Weeds Are Crowding Out the Wheat
a sermon based on Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
by Rev. Thomas Hall

For many of us, the new millennium began late. September 11th, 2001 forced us into a very dangerous and angry world. We’ve wept through unnumbered memorials for lives lost on that Tuesday morning—both for the rescuers and for the dead down under. Our safe, we’re-in-charge world is gone and now we must live with global anxiety that continues to haunt us. The weeds are taking over the garden.

Recently we welcomed a student to our home to be our guest while he attended language class. What should have been unbounded joy was more a cautious, strained celebration. Bader is from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And a Muslim. I couldn’t help but think of the impact that a Palestinian student might have on insensitive, angry neighbors in this new millennium. Authorities watch our student’s activities when he leaves for school. My fear is in part, based on another Palestinian student who attended our church years ago—Kamiel my friend—who ended up getting so brutalized in a small rural restaurant, that he required hospitalization. I have personally seen the weeds crowding out the wheat.

In other parts of the world we face a "subcontinental nuclear Armageddon," as the Times of India reports, that could "fill the subcontinent with mushroom clouds and millions of incinerated bodies. [1] " I wish we could just send in the weed pickers and say, "Go get ‘em! Destroy the bad guys."

At least the kingdom of heaven is pure, for heaven’s sake! But turns out that even in our most sacred places of worship, weeds have scarred and damaged innocent wheat. Tragically, some of our wheat have turned out to be more weeds than wheat: "Archbishop Implicated in Sex Scandal," among recent headlines. To shift metaphors from agrarian to animals, one minister admitted, ". . . the ‘fish’ business these days is not as simple as it once seemed. The human fish now come out of outrageously polluted cultural waters, and they bring all the effects of their pollutedness with them." [2] We’re living in a new millennium in which we are no longer assured of the outcome of evil and good. And sometimes it’s very difficult to tell a wheat from a weed.

Perhaps we can learn from Jesus’ little tale about wheat and weeds. A man sows good seed, and then an enemy comes and sows weeds. We can understand this; all crops have at least some weeds. Jesus tells the truth. There are going to be weeds in life. Weeds in the world, weeds in life, weeds in yours and my community of faith.

Weeds are our enemy, Jesus says. Always have been and whoever puts them in the field is trying to put one over on us. Weeds stymie our best efforts and thwart every good and healthy and wholesome thing we do. One preacher has a list of the weeds. [3]  On his list are people in the world, in the neighborhood, in churches who just don’t fit in. They don’t contribute, don’t help, don’t attend, don’t do their share. He says, they just drag everybody down. They are the undesirables. And, according to the story their presence is the work of the enemy.

So the servants come and say, "what should we do with the weeds? Pull ‘em up and root ‘em out?" Not a bad suggestion. Just be rid of them and move forward with our lives. "Just send ‘em back where they came from." "Oh, they’re just lazy—take ‘em off welfare." "They just want to have babies to get government hand-outs." "They haven’t been to church in years; just take ‘em off the church rolls." "Let’s just get rid of them."

I’ve just finished reading Ezra and Nehemiah. That’s the solution they arrive at. "Just divorce those women who are not really truly, full-blooded national stock." Didn’t matter, of course, that those "stock" also had birthed and borne their children, had taught them, fed them, suckled them, and loved those children deeply. Just up and divorce them—clean the church rolls. "We got to have a pure, church roll. Reminds me of a doggerel my dad used to tell me, "What orthodoxy!— me and thee, although I’m not always sure about thee."

Some I know would love to get rid of the group that meets in the upper room of our church on Saturday night—SA’s they call themselves. Persons who are sexually addicted and admit as much. "We shouldn’t have such people even near the church—what will people think?" "Send ‘em down to First Church, they help those kind of people."

Here’s what Jesus says to our normal reaction of removing the weeds from our midst: "leave the weeds alone." You’re kidding! Leave them alone? In the church? The wheat with the weeds? We should take a stand right? Draw the line between right and wrong, the truth and the false, the good and the evil. But the supervisor says to the hired hands, "leave the weeds alone." Why? "Because you start pulling the weeds up, you damage to the wheat."

A minister once said he was holding a revival meeting in a church in Polk County. [4]   The minister came to him just before the beginning of the first service. "We’re going to have to do something during the service tonight."

"What?" the guest minister asked.

"We’re going to have to call for the fellowship and peace of the church."

"Why?"
"Well," said the pastor, "I messed up. I asked a certain widow in this town for a date, being that I’m a married man and have a family. I shouldn’t have done it. She turned me down, but then she went and told everybody. Now it’s all over the church. So you’ve got to call for the fellowship and peace of the church."

So that’s what happened. At the close of the service, everybody sat down and then the guest minister said, "All who are in true fellowship and peace with God and each other, please stand." So everyone stands—except the host minister. When the congregation sat back down, the minister got up and confessed his sin.

"I messed up, pure and simple. I’ve been wringing my heart out in sorrow and regret, but I want you to forgive me.

"Is there a motion that we forgive the brother?" A man stood up and said, "I move we forgive him. I’ve done the same thing a dozen times myself."

His wife looked at him; everybody looked at him. They forgave the preacher, but then they had to have another meeting to forgive this fellow. He kept saying, "But I didn’t mean it that way. I didn’t mean it literally." But his confession triggered something else and that triggered something else, and the guest minister said, "We had two weeks of weed-pulling instead of revival. It did more harm than good."

The problem is, is that we just don’t know who the weeds are and who the wheat are. In a scene right out of the old Dennis the Menace sitcom, dad is weeding the front garden. Then Dennis comes up and observes this garden ritual. After watching for several minutes, he asks,

"Hey, dad?"

"What, son?"

"How do you know which are the flowers and which are the weeds?"

"Heh, heh . . . Oh your mom will let me know."

[off screen shriek]: "HENRY! You’re pulling out all of the flowers!"

Let me close with three reasons why we are not supposed to go around plucking up weeds. First, even weeds may turn out to be useful. Weeds were not mowed down in ancient Palestine—they provided a valuable source for fires. Not much coal or lumber lying around Palestine in those days. Just manure and well, weeds. So at the harvest they were put to good use. By letting both weeds and wheat grow together, you had the perfect resources for making bread: flour and fire! So have patience. Wait until God decides how to use the resources in God’s field.

Not only that, but who is insightful enough to make the call? Who can tell the difference between a weed and wheat? We are not qualified to pick the good from the bad. Darnel looks identical to wheat at the beginning. Just when we’ve got that stalk that looks all the world like a weed bent over to be hacked off, the grains of wheat fall out. Barbara Brown Taylor says that during the crusades, knights from Europe passed through an Arab town on their way to holy land and killed everyone in sight. Later they turned the bodies over and found crosses around most of their victims’ necks. It never occurred to them that Christians came in brown as well as white. [5]

Finally, if we choose to go around yanking weeds out of God’s field we may run the risk of turning from good seed into bad. Haven’t you discovered that in any holy war, be it in the Middle East or in the middle of your faith community, we can get so riled up that we begin acting like weeds—full of prickles and poison? I have seen many well-meaning and sincere persons get so passionately involved in a holy cause that in the end, everyone on both sides becomes the bad guy. No one is innocent. All are hurt and dirtied.

A mixed field includes wheat and weeds together. The only way to fight the poison of the weeds is to make sure that we’re producing good, wholesome fruit. Leave the rest to God. If we give ourselves to God, God will do the rest. Amen.

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[1] The Week (June 14, 2002): 2.
[2] Gordon MacDonald quoted in Current Thoughts and Trends (June 2002): 5.
[3] Fred Craddock, The Cherry Log Sermons (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001), page 26.
^{[4] The guest minister was Paul Culpepper; cited in Cherry Log Sermons, page 28.}
[5] Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 1998), page 148.