8th Sunday after Pentecost

When my dad, Galen, was a kid, he used to help one of the local farmers, a guy named Perry Clase, during the summer. Back then, small rural farmers wouldn’t necessarily buy seed every year for whatever they were planting. Instead, they would hold on to some of what had been harvested in one year and then use that for the following year. My dad doesn’t know how he managed to do it, but somehow Perry had contaminated his crop seed with thistle seed. When it started coming up it was obvious that the contamination had taken place.

So, Perry decided to hire my dad to help him pick out the burgeoning thistle plants in order to try and save his wheat, or whatever it was that he had planted. My dad went over to the Clase farm, and he and Perry went out to the field. It was a hot midsummer day, and it was miserable work with little success. After a couple of hours, Perry decided it was time for a break. They sat under a tree, drinking some water. And using prayerful language he said, “Jesus Christ, Galen. This is like wearing boxing gloves and trying to pick fly poop out of pepper.” Although he may have used more colorful terminology than that…

The parable for this week, the parable of the wheat and the weeds, and the Gospel lessons for last week, the parable of the sower, share some interesting characteristics.

First, they’re both agriculturally themed. The parable of the sower is about an agricultural worker who spread seed everywhere, regardless of the type of soil which presents itself. Hard packed soil, rocky soil, soil with brambles growing, good soil. And this week’s parable begins, again, with an agricultural worker, a sower, who goes out and sows seed in a field.

The second thing both lessons share is that they both have an explanation attached to them, which comes several verses later, after the end of the parable itself. The parable of the sower receives an explanation as to what or whom the different types of soil represent. The parable of the wheat and the weeds, again several verses later after the end of the parable, likewise receives an explanation. Here is what is significant about those explanations. Most biblical scholars today agree that they were not part of the original parables as told by Jesus but were added later on by someone who thought the parables needed explanation or clarification. The thing is that with the addition of the explanations the entire nature of the parables is radically altered. So, for the reading from last week, for example, the parable of the generous sower becomes the allegory of the soil. And rather than it being about the generosity of the sower it becomes about judgment based upon the performance of individual people. The packed soil is those who don’t accept God’s word. The rocky soil is those who are fainthearted. The thorny soil is those who care more about the riches of the world. The good soil that causes the seed to bear fruit? Well, that’s all of us, of course! Likewise with today’s reading, the explanation radically changes the nature of the parable turning it from a meditation on the ambiguity of the world and the nature of evil into an apocalyptical allegory, an allegory about the end of the world, with judgment at its core.

So, why would they do this? Well, if they are about judgment, they make everything very neat and tidy and orderly; and we like that kind of thing. And, if we are so inclined; if we are in a position to exercise power, they provide for us the rationale for judging certain individuals or groups of people as being unacceptable, unlovable, and irredeemable and therefore not worthy of being part of the group. We have a biblical justification for excluding certain people.

This practice destroys the power of the parable. Parables are intentionally wildly open-ended, ambiguous, and unpredictable. That’s part of what makes them so enduring because we are continually drawn back into them as we discover new depths and nuances of meaning.

For some reason, that kind of ambiguity makes us uncomfortable. But a life lived with God is chock full of paradox and ambiguity. Just think for a moment about some the things we accept as principles of the faith: 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 forgive is to be forgiven. 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 already breaking into our lives.

One of the things I appreciate about the Lutheran tradition is that an embrace of paradox is baked right in. Law and Gospel. Sanctified sinners. Paradox is par for the course for us and is woven into the fabric of our faith.  These seeming contradictions are what give the Christian religion heft, credibility, and its truth, because it’s a reflection of the reality that life is messy. If we live in a world that's full of contradiction, then we need a religion robust enough and complex enough to bear the weight of that messy world. We need a religion that empowers us, in Richard's Rohr's beautiful words, "to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality."  It means to love the "both-and," the in-between, the mystery.

But that’s messy and we don’t like messy. It's no coincidence that a lot of the heresies that roiled Christianity over the past couple thousand years grew from an inability to accept paradox: Jesus can't be fully God and fully human, so let's choose one. God can't be present in creation and transcendent at the same time, so narrow that down. The God of all riches can’t possibly favor the poor, so let's preach prosperity theology. It can’t be possible that a holy God is okay with human pleasure, so let's teach austerity.

It takes courage to say, "This is true — and this is also true. I don't know how, but God promises to show us new and beautiful things if we’ll venture into the tension of this both-and, and wait for more light, more wisdom, more truth." In our Gospel reading this week, Jesus invites us to practice this kind of courage. Jesus asks us to hold two seemingly contradictory truths in uncomfortable tension. One: evil is real, noxious, and among us. And two: our response to evil must include both acknowledgment and restraint. 

Evil is real, noxious, and among us:  For many modern Christians, this is the harder of two two truths to accept.  I mean, “evil” is such an old-fashioned, heavy-duty sort of word. It has an ugly history within the Church, a history of exclusion and wounding. Isn’t it time we dispensed with such extreme language in favor of something softer?  Gentler?  More enlightened? Do we really need to call anyone or anything evil? Jesus clearly has no such issue with the term. He states unequivocally that evil is real, insidious, intentional, and dangerous. Evil, in the parable of the wheat and the weeds, is no mistake or accident. The weeds Jesus describes are intentionally sown into the field by a real enemy whose motivations are loveless and sinister. The literal weeds (which many scholars believe is darnel or “false wheat”) are not harmless — they’re poisonous. They mimic the look and color of nourishing grain, but they’re fake, and their seeds can cause illness and even death if consumed in large quantities.

There’s nothing enlightened about denying the reality of evil in our world and in our midst. We are, 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 weeds, good and evil, the fruitful and the poisonous. We are each, in Martin Luther’s words, “simul justus et peccator”:  At the same time both sinner and saint. To confess this is not to extreme or puritanical — it is discerning and wise. It is to live in reality. And it is to believe Jesus.

But Jesus also assures us that evil is doomed: “At harvest time, I’ll instruct my reapers to collect, bundle, and burn the weeds.” Again, this is a truth that doesn’t always sit well with many of us in the 21st century. Yet, if this parable offers unequivocally good news for the world’s most downtrodden, disenfranchised, tormented, wounded, and oppressed, then why are we uncomfortable with its sweeping promise? At some level, we recognize that despite our best intentions that we are so intertwined with the evil that exists in the world around us, we fear we cannot be separated from it without bringing harm to ourselves.

Jesus promises his listeners that justice is both necessary for an abundant harvest, and certain because God wills it.  Yes, the weeds may win out in this lifetime — Jesus doesn’t deny the grim reality of life here and now. Evil may claim victory for many seasons, lifetimes, and generations. But the passionate, protective, and deeply righteous love of God will not permit evil to rule the world forever. Oppression will end. Injustice will die. The wheat will thrive, and the weeds will not. “All causes of evil and all evildoers,” Jesus says, will be exposed and disempowered. All causes of evil. The causes we condemn in others, and the causes we complacently excuse in ourselves. The causes that are personal, and the causes that are systemic. The causes we know about, and the causes we don’t. All causes of evil.  No exceptions. 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. 

Like the servants, we tend to be more confident than humble when it comes to moral gardening: “Jesus, trust me, I know how to separate the weeds from the wheat.  Let’s get the work over with now — why wait?  Let’s settle the question of who is good, and who is bad.  Who belongs, and who does not.” 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. Why? Well, because he knows that in reality it’s like trying to pick fly poop out of pepper while you’re wearing boxing gloves.

Jesus knows that we can’t police the wheat field without damaging the wheat. We can’t rid ourselves of everything bad without distorting everything good. When we rush ahead of God and start yanking weeds left and right, we do terrible harm to ourselves and to the field. Our sincerity devolves into arrogance. Our love devolves into judgment. Our holiness devolves into hypocrisy. And the field suffers. 

The seeds of God’s life in us are still young and growing. Our roots are delicate and tender, and they need time. We must 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, because it’s not ours. It’s God’s. And only God loves is enough to bring it safely to harvest.

So once again we are called by Jesus to a complicated in-between place:  A paradox. Evil is real, noxious, and among us, and our response to evil must include both acknowledgment and restraint. If that worries you, remember that we are held and embraced by a God who sees far beyond our thin, one-dimensional understanding of truth. And that’s a good thing. 

We’re held in God’s embrace: a deep place. An abundant place. A generous, sufficient, and roomy place. We might fear paradox. At the very least, we very often find it very uncomfortable. But God does not, and it’s in God’s soil that we are firmly planted. We’re safe, even in the contradictions. Messy and weedy for sure, but safe.  AMEN