What a Mess!

Proper 11A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Last week Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to a Sower scattering seed with reckless abundance. This week the image shifts from the generosity of the Sower to the patience of the landowner. The good seed has taken root, but it is not alone. An enemy has sown weeds among the wheat, and now both grow together until the harvest. (Micah Krey) Our parable asks: How are the people of God to live in a world where good and evil remain tangled together?
If Jesus truly is the Messiah, why hasn’t everything changed? It’s still John the Baptist’s question from a few weeks ago, “Are you the one…or are we to wait for another?” Not enough has changed!

Jesus doesn’t pull any punches. An enemy has sown weeds among the wheat. It was not an accident or an unfortunate mistake. Noxious weeds were intentionally sown into the field by a real enemy whose motivations are loveless and sinister. Scholars believe the ‘weed’ Jesus is talking about is called bearded darnel, or “false wheat.” It looks virtually identical to wheat and is not merely a nuisance but is poisonous causing illness and even death if consumed in large quantities. Today’s parable teaches that evil is real, insidious, intentional, dangerous and outrageous. Common sense would dictate a single course of action. Go and tear out those weeds at once! But Jesus says no. “No” and “wait.”

Jesus insists on patience, humility, and restraint when it comes to patrolling the borders of his precious field. He asks us, even as we acknowledge the pernicious reality of evil, to accept his timing instead of ours when it comes to destroying it. Why? Because he knows that the business of discernment is much harder than we think it is: “Turn us loose with a machete and there is no telling what we will chop down and what we will spare.” (Debi Thomas, “Let Them Grow Together,” Journey with Jesus, 7/12/20)

There is no way to police the wheat field without damaging the wheat. There is no way to rid us of everything bad without distorting everything good. What looks at first like a problem can turn out to be the solution, and what appears to be the solution can turn out to be the problem.
For example, farmers in New Zealand battled a noxious weed called Gorse for almost a century. A thicket of Gorse grows nine feet tall and chest deep in thorns impassible to sheep, cattle, deer and goats. The government of New Zealand passed a law demanding that landowners eradicate Gorse any way possible. They sprayed it, bulldozed it, uprooted it, and burned it. The Gorse always grew back while costly conservation efforts to restore the once lush ancient forest failed.

In 1987 a full botanical survey of Banks peninsula in New Zealand found less than 1% of old growth forest remained. That’s when botanist Hugh Wilson and a famer named, Maurice Wright, proposed a heretical new solution. Do nothing. They bought land, built a fence around it, kicked out the sheep and waited.

Wilson had noticed native seedlings coming up under the Gorse. Gorse casts profound shade needed to shelter young native plants. The seeds from the ancient forest where already in the soil just waiting for the right conditions to grow. Gorse is a legume that naturally fixes nitrogen into the soil fertilizing the ground. Moreover, as it matures Gorse breaks down under its own weight allowing light to come down onto the ground. Native plants and trees began to take over. The plant the government of New Zealand spent 90 years trying to exterminate was the fastest route back to native forest. The Gorse became a temporary structure that built its own replacement and then vanished. Today 350 native plants and 35 native bird species have returned. 47 waterfalls flow year-round up from a handful before the forest returned and the hills stopped bleeding water in summer. All this was accomplished without killing any Gorse or by planting a single tree. (Treeline Journal, Youtube)

We inhabit a mindset of either-or, right and wrong, good guys and bad guys. This would seem natural, especially for religious folk. But the real world God creates operates differently. Complex open systems are both-and. This should not surprise us, but it still does. This teaching runs deep in the Christian witness and in our Lutheran heritage specifically. We say, “God is One, and God is Three. Jesus is God and Jesus is human. The Bible is God’s Word, and the Bible is authored by flawed humans. Creation is good, and Creation is broken. To give is to receive. To die is to live. To pardon is to be pardoned. To be weak is to be strong. To serve is to reign. We’re saved by grace, and faith without works is dead. We are in the world, but we are not of the world. The kingdom of God is coming, and the kingdom of God is here, within us… at every point, Christianity calls us to hold together truths that seem bizarre, nonsensical, counterintuitive, and irreconcilable.” (Thomas)

“Every facet of the religion, from its theology to its ethics, to its holy book, to its founder’s own identity, invites us to occupy holy in-between places, places of hard but life-giving ambiguity.” It’s not that we hold paradox; it’s that paradox holds us. We are held in a deep place. An ample place. A real place. (Thomas)

God knows we are, after all, like the field in the parable, both mixed and messy. Each of us individually, our faith communities corporately, and our world in its entirety, contain wheat and weed, good and evil, the fruitful and the poisonous. We are each, in Martin Luther’s famous words, “simul justus et peccator.” At the same time both sinner and saint. To confess this paradox is not to be puritanical — it is to be discerning and wise. It is to live in the world as it is while striving with God for the world as it should be. And it is to believe in Jesus.
Jesus’s parable says without apology that evil is doomed: oppression will end. Injustice will die. Evil always includes the seeds of its own demise. In short, all that chokes, starves, breaks, distorts, poisons, and harms God’s beloved, will burn away. Not because God hates the world. But because God loves it. (Thomas)

This is not to say we should ignore evil. But it is to say that we should move gently and with great care, recognizing that our task is to grow the good, not burn the bad. Our job is to bless the field, not curse it. Remember, the field is not ours, it is God’s. Only God knows it intimately enough to tend it. Only God loves it enough to bring it safely to harvest. (Thomas)
God’s garden is a mess, but God is patient and wise. The bearded darnel in our hearts, the prickly Gorse in our minds is being transformed by grace into nourishing wheat. The passionate, protective, and deeply righteous love of God will not suffer evil to rule the world forever. May God ripen your spirit, restore you in your broken places, and bring us to fullness of life. (Thomas)