2023 July 23

Fifteen years ago when these readings came up in the lectionary, I was in church with my parents, one of my brothers and his twins, then aged five. We were together because my sister, Sherry, had just died from an extended struggle with cancer, and after church that morning we were meeting with the priest to go over what we wanted for her memorial service. I honestly don’t remember what the sermon was about that morning, but apparently it made an impression on little Megan. When we returned to my parents’ house, she saw my other sister, Linda, weeding the area along the banking where we were going to place Sherry’s ashes the following weekend. Megan walked over to her and asked what Linda was doing.

“I’m weeding this garden,” she said.

Megan replied, “Oh. What about the wheat?”

“No, I’m WEEDING the garden,” Linda repeated, thinking Megan had misheard her.

To which Megan, slightly more assertive, replied, “Yes, I heard you. Be careful of the WHEAT.”

Linda, of course, had not been with us in church so she had no idea what Megan was talking about, and thought Megan was confusing the words “wheat” and “weed.”  I was just fascinated that Megan had absorbed so much of the service that morning that I was waiting to see what she said next. Linda tried one more time to clarify that there was no wheat there, she was pulling up weeDs.

Megan was now fairly frustrated and said, “YES, I KNOW. Be careful not to pull up the WHEEEEE-TUH, too!” 

Megan was trying very hard to pass along the lesson she had learned in church that morning, and Aunt Linda just wasn’t getting it! I walked into the house and told my parents and brother what was happening outside, and we all had a good and much-needed laugh that steamy July morning.

Our English translation of this story makes good use of the similarity between the words wheat and weed (and this preacher’s tongue gets all tied up trying to keep them straight!), but those of you who remember older translations may remember other words use—the wheat and the tares, or the wheat and the darnel.

Darnel is the most accurate translation; that is the name of the particular weed Jesus is talking about, a highly toxic weed that you most definitely did not want mixed in with the wheat at the end of the harvest. The problem is, darnel looks a lot like wheat until both begin to bear fruit, so it is hard to distinguish which was which in the early stages of growth. As it grew, the roots of the darnel grew tangled around the roots of the wheat. If darnel got mixed into the wheat field, you had to let them grow together until you could be sure which was which.  Otherwise, you risked destroying perfectly good wheat in an attempt to protect the harvest.

The Gospel of Matthew was directed at people who had already made the decision to follow Jesus, to be part of this new community of God, and are trying to figure out how to be such a community, and how to deal with those times when things don’t seem to be going the way they would expect.  It’s important for us to keep this in mind as we read some of these passages. These images of burning and weeping and gnashing of teeth are not meant to be used in trying to ‘convert’ people. If we forget this, we run the risk of trying to scare people into following Christ, rather than drawing them in with the Good News of God’s love and forgiveness and promise of a fresh start and new life in Christ.

In this passage, Jesus is calling on those listening to have some patience, to wait things out. To leave it to God to sort out what was redeemable and what was not. Jesus is warning us to refrain from judging one another as useless and beyond redemption, refrain from jumping to conclusions about one’s ‘weediness” or “wheatiness” before the full fruit has emerged. Jesus is telling us that it’s up to God to determine a person’s true nature, and true value.

A great example of this comes from our first reading this morning. For a good part of Jacob’s life, we all would have condemned him as worthless weed. He manipulated his brother Esau out of his birthright, that extra portion of their father’s inheritance. Then he deceived his father into giving him the special blessing handed down from Abraham, by pretending to be Esau. He gets a little bit of a come-uppance from his father-in-law, Laban, when it comes time to get married, but ultimately tricks Laban out of a significant portion of his flocks and property. Jacob plays favorites among his sons, and seems to be blind to the jealousy and conflict that creates among his family. He spends most of his life running away from the messes he created. I will confess I get more than a little aggravated that in the midst of this chaos God grants him this amazing dream of angels, and reassures him that God will be with him through all the events to come.

Does Jacob really deserve such mercy?

That’s kind of the point of all these readings. God shows us mercy precisely in those moments when we don’t deserve it. God holds out the possibility that we might yet turn out to be wheat, despite all appearances to the contrary. God asks us to suspend judgment until the story is completed. God reminds us that judgment is not really up to us at all, that God will be the one to make those final determinations about what can be saved and what needs to be bundled and burned for fuel.

This passage was told as an eschatological tale. It was meant to reassure a community that everything would work out in the end. But now, 2000 years later, it’s useful to look at it less through an “us vs. them” lens and more as a mirror on ourselves.

500 years ago, Martin Luther was already helping us with that.  Luther was convinced, as I am, that we are all “simul justus et peccator” –simultaneously justified and sinful. We are all a mix of wheat and weeds. We are all a mix of saint and sinner. None of us completely good or completely bad. This parable doesn’t give us permission to ignore the “weedy” parts of us, to pretend they aren’t there or do nothing about them. God does expect us to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and not continue feeding the weeds once it’s been clear that’s what they are. But it does urge us to be patient, to not give up on ourselves or each other before God has. It urges us to be tolerant of our differences and to trust that ultimately God WILL clear out the weeds—our own and other people’s—until only the good harvest is left.

That doesn’t mean we just ignore it when people are being harmed. We are expected to hold one another accountable. The Gospel of Matthew addresses how to deal with that in a later passage. For today, we’re dealing with those occasions when there is something wrong and there is nothing we can do about it.

It acknowledges that it will not always comfortable, there will be times of suffering, times when we are confused and discouraged. Times when it seems like the whole world is falling apart around us. Times when all we can hear is the groaning of all creation, all we feel is the pain and find it hard to believe that God’s kingdom is being born.  It is moments like these when we have to remember what Paul wrote in today’s section of the eighth chapter of Romans. “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Why? Because at the end of it all, we can hold onto this one basic truth: We are assured that however far we wander, God is with us and will seek to bring us home. We are God’s children, we have been promised the full inheritance despite our imperfections, because God has claimed us as God’s own. God will find the wheat in every single one of us.

Amen.