You know, sometimes I wonder if it’s ever even remotely possible for such a story, a story originally told to people living in the villages of ancient Palestine two thousand years ago, to have any meaning at all, any real meaning anyway, for us who live so far away and so differently. Is it at all possible?

 

For example, if we take the primary metaphor that Matthew uses in the story he tells us this morning, it seems to me there’s very little for us to connect to. An ancient Palestinian farmer’s field has been sowed intentionally with good seed but has become infested, overnight, with weeds, weeds that look an awful lot like the wheat, apparently. Very few of us here can relate to that, I bet, back yard gardening and landscaping and weed-control that we have done (or do, or have our landscape guys do) notwithstanding. Even in downstate Illinois where I served a congregation that had some farmers in it, as I think about it, agri-business there was done in rich, black topsoil that was chemically adjusted -- daily, practically -- to keep the weeds and bugs out and the nutrients consumed by the plants in – so even there they couldn’t relate to this story very well. They’d never worked with Middle Eastern desert soil. Nor have most Americans, I’m pretty sure. When weeds are taken care of by Chemlawn and Scotts and landscaping guys, how can we relate to the kind of metaphor the story we’ve just heard uses? I wonder.

 

Or, theologically and emotionally how can we relate? We are so far removed from the circumstances of the people to whom Jesus preached, or for whom Matthew wrote his gospel just a few decades later. For one thing, they, like Matthew, believed the end of time was about to come. We don’t, I think. Matthew and his people believed that God was about to usher in the wonderful after-era promised by the rabbi Jesus when all would be flipped flopped, the poor would become rich, the sad and lonely would be filled with joy, human tragedy would be replaced by God’s peaceful city, all injustices, including those caused by the occupation authorities, the Romans, would be made right. They believed the apocalypse was imminent. We don’t believe that. It hasn’t come for 2,000 years, and we’ve made peace with its delay and the fact of the continued existence of evil. How can we relate to a metaphor that assumes an audience who believes the end of the world is about to happen? I wonder about that.

 

On the other hand…and pretty amazingly, actually… there are in almost all of these stories told by the ancient Gospel writers certain thematic truths that aren’t limited by any disconnections between the frameworks of reference of one audience and another one two millennia later...or by the difference between expecting time to end and not expecting it to end. Last week, for example, in the story that we heard in the first half of Matthew 13, there was present and powerful truth in a story about the importance of context and environment for the well being of good seed scattered by a good sower. The environment into which seed that is good from the git-go is cast turns out to be the determining factor as to whether the seed will survive and grow into what the lord-sower of the good seed intends. And the environment is controllable and changeable, by human endeavor. All human history testifies to that. And we heard the text calling us to pay attention.

And Matthew is warning the little late first-century Christian church here. The posturing attitude of “we know who the good folks are and who the bad folks are” is the role played by the misinformed servants in Jesus’ parable, the ones who run to the farmer-master and say, “What has happened? An enemy has sown weeds in our garden of purity. We know where they are and we will root them out.” To which the farmer-master-god says, “No, leave them be. You don’t know which plants are the wheat and which are the weeds. Only I know that. It’s what makes me God and what makes you something other than God in the divine but universal scheme of things. And for you,” God says to the would-be servants of the farmer and also to us, “to presume you can be God or to pretend you’re God is to sin most grievously!”

 

Still, we still do it all the time, I’m afraid. And it’s not just racists and white supremacists and their grossly misinformed ilk. All of us engage in exercises of sorting the wheat from the weeds much of the time -- in subtle ways and not so subtle...by erecting, within the norms and mores of our cultures, standards for behavior that citizens must live up to in order to be “good” citizens, even standards and measures that have nothing to do with anybody else’s business and pose no threat to the well being or rights of the rest of the citizenship. We must keep them out, or cull them out, because “they” simply are not like us. We must keep them separate in order that the fields and corn rows of our lives will be neat and orderly and weed free and, should I also say, very, very boring, if not hurtful to life generally in the long term, in spite of the weed-cutter’s best intentions.

 

But, shhhh, listen. Heaven’s flute plays even through the harsh warning this lesson contains. Listen.

 

 

Listen hard enough and long enough to hear the good news that also is to be heard this Lord’s Day, news that, though there are weeds, ugly, thorny, deserving to rooted up and pitched out weeds, the wheat ultimately wins the battle in God’s garden. In the end, it is the wheat that prevails.

 

These days the news media are bringing us bad news every day about the sad state of the United States’ economy, as if we didn’t already have enough things to worry about. Daily, there’s speculation in the newspapers and on the news channels about the egregiously high cost of things these days and all of the things that used to be relatively cheap for all us Americans, and about the effect that all of this, along with the recent new declines of stock market indicators just when we were beginning to think the recession was beginning to recede, and about the effect it’s all having on the lives of us Americans, and about what will happen if Congress and the President don’t somehow get together to rebalance our financial boat. It’s as though more evil weeds have made their way into the gardens of life that God gives us and gives us responsibility to maintain, as though there weren’t more than enough weeds already.

 

Like many of you, I suppose, I got a statement in the mail recently on the activity of my retirement annuity account during June, the fund that was McCormick Seminary’s retirement program during the eight years that I worked there. Talk about weeds in the garden that choke out the production you anticipate when the harvest comes! That was two weeks ago, I think. It was waiting in the mail when we got back from vacation. Then this week comes word some folks in Washington are thinking about reducing Social Security checks and cutting Medicare benefits, both of which Alice and I are quite aware that we’ll soon become quite dependent on.

 

Give me a break. It’s like you go to bed one night and you wake up the next morning and the garden of your dreams is filled with weeds everywhere you look. Then you read the lectionary and discover that God has a sense of humor, or a true sense of meting out grace when grace is needed. You read of an ancient garden filled with weeds, mysteriously, overnight. And you read, in the end, that the garden produces nevertheless. The good wheat remains, amongst the weeds. The weeds just happen to be getting all the attention and are producing all the angst in the household of the gardener, except in the gardener himself.

 

One commentator on this text, Don Denton, tells of his experience as a pastor in rural Indiana where most of the families, like those I remember in downstate Illinois, we’re farmers with big houses with neat fields of corn and beans all around them. “But the place was abundant with shame,” Denton says, “because of weeds, but more precisely because of things they understood as weeds but really weren’t: cerebral palsy, but also Down’s syndrome, ALS, schizophrenia, manic-depression, genetic obesity, Parkinson’s disease, and Hodgkins Lymphoma had all taken root in families within the township; so had alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, incest, persistent bereavement and depression. There was even a resident bully. One bright young lady developed anorexia during my period as pastor,” he says. “And mingled right in with the same people who walked through the door of the church and guided its mission there were some pretty intransigent strains of good old fashioned sin.”

 

Yet the wheat was there too, Denton says, sometimes too well hidden by the weeds to be noticed and appreciated, but it was there. The church and its purposes for advancing God’s will for that place were advancing. There was no denying.

 

Nor is there any denying that God’s wheat is here in Houston and at St. Philip Presbyterian Church too despite the weeds and despite the challenges that life contains and the constant inner whisper inside our heads that the best we can do isn’t good enough. I’ve got to remember and so do you that the wheat is here too, growing, pushing toward the time of God’s harvest. God has planted a good earth in God’s garden. And those plantings will produce, thirty, sixty, a hundred-fold, in spite of the weeds.

 

I’ve got to make peace with the weeds, but at the same time I’ve got to continue to contend with them. And so do you. We’re not permitted to ever be OK with evil. We’re called always to resist it. But we can make peace with the fact that this creation of which we are a part remains unredeemed. There are weeds, and there is the good wheat, and I’m not always going to know which are which. But we can make peace with God’s sovereignty above all things and all people, even the weeds. And we can draw courage from the absolute knowledge that the weeds are never going to get us…neither you or me or anybody we have ever loved. God the gardener won’t let them. Let anyone with ears listen. Amen.