly like a wheat plant until it comes to the point where it goes to
seed, and then you can distinguish between the two. Unfortunately this wild rye
plant is also mildly poisonous so usually you don’t want to collect them all
together. It is a dilemma, the dilemma of the weeds and the good seed. What do
you do? How do you distinguish between them? How do you discern? When do you
separate?
Now parable means puzzle.
Parables are designed to be something that there is no clear solution to. They
lead you to think about things and look at them in different ways. They are
like a crystal that you turn and different colors appear as the light strikes
it in different ways. They are like a Zen Koan. Something that makes you think
but has no clear answer. So there is a real question any time in scripture a
parable is followed by Jesus giving the explanation for it. That kind of
literal explanation, that this is this and that is that, takes away that sense
of wonder, of playing with the imagery and trying to understand it. So most scholars
agree that when there is an interpretation of one of Jesus’ parables it is
probably not what Jesus literally said. It is rather what the church, or the
person that was writing the Gospel, thought it meant. You see, each one of the
writers of the Gospels was writing for a particular group at a particular time.
For each group there were certain issues that were important. So, the writer of
the Gospel would choose stories, or things that happened, or tales of Jesus, or
sayings of Jesus that were most appropriate for the audience that he was
writing for. It would seem from this interpretation that Matthew was writing for
the communities that had specific issues. One of the issues that came up for
the earlier Christian communities is what to do when members of the community
disagree. What do we do when there is someone who isn’t living by the same
standards as everybody else? What do we do when someone - remember it is a time
of persecution - goes and burns incense to the emperor in order to keep from
being killed or having his family killed? What do we do that? How do we keep a
community together?
So whether you believe that Jesus
actually said those interpretations, or whether you think the interpretation
was inspired by the writer and the church, there basically seems to be two ways
of looking at this parable.
One is in terms of how you handle
a community. The other is a more, some would say, spiritual interpretation. Looking
at it in terms of our own inner lives, of what is happening inside the
individual, of our own spiritual growth.
There was an old Mohawk Indian,
and he was talking to his grandson. He said, “There is a struggle going on
inside me. There are two wolves fighting. One wolf is good and generous and
kind and selfless. The other is self centered and angry and hurtful and
spiteful. And the two are inside me and they fight with each other.” The little
boy thought for a moment and then he said, “Grandpa, which one is going to
win?” And the grandpa said, “The one that I feed.”
You see we all have seeds inside
of us, and some are wheat and some are weeds. In the parable that we heard last
week, it would seem that the seeds were the word of God. We have in us all the
good words, all the scripture we’ve heard all the kind words we have been
taught all the good things that we have lived with in our lives. All those
positive messages, and some of those have taken root and grow within us. And
then there is all the negative stuff. There are things that our culture sends
out. There are hurtful messages. There are questions. There are desires. There
are all kinds of things that may not be of God. These are the weeds. Some you
can very clearly know are weeds, and some you can’t be quite sure. Sometimes it
is hard to discern what is the good and what is what society thinks we should
do. Sometimes it is hard to know, and we struggle inside with these two parts
of us. As Paul in one of the readings we had a few weeks ago said, “I do that
which I don’t want to do and I don’t do that which I want to do.” We all have
that struggle inside, those two wolves, the wheat and the weeds.
But we can also look at this
parable in terms of the wheat representing people and the weeds representing
people. This perspective is concerned that there are individuals who are trying
to live good and holy lives and there are individuals that are not. What do we
do with that? I am sure that all of us at some point in our live, whether it
has been in a sermon while sitting at church, or listening on the radio and
changing the channel to find some preacher on the radio, we’ve heard someone
telling us who the weeds are and what we should do about it. They are talking
about discerning who belongs as part of the Christian faith and who doesn’t.
Who is good and who is bad. Not based on their behaviors, not saying that
certain behaviors are bad, rather that certain people are bad, or not good. The
early church struggled with this. We have a book called Holy Women, Holy Men
that has for almost every day of the year different great Christians to
remember, people who were inspiring. Many of them, when they were alive, were
persecuted by the very church that honors them today. Some of them were
martyred because they stood up for what they believed to be true, which wasn’t
consistent with what the community thought was true at the time. But later they
were honored for their faith. How do we discern the weeds from the wheat? How
do we decide who are the good people, who are the good Christians, and who are
the weeds? And what do we do about the weeds? That is the question that the
church has struggled with through much of its existence. But I think this
parable has an important point to make. It says it is not up to us to figure
out who is a good Christian and who is not a good Christian. It is not for us
to figure out who are the weeds and who are the wheat. That will be decided at
the end. If we get too busy trying to weed out all the people who are not doing
it right we are going to be rooting up a lot of people that may actually bear
fruit and be wheat. What Jesus may be saying here is “It’s okay, we’ll sort it
all out at the end. It is not up to you at this time to decide who is good and
who is bad, who is going to go to heaven and who is not. That the angels will
do that. They’ll take care of it. It will all be worked out in the end.” After
all, how are we to know? It is hard to discern the wheat from weeds. The person
who said this best was one of my favorite authors, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He
wrote “If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil
deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy
them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human
being.”
And so we are called to feed out
good wolves, and not try to judge who is good and who is bad, but trust that
God will work it out in the end.
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