Pentecost 5, 2011 Immanuel Chapel, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
A sign in a Garden center read, “Weeds are plants that haven’t learned to grow in rows.”
Each spring I plant a few rows of seeds and a tomato plant or two in the newly worked soil of my little garden plot. I like God, planted good seed. Mine were from Burpees. But now weeds have taken over. Morning Glories vine around steel posts and reach out to engulf the air conditioner unit. Though it happens every year, I am dismayed. Where did this bad seed come from when I planted only Burpees best?
Today Jesus puts before us a sequel to the parable of the Sower we heard last week. These parables teach us about God’s kingdom.
We prayed earlier, “O God, rule and govern our hearts and minds by your Holy Spirit.” Later we will pray, “Thy kingdom come.” God’s rule and governance, God’s kingdom comes with Jesus and the preaching and teaching of the word of His cross and his resurrection. Jesus says, “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears for they hear.” If our eyes of faith grow dim and our ears become stopped up, even then the Holy Spirit witnesses with our spirit that the gospel of God’s rule in Jesus Christ is still rooted in our lives. It is growing toward an anticipated bumper crop for the Lord’s harvest on the day he returns.
In the parable this morning a man sows good seed in his field. However, during the night, his enemy comes and sows weeds. The enemy does not broadcast his weed seeds on the trodden path, nor in the rocky soil nor among the thorns along the edge of the field. No, the enemy sows its bad seed in the good soil among the wheat seeds. When the farmhands see the weeds growing with the wheat they want to yank them out by the roots. The farmer cooled their eagerness, warning that they could damage the harvest by also uprooting the wheat plants. The harvesting crew will take care of the weeds. The grain will be taken into the grain bin and the weeds will be burned.
In this parable Jesus is the man sowing the wheat seed. The wheat seed are Christians planted in the field of the world. The enemy is the Evil One who sows sons of evil.
You and I live in the time of growing, between the planting and the harvest. Just because we are good seed doesn’t now mean that life is all good. Now our natural tendency is to look out there in the world and identify the children of the Evil One. Yes, the children of the Evil One are out there. But the text says, “His enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat.” Christ is directing us to look at the children of the kingdom bundled together in our pews this morning. Now we could start glancing sideways at one another and begin to think, “Hmmm, I wonder about so and so. Could that person be a weed disguised as wheat?” Now the church, throughout the ages, has spent a lot of time trying to weed out the weeds from its midst. One would think that this parable of Jesus hasn’t been around for nearly 2,000 years. But Jesus says, “No, no. That’s not your job nor are you equipped to carry out that kind of judgment.” Because the weeds have also been planted among us is also planted within us. One person writes about it this way, the sons of the Evil One “may be so expertly leafed and disguised that you would never guess that he’s a weed, and that he’s –dear God-penetrated the aorta, for heaven’s sake. How do you cut back a weed that’s inextricably intertwined with your lifeblood?” We don’t. In other words, the evil things of this earth can be so intertwined with the good things of this earth that to uproot one would uproot the other. Not only will we never be able remove all the evil from the world, we are not able to do so from the church, nor from ourselves.
A story that comes from the Jewish community speaks to us.
The Evil Spirit once came before God dejected and wailed, “Almighty God—I want you to know that I am bored—bored to tears. I go around doing nothing all day long. There isn’t a stitch of work for me to do!”
“I can’t understand you,” god replied. “There’s plenty of work to be done only you’ve got to have more initiative. Why don’t you try to lead people into sin? That’s your job.”
“Lead people into sin!” muttered the Evil Spirit contemptuously. “Why Lord, even before I can get a chance to say a blessed word to anyone he has already gone and sinned!”
The harvest at the close of the age will not be done by you and me but by the angels of God. The angels will gather out of his kingdom “all causes of sin and all lawbreakers.”Until the harvest the wheat and weeds are allowed to grow side by side.
Then how do we live now as fruit-bearing wheat in a weed-infested world? We persevere. Jesus has sown a whole field of wheat, so that each individual stalk can lean on another when the weeds bear down. We persevere alongside others who are persevering alongside us.
It starts with God. God is three in one. God is a community. In his creation He placed us in community with himself and one another. In the church he has placed us into the community of Christ. Christ waters us with grace in our baptism each and every day, with the forgiveness of our sins and rescue from death and the Evil One. Daily, he gives eternal salvation to all who believe this. Daily he drowns our old weed infested person. Daily a new weed free stalk of wheat emerges and grows toward producing fruit of right living, waiting for the day of the great harvest of God’s kingdom. Then his harvest will shine like the golden sun in the kingdom of God. Truly, “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear” the goodness of the Lord.
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