Sermon: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 11

July 23, 2023

Adapted by Barbara Marshall

The sermon I am about to share is from an online site. Linda was to be preacher today but with her current health struggle, I offered to find and adapt a pre-written sermon so she could concentrate on resting and taken care of her needs.

The “Parable of the Weeds” is part of a cluster of parables that has to do with God’s kingdom. Last Sunday’s Gospel lesson from Matthew was the parable of The Sower and the Seed also known as The parable of the Four Soils. Today’s parable from the Gospel of Matthew is one of several that has to do with seeds and agriculture. Over and again Jesus’ point is that the kingdom of God is never quite what you might expect.

The Parable of the Sower made clear that although the “seed” of God’s Word is powerful enough to change the world, it is at the same time oddly vulnerable, too. It can be snatched away by birds, burned up by the sun, choked by thorns. The parables of the Mustard Seed and Yeast indicate that the kingdom is far smaller and more subtle than you might guess. The kingdom is the single most powerful and important reality in the world, but it does not have the flash, glitz, or razzle-dazzle you ordinarily associate with mighty movements of history.

Apparently God would rather work behind the scenes. Changing people’s hearts is a quiet and gracious business more than a noisy and forceful affair. What’s more, the growth and spread of this kingdom is going to extend throughout the world but it may never exist in a pure state. To make that point Jesus tells a Parable of the Weeds. A farmer carefully plants an entire field of wheat. His furrows were pin-straight, his wheat seed was of the finest quality. He did it all right and went to bed that night content that he had done everything he could to ensure a bumper crop some months down the road.

But while he took his well-earned rest, an enemy came in and, with equal care, planted weed seed in the same furrows. Worse, the weeds he planted were something called “darnel,” which looks almost identical to wheat. But if you don’t separate the darnel from the wheat before grinding, the resulting flour will be inedible. So once the wheat starts to grow, the farmer’s hired hands notice the presence of the weeds, and what’s more, they see it growing almost as uniformly as the wheat itself. This was no accident, no stray spores that drifted in on the breeze one day. This was an act of agricultural terrorism!

In a huff the servants ask the master farmer if he wants them to go and start plucking out these dastardly weeds. It was the logical thing to do. The last thing you wanted was for the darnel to go to seed because then even next season you’d still have a field full of weed seeds. But contrary to all agricultural good sense, the farmer tells the hired hands to leave it be. They’d sort it all out later at the harvest. If Jesus’ listeners knew anything about farming (and presumably a lot of Jesus’ audience did know about such things), then the shock of this story is the idea that any farmer would do nothing about such a situation. At least not right away.

But that’s probably a clue that this story is not about agriculture but instead it’s about theology. (The Bible is not The Farm Journal magazine. Do not consult it for best agricultural practices!!). Overall, it is not too difficult to figure that out. Nevertheless, the disciples later come to Jesus to ask, “Could you spell things out for us a wee bit more?” Jesus obliges, but you can almost detect a little weariness in the rather dry way that Jesus connects all the dots for them.

Have you ever told someone a joke that this other person just didn’t get? If so, then you know that trying to explain the joke pretty much takes all the fun out of it! Indeed, have you ever seen someone burst out laughing once you finished explaining a joke? Generally what happens is the other person responds to your explanation not with a laugh but by saying, “Oh, now I get it. Heh-heh. Very funny.”

But that was not the reaction you were looking for when you told your joke in the first place! So also in Matthew’s reading there is something a little dry about Jesus’ having to spell things out so simply for the disciples. The punch of the original story gets lost a bit. In fact, if you read only the parable, then in the end you are left wondering just what it might mean to let the wheat and the weeds co-exist and grow together for now. You ponder how and why pulling up the weeds would threaten also the wheat. And if you see that the wheat stands for the true members of the kingdom and the weeds for imposters, you end up wondering how you should behave when forced to grow right alongside of nettlesome folks.

That’s what happens if you read just the parable. But once you get finished reading the explanation, you are tempted to forget some of that and instead start rubbing your hands together because you feel so satisfied to know that all those annoying, “weedy” folks will get their comeuppance in the end. Suddenly you start to wonder less what it means to be wheat in the midst of weeds and start to focus more on that coming day when the roll is called up yonder and the weeds get burned at long last.

But I want to suggest that although we accept and must understand our Lord’s explanation for his own parable, we need to be cautious about not missing the punch of the parable itself. Because the parable is not so much about all wrongs getting righted by and by but is more about our lives right now. At bottom this parable is about patience. This parable is not first of all about what will happen to the weeds at the last day but about how the wheat has to react during all the time that leads up to that final sorting out.

The farmer in the parable seems to believe that the weeds themselves won’t threaten the wheat–the two are capable of growing together. The weeds do not threaten the wheat but instead the threat comes from how we react to the weeds. The danger is not being in the presence of sin but trying to root out all the sin we see. But that means that the real challenge presented to the church by Matthew is finding the strength to resist the temptation to take matters into our own hands and start yanking up every sinful thing we see every time we see it. When in the master tells the servants just to “let” things be, it reminds us of a word in the Lord’s Prayer. FORGIVENESS!

Those who have ears to hear…….

In summary, when we hear Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds, we first think of good people (the wheat) and bad people (the weeds) coexisting in an imperfect world until the coming of God’s kingdom. But the reality is that our lives are fields where both the “wheat” of what is good and fulfilling and nurturing “grows” alongside with “weeds” of discouragement, frustration and failure. In the Gospel spirit of humility and mercy, we find the wisdom to bring the “wheat” of our lives to harvest despite the threat of the destructive “weeds” we encounter. Discipleship realizes that struggle exiting within every one of us but also embraces the hope that, in seeking to imitate Christ’s spirit of loving servanthood, we may be “wheat” for a world that is often choking in “weeds.”

Sermon Resources were an Online sermon and Connections for 7/23/2023