Advent 2 A

Chaff exists to protect the growing grain of wheat, but when the grain is mature we don't need it any more.

Advent 2 A

Transcribed from a sermon given on

December 8, 2013

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

This past week, on Wednesday, I completed my duty as a citizen of serving on a jury. As we were on the jury and I was looking at the readings for this Sunday I saw something similar between the idea of separating the wheat from the chaff and what we as members of the jury were told to do. The judge had told the members of the jury to listen with an open mind. Don’t make any final decisions until all the evidence has bee presented, but weigh the evidence. Weigh what people say. Discern what is said that is useful, and what is not useful. What appears to be truthful, and what is not truthful We were to discern the difference between that which was the wheat, the information, the evidence, that we need to make a decision and the chaff, the stuff that for one reason or another needed to be ignored. It was a discernment that we were to make.

We were also told that we were absolutely not to talk about the trial to anyone, including each other, during the time the trial was going on. And that each one of us individually was to make this discernment. To me it all seemed kind of clear about half way through the trial. It was like I’m done; I think I know what is going on. And it seemed real clear to me who was telling the truth and who I didn’t think was telling the truth. You are sitting there very close to the person, you can see their eyes, you can see their hands, you can hear their voice and you can really get a pretty good sense of who they are. But I was wondering what was going on in the heads of the other jurors.

We had quite a variety of people. We had all ages from someone who was in college to people who were retired. We had men and women and people of all races and ethnicities. There were different education levels and different occupations. We had a real cross section of the people of San Luis Obispo county. So I was curious how other people were experiencing the trial.

When we got into the jury room we are supposed to not tell each other right away what our decision is but rather to talk about the evidence. So we started going around talking about the evidence. And it was amazing to me, maybe not amazing, but I felt good about the fact that everyone there saw the same things as being chaff and the same things as being reasonable. The people who testified that I went “I don’t know about this.” The rest of the people went “I don’t know about those people.” And the ones that I thought yeah, I really like what this one had to say. It was really useful and right on and clear, and it was the same thing with the rest of the jury. It was reinforcement to me that everyone can tell the difference between the wheat and the chaff. We are all able to make that discernment if we pay attention, and we take the time and we are open minded about it. It doesn’t matter how much education we have, it doesn't matter how much experience we have, we all have that ability. We can know what is useful and true and what is not useful and probably not true. We all have that ability.

Here John the Baptist is talking about Christ coming to do something like that. Let’s talk for a moment about wheat and chaff. When John the Baptist was talking he was talking to an agrarian people. People who had all seen farmers going about with their fork, lifting up the harvest and having the breeze take the chaff away and the grain fall down to the ground. They knew what that was about. But most of us have not had that experience.

Just a reminder here that as the wheat is grown and as the grain begins to form the chaff comes around that grain to protect it. It is hard and keeps out the bugs, and keeps out the wind and makes that grain of wheat safe as the grain develops. But once the grain has fully matured, now the chaff is a problem because you can’t put the grain of wheat in the ground with the chaff still on it. It can’t sprout and grow and become a plant. And you can’t eat the wheat with the chaff still on it because the chaff is indigestible and it would make us sick if we didn’t get most of it off. So it is necessary once the wheat has matured, once the grain has matured, to separate that grain. To separate that which will grow into something meaningful, which can nurture and strengthen people, from the chaff that grew up around it as it was developing.

It is not saying that there is something wrong with chaff. Chaff is necessary. The grain would not have been able to come to maturity without the chaff around it. But once the grain is mature, that chaff isn’t needed any more.

So the image of separating the wheat from the chaff it is not about some people are chaff and some people are wheat, it is that all of us, every single one of us, is a grain of wheat, a grain of something that can nurture other people, that can grow into something more, to that which God intends for us to be. And we all have chaff. We all have stuff that is left over.

You see none of us got out of childhood without some scars. Absolutely none of us were raised by perfect parents. They might have been good enough parents or they might have been excellent parents, or they might have been really been bad parents, or some combination thereof. But none of us had a perfect childhood. None of us always felt safe, secure, loved and appreciated. Even if we had an ideal family at home we might have been bullied at school. Or had a neighbor that picked on us, or something. A little child is a very fragile thing. Sometimes we can’t handle as children the stuff that happens to us. And so we develop what Freud called defense mechanisms. Freud was the first one to talk about this, but other people have elaborated on it and refined it. This idea is that we have mechanism by which we protect ourselves because some of the stuff that happens to us as children is more than we can deal with.

So we develop habit patterns to help us feel safe. Perhaps we forget things that traumatized us. Or perhaps we became the comedian in the family and we always had to be telling a joke because we couldn’t stand the pain. Or maybe we become shy and withdrawn because we are afraid of getting hurt. Whatever it is that we did, that we took on, that we carry with us as a way in which we survived.

Those defense mechanisms are absolutely essential because sometimes what is happening to us is more that we can deal with at that moment. So we hide away, we put this protection on, but that protection, that which protected us as a child, as a seed which was maturing, that which protected us is now in the way. It keeps us from being able to grow into the person God wants us to be. It keeps us from being able to nurture and love others with the purity that God wants us. So at some point we’ve to to let go of the chaff.

(The recording ended here.)

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.