Proper 11 A - The wheat and the weeds

What do you do when things are all mixed up together, like the good seed for wheat and the bad seed that produces weeds? This is the dilemma of the parable in this Sunday's reading.
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.

Have you ever given your love to someone unable to receive or acknowledge it?
Have you known times when you feel dead and dry inside, and unable to feel the love that you intellectually know is there? God sows love like a foolish farmer that casts seeds on rocks and weeds as well as good soil. 
This sermon, written 18 years ago, includes some reflections on a personal loss and the constancy of God's abundant love.

Proper 10 A

Sermon given 7/13/96

at St. Alban's Epsicopal Church, Brentwood

by the Rev. Valerie Hart

Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

         As I was contemplating these readings this week I got to thinking about my Mother-In-Law. During the last few years of her life she was extremely depressed. She was deeply loved, yet seemed incapable of knowing it. Her husband, my father-in-law, was as devoted as any man could be. He cared for her, took her wherever she wanted to go, gave her whatever she wanted, and made few demands upon her. He made sure she went to the doctors, took her medicine, etc. He even took her to Hawaii, where years ago they had experienced so much love and joy, in the hope that she would cheer up. But nothing seemed to matter; she continued to feel unloved, unlovable. No matter how much love was showered upon her by her husband, she couldn’t feel it. It didn’t matter that her baby grandchild adored her, she felt unloved and useless. Nothing that any of us said or did would matter. No seed of love could take root in the hard soil of her heart. A heart that had kept hidden the hurts of childhood, a heart that had so loved her family, a heart that could not receive, yet still longed to give. In fact, in her suicide note she said that she felt we would be better off without her. How little she understood of the deep love we felt for her and the aching we would all feel with her death. How hard it was to have loved someone so deeply and to know that they were unable to feel it.

         Have you ever given your love to someone unable to receive or acknowledge it? Perhaps there was a time when your spouse was so busy with work or other concerns that he or she didn’t notice your love. Or your children may have gone through a period of time when their need to express and be in touch with their anger made it impossible for them to acknowledge your love. Or you may have found yourself caring for a parent whose illness was so severe that their pain kept them from realizing the love behind your ministrations. Or maybe you are a teacher who has known a student who was so damaged by life that they could not respond to your sincere care. We have all had times when we have felt as if our love was being thrown into a black hole, where the one we loved just didn’t respond.

         Or perhaps we have known times when we feel dead and dry inside, and unable to feel the love that we intellectually know is there. Perhaps we have felt this way because of grief, or stress on the job, or hormonal changes, or chronic illness, or mental disturbances, or we just don’t know why. These are times when we cannot respond to the care expressed by others, when no matter what is said or done we feel unloved, unlovable. When even God’s love can’t get through.

         What does this have to do with today’s readings? God is the abundant sower, perhaps even a foolish farmer, for God sows love on all. The seeds of God’s love are sown on the hard path where there was no hope of them taking root. They were sown on rocky ground that had no depth; they were sown among thorns where there was no chance of growth, in addition to being sown on good ground. What kind of farmer is so wasteful? Doesn’t the farmer choose carefully where the seeds will be planted? Why would a farmer waste all that seed? But the nature of God is abundance. Isaiah speaks of people receiving water and food without money. He describes the word of God to be like rain and snow coming down and watering the land. The rain and snow do not discriminate as to where they will land. The rain falls on the land that has been prepared and absorbs it, it falls on the hard clay that just has it run off, it falls on the streets and towns and lakes and rivers. It is indiscriminate. So it is with God’s love. God’s love is sown upon all - worthy or unworthy, rich or poor, good or bad, happy or depressed, those ready to receive and those closed off. It doesn’t matter to God, the love is just sowed everywhere.

         I remember a time when I felt spiritually dead inside. When I saw my spiritual director I told her how I was unable to feel God’s love in the way I had before, and I grieved that loss. I said that I felt dry inside. Her response surprised me. She said that many of the great mystics trusted the dry, desert times more than the times they felt filled with love, because it was often through the dry times that God’s work of transformation was most powerful. Just as a field must lie fallow sometimes in order to continue to produce healthy crops, sometimes our hearts feel dry inside so that we can fully know our need for God. Often after a period of dryness, the gift of experiencing the fullness of God’s love again is worth the pain of the dry periods. Coming out of that dry period, once again feeling filled with God’s love, I realized how central love is to all that we do. It is really very simple. Our theology does not need be complicated - it is that God loves us, and we are Christians because the way that we came to know how much God loves us is through the incredible love expressed by Christ. And our worship is also an expression of love. We sing songs of love for God, we pray in thanksgiving of God’s love, even our times of confession is an acknowledgment that we have not loved as we could. We express our love for each other at the Peace, and we conclude our worship with the Eucharist, the Holy Communion where we remember God’s expression of love through Christ, and we partake of the loving gift of his body and blood. That’s all that it is about - Love. It is really quite simple - God Loves Us and never stops loving us, whether we can feel it or not.

         God just keeps sowing those seeds of love, whether we are receptive or not, in the confidence that at some point the soil will have been prepared, the thorns removed, the rocks cleared away, the hard ground plowed, so that the seed will take root and grow and bring forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. And what marvelous grain it is, for the fruit of God’s love is our ability to love. When we have so abundantly received we are called to equally abundantly, and selflessly give. And we are called to give our love as God gives, abundantly, without concern of how it is received, with the assurance that sometimes seeds planted in the desert are just waiting for the next rain to sprout and grow.

         So we keep loving, as God keeps loving, and we keep plowing the ground, clearing out weeds, removing the stones, and trusting in the dry times that the abundant rain will return, - trusting in a love that is often not returned from others, trusting in the love from God that we are sometimes unable to feel. And trusting that God will continue to keep sowing love.

         I don’t think that God ever gives up on us. I am sure that even though my mother-in-law was closed to God and human love in this lifetime, that God has not given up on her, but continues to sow the seeds of love into what I hope and believe is now more fertile soil.

         I trust that such an extravagant farmer would never give up on an opportunity for love, that God continues to sow the seeds of love, and will continue to sow them in the hope and confidence that eventually they will fall on fertile ground.