| August 10, 2008
You are welcome to reflect on this message
I’ve always thought this was a stunning verse of scripture. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hyoocrites! You travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves” (Matthew 23:15).
The only thing worse than a hypocrite is somebody who makes more hypocrites. The church has always been plagued by those who make things worse trying to make them better. The Pharisees are the New Testament “weeders,” though they considered Jesus and his crew to be “weeds.” The early Saul was also a “weeder,” and got “Stephen stoned,” because he couldn’t distinguish between the wheat and the chaff. So is a weed just a flower that's the victim of prejudice? Or does God think more of red roses than yellow dandelions? Like Paul and Stephen, it’s hard to say.
Matthew believed God’s worst enemies are his friends! Jesus didn’t “weed” Judas from the twelve for his betrayal. Or Peter for his denials. Or the others for running away. We better be glad too, because if God were to weed out all the imperfections, who’d be left? That could be why the number one cause of atheism is Christians defending God, who make it harder for an unbelieving world to believe. Somebody said you defend God like you defend a lion. You get out of his way! But we can’t keep from getting in God’s way … defending God.
So Matthew clicks off a whole string of parables to answer the question: why do people fight against Jesus? His story about the “wheat and the weeds” perhaps offends more people than any he told. God going soft on evil is not only naive, but a huge stumbling-block to belief and participation in organized religion or the institutional church. It doesn’t leave us with any good options when we try to get rid of the mess. Either God is not good. Or else he’s not God-enough to do anything about evil. It raises a question about who's in charge of the universe? If God is, then why is the world not a beautiful sea of waving grain? Or couldn't the church at least be a neat field of superior wheat?
Not according to Jesus. He didn’t even think the kingdom of heaven is pure. It might’ve started out that way, but sometime “during the night, while everybody was asleep, an enemy sneaked in and sowed weeds among the wheat!" Oh this one’s tricky! Putting out darnel, a nasty wheat look‑alike. Except the seeds are toxic, with roots like nylon chord. If it's not separated from the wheat, the darnel gets ground into flour. Make a loaf of bread out of that stuff and you're gonna have a big belly ache!
Everybody has weeds; not only in our gardens but in our lives. Some are just irritating, like poison ivy; they make you scratch and itch. But others are deadly. Those are the ones that make no sense. A doctor sees an outbreak of polio, but then he says, “Nope, we’re not gonna give the vaccine.” The chairman of Homeland Security knows that there are terrorists in the airport, but he says, “No, we’re not gonna be doing security checks.” The theological shock is: Why doesn’t God do something about the weeds? God seems to favor the weeds. We want God to get rid of them now. But God says, “later.” So our preoccupation with the weeds. But those workers knew what to do! "Let us deal with the weeds." We’ll yank them up. Throw them away. Clean up the field once and for all. The good old common sense solution.
And we've seen a lot of that lately, haven't we? Over in Iraq, in the Middle East. The UU church in Knoxville TN, where a shooter mad at liberals, democrats and gays, took a shotgun to a kids program during morning worship. Any place people are trying to purify the field with hostile methods, they're doing what these workers wanted to do. "James and John," calling down fire upon their heads! No good half‑breed Samaritans! Mixtures, all. “Let us handle it Boss!” But whoever does it, does so without permission. Well why? "Because in gathering the weeds, you uproot the wheat along with them. Let them both grow together, until the harvest. At the harvest I will tell the reapers, collect the weeds first, and tie them up to be burned, but gather the wheat in my barn." This is a stunning explanation, not only because it’s passive about evil. Can I get a witness? Will ya’ll just leave the weeds alone.
There’s even a scripture for it, Revelation 22: "Let the evildoer continue to do evil, and the filthy still be filthy…" But it also suggests we can do more harm when we think we're doing good, than if we did nothing at all. “Doubling the size of hell...” But the householder said no to the "neatniks" who wanted to clean up the field. Why wouldn’t he let them do it? Maybe because nobody’s qualified. I don’t know anybody authorized to separate the good from the bad, do you? I know plenty who think they are. The temptation to play God. Or work magic. Especially in church. That's the greatest thing about Jesus in my estimation: he didn't go around trying to be God all the time. And was fine with God doing things on his own time table.
Some folks can't stand imperfection. So in trying to make everything perfect, they eliminate something that looks like a weed. But after a closer look, the weeds are still standing. You can’t always tell the difference. So you end up with “Collateral damage.” It's hard to distinguish between good and bad because it they grow in the same ground. And you can't uproot one without the other. By extracting the weeds a lot of innocent bystanders get wasted. According to the householder, it’s not worth it. Better to let them grow together for now, until the harvest. Yanking up weeds is a future, not present task. Only thing left that’s needed is a little patience on our part, tolerance of a temporary problem, the ability to live with imperfection. Some people just can't stop themselves from meddling. We got to fix it. God help us!
What drives this parable is not the weeds but the impatient workers, who end up doing more harm than good. But worse, they think they know more about evil than God. Or that evil is not in them; only in the weeds. Or that they can manipulate God into doing what they want. Most of us think what’s best for the wheat is to attack the weeds. Or they could just go about being wheat, next to the weeds. What a novel thought. If the workers pull up the weeds, the wheat does what weeds do. Again it’s hard to tell the difference…making messes messier. Their actions were more destructive than the presence of weeds. “Becoming twice the children of hell than themselves...”
The trickiest thing weeds do is to get the wheat so riled up that the good wheat starts acting like bad weeds, sometimes even more destructive and poisonous; church people who turn into bad guys, trying to put those they oppose out of business. If we become a beast to defeat the beast, then bestiality wins. The Owner warned us about that too: "You’ve heard it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' but I say unto you, Don't resist an evildoer…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous."
It’s hard to hear it because it doesn’t make sense, according to our way of thinking. But God doesn't have any problem with imperfection like we do. He can live with a mixed field, because he expects growth not perfection. Growth is acceptable with God. This is not a call to passivity, but a call for the church to penetrate into a mixed-up world, shining the light of Christ. God knows what we've been slow to learn: the best solution to evil is for the wheat to be wheat and bear good fruit in place of the bad.
Do we believe what goodness can do to evil is more powerful than what evil can do to good? I think the church as been too busy obsessing over the weeds instead of just being the church. And let God take care of the weeds, the reapers, the harvest, the fire. All of it. It's God's job. And more children of hell are created by you-know-who, because they think they can do God’s job better than God! Down South, we’re accustomed to going to church to “get saved.” Well to read Matthew’s Gospel, maybe we ought to say, “God save us from the church!” Observe all the empty pews.
I’m sure ya’ll know the Catholics number their preachers like this church does. We’re only up to 36, because the Catholics got a head start on us, about 1700 years. They’re somewhere around 265, depending on your sources. But my favorite pope was John XXIII, one of God's great saints. What you may not know is, he had a habit when he prayed, by ending his lengthy prayers each night, talking to God, then talking to himself; lecturing to himself. After a day of laborious Roman Catholic church-work, he’d end it by asking himself this question: "But who governs the church? You or God? Very well, then Angelo, go to sleep."
In these days before the harvest, can there be a better attitude than following the example of #23? That may be the only way any of us preachers can get some sleep. Church can drive you crazy if you let it! Angelo Roncalli got it right. By letting God be God and us be the church. By staying true to our roots and to the one who planted us. And allowing the harvest to be God’s business. Think of all the weeds in your life; where you work, in your family, your church, your government, in yourself. “Very well Angelo, go to sleep.” I bet that’s the only time you’ll ever hear a preacher advise the congregation to go to sleep!
Pastoral Prayer: (8-10-08) |
