By the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow
This sermon is based on Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
An audio version of this sermon is available here.
If we were to take the basic message of Jesus’ parable in our Gospel reading today and squeeze it into one sentence, it might come out saying something like this: “You’ve got to take the bad with the good.” Jesus’ image of a field where wheat and weeds are all growing together is an image of a world in which good things and bad things, good events and bad events, good people and bad people, are all tangled up together, and in a very basic way you just can’t get one without the other. The parable of the weeds in the wheat is a down-to-earth way of saying “You’ve got to take the bad with the good.”
Of course, if that’s all the parable says, it’s understandable if our first reaction is, “Well, duh!” We don’t need a parable to tell us that. We already know that there are good people and not-so-good-people and downright evil people in the world; any casual glance at the television news or cursory scan of today’s newspaper will tell us that. We already know that our lives encompass good memories and bad memories, that we’ve made smart decisions and stupid decisions, that each and every one of us have done things that have led to creativity and accomplishment and success for ourselves and for others and we’ve done things that have turned out to be hurtful and damaging and destructive to ourselves and to others. We don’t need a parable to tell us we have to take the bad with the good; we have our noses rubbed in it every day.
And yet perhaps we do need to be told that — or at least reminded of it from time to time. Because we human beings have a pervasive tendency to want to take the good in life, and to shuffle the bad off to someplace else. We only want half of the equation. It makes me think of a Peanuts cartoon I saw years ago: Charlie Brown and Lucy are talking together, and Charlie Brown says something about life having its ups and downs, and Lucy goes off into a tirade: “Why!? Why does life have to have ups and downs? Why can’t I just have ups? Why can’t I just go from an up to an even upper up?” Lucy carries on until Charlie Brown just puts his head down and says, “Good grief!” We tend not to want the bads with the goods; we want goods, and then we want even gooder goods.
In that respect we’re kind of like the farm workers in the parable. When they see the weeds growing along with the wheat, they immediately want to go out and pull up all the weeds. They want the field for the wheat alone; they want just the good stuff, without any of the wasteful, futile, unproductive stuff they know is out there.
But the householder in the parable knows better. “No,” he tells the farmworkers, “you can’t go pull up the weeds; because if you do, you’ll end up damaging the wheat, too.” And there are a couple of reasons why the householder says that. First, wheat is a kind of domesticated grass, and grasses grow with extensive, delicate, complex root systems: grasses have lots of little roots that spread out and intertwine with other roots and rhyzomes around them. If the farmhands were to go pull up the weeds, chances are they’d damage the root systems of the wheat plants, too. They might want to do good, but they’d wind up unintentionally doing harm. And to make matters more complicated, there are some weeds that look an awful lot like wheat as long as the plants are still young and growing — you can’t tell which is weed and which is wheat until the plants have reached their full maturity and have become everything they’re going to become. If the farmhands were to go out and pull up the young plants now, chances are they’d end up pulling up some weeds and pulling up some wheat and letting some wheat grow and letting some weeds grow — and the net result might be worse for the field than it was in the first place. There just isn’t any way to separate the weeds from the wheat without doing some unintended damage along the way; the good and the bad are too deeply intertwined to have one without the other. So the householder says, “Let them both grow up together; let each plant become what it can become; don’t try to judge them too quickly; and in the harvest, in the end, when everything is complete, then we can tell which is which.”
And that, it seems to me, is the real wisdom of the parable, that’s the thing we do need a parable to tell us. It’s not just the platitude that you have to take the bad with the good; but the message is that sometimes you can’t tell in advance what will turn out to be bad and what will turn out to be good, and therefore you shouldn’t rush to judgment between them. Our first tendency is to be like the farmhands; but the parable tells us that God is like the householder, God is merciful and patient, God always allows things and people and events to grow to the fullness of all they can be before God judges them fruitful or futile — and the parable invites us to be godly in that way, too.
And the really remarkable grace in that invitation is the way it encourages us to discover that some things we thought had been weeds really turn out to be wheat — how some of the events and experiences we go through seem difficult or damaging or disappointing at the time, and yet grow in us into bearing the seeds of of wisdom and compassion and love. When I served a congregation in Michigan I knew a family who had a child with Down’s syndrome. They already had a little girl and a little boy, about 5 years old and 3-1/2 years old — just about Maggie and Aidan’s ages when we knew them. And their first two kids were active and energetic and busy — and quite enough of a handful to take care of as they were. And both parents had jobs, and worked long hours to make ends meet, and shuffled their work hours around so that they could share more equally in caring for the kids and didn’t have to farm them out to childcare very often. And money was kind of tight in their household. And then they got the news from the amniocentesis that their third child would be born with Down’s syndrome — and while they couldn’t predict in advance how severe his mental disability would be, the doctor had to be honest with the family that he would never be “normal” like their other children. Well of course the news was devastating to them. Their family life was full — sometimes even tense — as it was; how could they possibly add a special-needs child and have any hope of making it work? It was not an easy thing for them. It meant extra childcare and extra medical bills and special equipment around the house; it meant having to do some things twice as slowly with their new baby as they had done with their other kids; it meant teaching their older children that their baby brother required special attention and care, even from them — and it all took its toll, it all added its measure of anxiety and frustration to the lives that they had known.
But after a time they began to find something else happening with them as well. They found that, because they had to pay extra attention to their third child, they were developing the habit of paying extra attention to each other as well. They found that, because it took longer to do things with their third child, they were slowing down, not rushing around so much, taking longer to do things, and to enjoy things, with each other as well. They found that their third child laughed more easily and hugged more often, and they all began to learn to laugh more and to hug more from him. Over time, they found that their third child, their “problem” child, their “disabled” child, was teaching them, was bringing them a gift of patience and wisdom and compassion and love, a gift they never would have known without him. What had seemed like weeds growing in the field of their family life turned out to be the finest wheat, the bread of a communion that went deeper than anything they’d ever known.
The parable of our Gospel today tells us that in our life the good and the bad, the difficult and the joyful, the seemingly futile and the ultimately fruitful, are very deeply intertwined, and it takes mercy and patience and compassionate judgment to let things grow to their rightful harvest. And the promise of the Gospel today is that, with the mercy and the patience and the grace that come from God, even some of the weediest parts of our lives can grow into the wheat of saving and redeeming love.
That’s the love that Jesus shows for us; and that’s the love we all can share in Jesus. Amen.
This sermon is based on Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
An audio version of this sermon is available here.
If we were to take the basic message of Jesus’ parable in our Gospel reading today and squeeze it into one sentence, it might come out saying something like this: “You’ve got to take the bad with the good.” Jesus’ image of a field where wheat and weeds are all growing together is an image of a world in which good things and bad things, good events and bad events, good people and bad people, are all tangled up together, and in a very basic way you just can’t get one without the other. The parable of the weeds in the wheat is a down-to-earth way of saying “You’ve got to take the bad with the good.”
Of course, if that’s all the parable says, it’s understandable if our first reaction is, “Well, duh!” We don’t need a parable to tell us that. We already know that there are good people and not-so-good-people and downright evil people in the world; any casual glance at the television news or cursory scan of today’s newspaper will tell us that. We already know that our lives encompass good memories and bad memories, that we’ve made smart decisions and stupid decisions, that each and every one of us have done things that have led to creativity and accomplishment and success for ourselves and for others and we’ve done things that have turned out to be hurtful and damaging and destructive to ourselves and to others. We don’t need a parable to tell us we have to take the bad with the good; we have our noses rubbed in it every day.
And yet perhaps we do need to be told that — or at least reminded of it from time to time. Because we human beings have a pervasive tendency to want to take the good in life, and to shuffle the bad off to someplace else. We only want half of the equation. It makes me think of a Peanuts cartoon I saw years ago: Charlie Brown and Lucy are talking together, and Charlie Brown says something about life having its ups and downs, and Lucy goes off into a tirade: “Why!? Why does life have to have ups and downs? Why can’t I just have ups? Why can’t I just go from an up to an even upper up?” Lucy carries on until Charlie Brown just puts his head down and says, “Good grief!” We tend not to want the bads with the goods; we want goods, and then we want even gooder goods.
In that respect we’re kind of like the farm workers in the parable. When they see the weeds growing along with the wheat, they immediately want to go out and pull up all the weeds. They want the field for the wheat alone; they want just the good stuff, without any of the wasteful, futile, unproductive stuff they know is out there.
But the householder in the parable knows better. “No,” he tells the farmworkers, “you can’t go pull up the weeds; because if you do, you’ll end up damaging the wheat, too.” And there are a couple of reasons why the householder says that. First, wheat is a kind of domesticated grass, and grasses grow with extensive, delicate, complex root systems: grasses have lots of little roots that spread out and intertwine with other roots and rhyzomes around them. If the farmhands were to go pull up the weeds, chances are they’d damage the root systems of the wheat plants, too. They might want to do good, but they’d wind up unintentionally doing harm. And to make matters more complicated, there are some weeds that look an awful lot like wheat as long as the plants are still young and growing — you can’t tell which is weed and which is wheat until the plants have reached their full maturity and have become everything they’re going to become. If the farmhands were to go out and pull up the young plants now, chances are they’d end up pulling up some weeds and pulling up some wheat and letting some wheat grow and letting some weeds grow — and the net result might be worse for the field than it was in the first place. There just isn’t any way to separate the weeds from the wheat without doing some unintended damage along the way; the good and the bad are too deeply intertwined to have one without the other. So the householder says, “Let them both grow up together; let each plant become what it can become; don’t try to judge them too quickly; and in the harvest, in the end, when everything is complete, then we can tell which is which.”
And that, it seems to me, is the real wisdom of the parable, that’s the thing we do need a parable to tell us. It’s not just the platitude that you have to take the bad with the good; but the message is that sometimes you can’t tell in advance what will turn out to be bad and what will turn out to be good, and therefore you shouldn’t rush to judgment between them. Our first tendency is to be like the farmhands; but the parable tells us that God is like the householder, God is merciful and patient, God always allows things and people and events to grow to the fullness of all they can be before God judges them fruitful or futile — and the parable invites us to be godly in that way, too.
And the really remarkable grace in that invitation is the way it encourages us to discover that some things we thought had been weeds really turn out to be wheat — how some of the events and experiences we go through seem difficult or damaging or disappointing at the time, and yet grow in us into bearing the seeds of of wisdom and compassion and love. When I served a congregation in Michigan I knew a family who had a child with Down’s syndrome. They already had a little girl and a little boy, about 5 years old and 3-1/2 years old — just about Maggie and Aidan’s ages when we knew them. And their first two kids were active and energetic and busy — and quite enough of a handful to take care of as they were. And both parents had jobs, and worked long hours to make ends meet, and shuffled their work hours around so that they could share more equally in caring for the kids and didn’t have to farm them out to childcare very often. And money was kind of tight in their household. And then they got the news from the amniocentesis that their third child would be born with Down’s syndrome — and while they couldn’t predict in advance how severe his mental disability would be, the doctor had to be honest with the family that he would never be “normal” like their other children. Well of course the news was devastating to them. Their family life was full — sometimes even tense — as it was; how could they possibly add a special-needs child and have any hope of making it work? It was not an easy thing for them. It meant extra childcare and extra medical bills and special equipment around the house; it meant having to do some things twice as slowly with their new baby as they had done with their other kids; it meant teaching their older children that their baby brother required special attention and care, even from them — and it all took its toll, it all added its measure of anxiety and frustration to the lives that they had known.
But after a time they began to find something else happening with them as well. They found that, because they had to pay extra attention to their third child, they were developing the habit of paying extra attention to each other as well. They found that, because it took longer to do things with their third child, they were slowing down, not rushing around so much, taking longer to do things, and to enjoy things, with each other as well. They found that their third child laughed more easily and hugged more often, and they all began to learn to laugh more and to hug more from him. Over time, they found that their third child, their “problem” child, their “disabled” child, was teaching them, was bringing them a gift of patience and wisdom and compassion and love, a gift they never would have known without him. What had seemed like weeds growing in the field of their family life turned out to be the finest wheat, the bread of a communion that went deeper than anything they’d ever known.
The parable of our Gospel today tells us that in our life the good and the bad, the difficult and the joyful, the seemingly futile and the ultimately fruitful, are very deeply intertwined, and it takes mercy and patience and compassionate judgment to let things grow to their rightful harvest. And the promise of the Gospel today is that, with the mercy and the patience and the grace that come from God, even some of the weediest parts of our lives can grow into the wheat of saving and redeeming love.
That’s the love that Jesus shows for us; and that’s the love we all can share in Jesus. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment