Sunday Sermon
“Wheat, Weeds and the Patience of God.”
Proper 11A
The Rev.Carol Hoidra
June 20, 2008
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church,
Texts: Genesis 28:10-19a; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
In February 1928, the novelist Virginia Woolf wrote a letter to her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. The person Mrs. Woolf refers to as “Tom Eliot” is probably better known to us as the brilliant 20th-century poet T.S. Eliot.
She writes, “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”
No mealy-mouthed mincer of words, Mrs. Woolf.
But perhaps I should say, “Let anyone with ears listen!” Because in that curious way that life has of imitating scripture, this anecdote could serve as a
Since I have lived both sides of this question, I find the subject of adult conversions to Christianity particularly riveting. How is it that people in the midst of a busy life, filled with worldly distractions of every sort, suddenly find themselves drawn into the life of God, and, in particular, that life as it is lived out in the community of the Church? What can account for such a profound and life-altering transformation?
Let’s see the way Jesus sets up the question for his disciples.
He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of
heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good
seed in his field; but while everyone was asleep, an enemy came
and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away.
So when the plants came up and bore grain, the weeds
appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came
and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in
your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?” He
answered, “An enemy has done this.” The slaves said to him,
“Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But he replied,
“No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along
with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and
at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Collect the weeds
first and bind them into bundles to be burned, but gather
the wheat into my barn.”
Although I claim no expertise in farming, or even in gardening, I have looked into this wheat and weeds business and have found out some fairly interesting information. One expert commentator states that the weeds in this parable are most likely “bearded darnel,” noxious plants that the Jews of the time referred to as “bastard wheat” because of the plants’ close resemblance to bearded wheat. In fact, in the early stages of its development, darnel looks exactly like wheat.
It is impossible to distinguish between the two until they come to a head, and at that point, the roots of the weeds have become so inextricably intertwined with those of the wheat, that, if you try to uproot the weeds, you will pull up the wheat as well. So you have to wait until the harvest to separate them. And, perhaps most interesting, these weeds pose no real threat to the wheat.
Where do these horticultural insights put us, in terms of decoding the parable?
Jesus explains it this way: “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angels.”
The weeds, not unexpectedly, end up in the “furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” – weeds with teeth! – and the righteous ones will “shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”
As Miss Prism stated in The Importance of Being Earnest, “The good end happily and the bad unhappily; that is the meaning of fiction.”
Now it’s not that I believe I am a better interpreter of scripture than the Son of Man, but the world is a little more complicated than a wheat field, and it’s important to bear in mind that a parable, strictly speaking, is not an allegory. There is not a simple one-to-one correspondence of story element-to-symbolic value. In fact, the efficacy, the allure, of a parable lies in its multivalence – it’s like a kaleidoscope, and a slight tilt in perspective can cause a whole new pattern to present itself for our consideration.
As in last week’s Parable of the Sower, the “seed” can be thought of as the word of God; the preaching of the Church. The field is the world. The wheat plants are the faithful ones who “get it,” and the weeds may be seen as worldly unbelievers. In this interpretation of the parable, God permits the ever-so-focused righteous ones and the wickedly distracted to coexist in the world, and – here’s the kicker – sometimes you can’t tell one from the other.
There’s more going on here than the standard Kingdom-Come “stump speech,” the heaven-and-hell exhortation to repentance. For one thing, Jesus is talking about God’s incredible patience with unbelief – “Let it be until harvest time.” Maybe then we’ll see that what we suspected was a weed was good wheat after all. And maybe some of that perfect-looking wheat will prove – can it be? – to have been the rankest of weeds.
This appearance-and-reality motif opens the door to the notion of hypocrisy, which seems to receive, from Jesus, particularly pointed condemnation – especially when it crops up among the religious authorities and others, like judges, who may be thought of as belonging to the Professionally Virtuous Class.
It is just this kind of hypocrisy in the Church that attracts the highly articulate disgust of unbelievers like Mrs. Woolf – and rightly so. Chaucer once asked, “If gold should rust, what should iron do?” Shakespeare observed, “Lilies that fester smell worse than weeds.” If the Church is truly the thin end of the wedge for the coming of the Kingdom, we should be vigilant about discerning this particular schmutz on our fair linen.
But in this parable, Matthew refrains from giving us – as individuals and as a holy community – a “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees” finger-wag: the judge of the harvest is God alone, and just as the master in the parable does not want his servants to root up the wheat in an attempt to purge the weeds, Jesus does not want his followers to waste time with witch hunts for the wicked – or the wicked-appearing – in our tidy patch of earth.
The final judgment of God is yet to come. Until then, we live in a complicated, inter-connected world of believers and nonbelievers, the fallen and the repentent, hypocrits and truthtellers. And – how’s this for complexity? – we may even have to tolerate a little streak of evil, a blush of hypocrisy in our very own “home field.”
If we are bothered by the evil, the hypocrisy that we find growing in ourselves, this is where personal prayer and – I hate to tell you – regular church attendance, frequent exposure to the proclamation of the gospel, can help to keep those troublesome weedy elements to a minimum.
I was practically running the weed version of the gardens at
And I found that it is easier to be in relationship with that Loving One within the holy community of the Church.
The Church – at its best – provides support to all who are struggling with life’s thornier issues, and a path for all who would follow the way of Jesus. This path will be a little different for each of us, with twists and turns that we can’t foresee. But I can guarantee you that, at some point, that famously “narrow gate” will present an opportunity for a clear-eyed, whole-hearted choice.
The good news is that the life of the Spirit is not regulated by the rules of the “Lightning Round.” You will have God’s own time in which to make your decision.
“Let anyone with ears listen!”
Amen.
