The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Some of you may have experienced this quite recently. Imagine this scene. The phone call is made to the broker or financial advisor. "Hello, is this Stocks R Us? Yes, this is one of your clients, Bill D’Mee. I just opened your statement on my account and I think there must be some mistake. Have you seen what my account looks like? When I opened my account with you I was assured that we picked only good stocks and bonds. I looked at my balance and I’m pretty sure that there are some bad apples in this bunch." You probably know the rest of this conversation. It is being lived out all over the United States right now.

In this case the advisor might well decide that harvest time has come and it’s time to pick out the bad and leave the good, but if it’s this past Friday that might be difficult because everything looks like weeds in the stock market right now. It might be better to leave it until a time when the good stocks are stronger and healthier so as not to pull out what will turn out to be a prize. But I’m not a financial advisor and this isn’t really about finances. At least, it’s not only about finances.

We know this parable. We live it all the time. God has sown good seeds in the world and the devil has sown weeds. Too often we are sure that the weeds need to be pulled earlier rather than later.

But the parable is about something with which we have very little direct experience, the Kingdom of God. The parable is not about this time and place, but about the Kingdom or Reign of God. Now is that a particular time and place that is yet to come? Or is it the way Jesus spoke so that the disciples would know that he was talking about the way God does things, not the way man does things? It may be both. I don’t know if it is the first, because we haven’t experienced that yet can’t really know what it will be like until we are "there".

I’m pretty sure that it is the second, it is the way Jesus talked so that we would know that this is the way God does things, not the way man does things. You remember what Torah means. It is often translated as the law, but is literally the path or the way. So these parables might also be called the Torah of God, not the Torah of Man.

This is God’s way, as the book of Wisdom reminds us, a way of mercy and patience. "Although you are sovereign in strength, you judge with mildness…Through such works you have taught your people that the righteous must be kind, and you have filled your children with good hope, because you give repentance for sins."

This is the Kingdom of Heaven to which we are called. So what is our response? Should we wait until some future time and place and assume that Jesus is talking only about how God acts and behaves? Or is Jesus talking to us about how we might want to behave if we ever want to live like God would have us live?

This is the hard part of this parable, because it isn’t just about loving our neighbor whom we know, it’s about how we treat the weeds. It’s even about how we define the weeds.

Shortly after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center on September 11 there were calls for expelling all of the Arabs or Muslims from our nation, whether they were here legally or not. Israel has recently decided to expel family members of Palestinians who commit heinous crimes, whether or not the family members are implicated. These are examples of pulling the weeds, even when the weeds haven’t been identified clearly, and the wheat gets pulled up along with the weeds. It’s easy to look back and say that the internment camps for Japanese were a mistake in World War II, but I wasn’t there and didn’t experience the terror.

I did experienced a small bit of the terror of September 11, however, and can say with certainty that it would have been a terrible mistake to start rounding up Muslims and Arabs indiscriminately and putting them in camps or deporting them. Because we would be pulling the wheat with the weeds.

Christianity is not easy. Jesus doesn’t always say pleasant, simple things. At least not if we take what he says seriously.

Leave the weeds to God, he says, and God will take care of them in the end. But how difficult it is for us to do that! "If God only knew", we think, "if God only knew how we are suffering surely he would tell us to get rid of the weeds in our own time." But God does know.

Remember the weed in the group of disciples. Surely at some point Jesus could have gotten rid of Judas, or at the very least not put him in such a trusted position. But he didn’t act that way because it is not God’s way to pull up the weeds and destroy the wheat as well. Jesus had to wait until the act of what Judas would do came to fruition, but then it was too late for Jesus to do anything to change what Judas had done.

We do have a story in the Bible where God did destroy weeds and wheat. It’s the story of Noah. After the flood God said to Noah, "I will never again curse the ground because of humankind…As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease." God "learned", we might say, that to pull the weeds and wheat together meant having to start over all the time. Humans are fragile and prone to doing the wrong thing sometimes, but they are also able to change, to repent, to turn around and go a different way. God counts on us to learn from our mistakes so that we might turn out to be wheat and not weeds.

That gets to another interesting part of this parable. How do we know what the weeds are? When can we tell? Can we tell they are weeds as soon as we see them? Jesus thought not. He thought we would have to wait until the harvest, when everything will have finally become clear.

Does this mean that we can’t jail people who kidnap children? Of course not. No parable that I know of would suggest that we should allow those who deliberately harm the rest of us to keep doing it. There is a difference between saying that we don’t know who the weeds are at all and saying that we don’t know them until such time as they have born fruit. That is the time of the harvest in every orchard I’ve been in and in wheat fields as well. If the fruit of someone’s life is hurting others then, I believe, we are justified in putting them in a position where they can no longer do that. Like jail.

But the way they are treated is at issue as well. Do we throw them away or treat them as if they could change? How would I treat someone who hurt one of my own children? Would I be able to treat them as a child of God? I honestly don’t know. I know what I’m called to do, I just don’t know if I have the strength to do it.

This is where the Epistle to the Romans helps me. I don’t have to have the strength to live in a way that is, frankly, somewhat foreign to human nature. But God does have the strength and can help me if I’m willing. God can remind us how to treat others and has given us examples in the Holy Scriptures. The key seems to be hopefulness and patience, for ourselves as well as for others.

I don’t have to know the end; I merely have to trust that God will make the end work out all right. I have to trust, to have faith, that God is just in a way that leaves open a possibility that I, too, will receive justice in His hands.

Paul says to the Romans, "I consider that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us…We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved." Paul suffered as well, and didn’t always know how to deal with the sufferings except to trust that God would make them come out in the end.

But even Paul couldn’t see how God would do that in every situation. It’s clear from his letter that he believed and trusted that God would make things right, but that he didn’t know how and was still waiting and hoping that God would eventually act. The trouble with God is - his perspective of when I need help and my perspective of when I need help are sometimes different. And his perspective of when the harvest should take place might also be different.

I’m usually ready long before I know all the facts to make some sort of judgement, and I’m slower than many people just by my nature of not being too hasty about doing anything! But I am hasty to judge sometimes. And it usually gets me in trouble. Just when I’ve had it "up to here" while watching someone who seems to be completely unable to correctly run a cash register or take down an order for something simple, they turn to me and smile. Here I am, in a hurry and already having decided that this person is somehow unworthy and incompetent and they smile at me and try to help me fumble through what I need from them. Now I wonder who is incompetent.

Discerning the weeds isn’t always about finding the difference, as my Ethics professor would say, between Hitler and St. Francis. Sometimes it’s about waiting for someone to get past what is bothering them and letting them get on to the next opportunity where they may shine and put forth good fruit. People are not all good, that’s the truth about original sin. But people are not all bad either, that’s the truth about grace and the parable of the seeds and weeds.

Dostoevsky gives us an example of what to do when we are distressed by evil in our world in "The Brothers Karamazov". "If the evil doing of men moves you to indignation and overwhelming distress, even to a desire for vengeance on the evil-doers, shun above all things that feeling. Go at once and seek suffering for yourself, as though you were guilty of that wrong. Accept that suffering and bear it and your heart will find comfort and you will understand that you, too, are guilty for you might have been a light to the evil-doers even as the one man sinless, and you were not a light to them. If you had been a light, you would have lightened the path for others too, and the evildoer might perhaps have been saved by your light from his sin."

He goes on to say that we should not doubt when the light we give does not seem to save, but trust that God will do the saving at some point in time. And if the evildoer is not saved, then hope that his children will be saved. Never lose hope and never stop shining light into the darkness.

God gives us all the chances we need to make the fruit we produce worthy of the harvest. But He also asks us to give each other all the chances we need to produce the right fruit. Be patient with one another, hope for the best. It may happen. "For in hope we were saved. 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." +