July 20, 2008 – The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.
Last Sunday several members of our Gardner-Spring Hill ministry spent the afternoon in a service project down in Osawatomie. We were working at the home of Larry and Debbie Ratley, who had been flooded out of their home last year during the exceptionally heavy rains. They’ve spent the last year trying to rebuild – they lost all their belongings – pulling together what supplies they could find and afford. We’re used to seeing devastation in the news coverage of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, but in fact the same kind of disaster has happened, only on a smaller scale, just to the south of us. We found out about the Ratleys from another Advent member who has been donating his time over the last few months to help them out.
So about 16 of us spent the afternoon dry-walling and installing kitchen cabinets. We also had a chance to get to know the Ratleys, and what a terrific couple! Deeply engaged in their community, strongly committed to each other with the sort of passion that’s borne of shared adversity, and a welcoming hospitality toward us that drew us in and made us fast friends.
Hovering over the whole afternoon was a question. No one said it, but it continued to accompany me as I drove home: Why? Not the general, philosophical-theological question “Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?”, but the very specific, personal “Why Did This Particular Bad Thing Happen To These Particular Good People?”
Ah, that Why question. It’s certainly not a private question; we asked it as a nation on September 11, 2001. Why? And it certainly isn’t a modern question; six centuries before Jesus the prophet Jeremiah looked around at his nation, Israel, and called out to God, “Why do the guilty prosper? Why do the treacherous thrive?”
One of the irritating things about Jesus is that he rarely answers our direct questions directly. Instead, he tells stories that end up making his point, while maybe or maybe not addressing ours.
He tells a story in this morning’s Gospel lesson, and we can only guess at the question that might have prompted it. Maybe it was something like, “Lord, there are so many faithful and good people who fill these crowds that come to hear you and learn from you; why are there also so many who find fault, who criticize, who doubt?” Or maybe it was a very personal question, something like, “Lord, all my life in my dealings with other people I’ve tried to do the right thing; I’ve tried to be faithful to God. But look at this illness that threatens to take my life; why am I afflicted?”
Jesus tells a story. A landowner sows good seed in his wheat field. But in the dead of night an enemy overplants the wheat with weeds. It’s called darnel, and the deceptive thing about darnel is that in the early stages of growth it’s almost identical to wheat. It’s only after the plants bear grain that the difference becomes obvious; the grain from the darnel plant is a different color than that of wheat, and that’s important to note, because darnel is poisonous.
The field hands want to go and yank up the weeds, but the landowner says, “No! By now the root systems of both plants are so intertwined that to pull up one is to pull up the other. No; let them all grow up together. When it comes time for the harvest, I’ll take care of the weeds.”
Jesus says that God is like that, that God refuses to sort it all out, the good from the bad, the evil from the righteous, the just from the unjust, this side of the harvest, the final judgment; Why? Maybe it’s because, as the parable says, the landowner is afraid that the weeding process would be fatal to the wheat. Or maybe the landowner hopes that the growing process itself will produce a bumper crop of wheat that will naturally crowd out the weeds. In any case, the landowner won’t do it, not yet.
Ah, but it would be so much better if he would, wouldn’t it? And better yet, if he let us do it for him? After all, we know who the bad ones are! Don’t we? At least, we think we do. But God refuses to act on our certainties, and he won’t let us act on them either. The New Testament letter of James says it well: “There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor?” (James 4:12) Behind this verse is a truth: We are not equipped for the task of weeding, of judging; only God is. As our First Lesson this morning puts it: Only God is the first and the last; only God has the authority.
To be sure, in this lesson there is a danger to the wheat. But the danger comes not from the weeds. In fact, the landowner doesn’t seem very concerned about them at all. The real danger to the wheat comes from the loyal workers whose good intentions would wipe out the entire harvest.
This is a most challenging, sobering lesson for a nation at war against “evildoers.”
And Jesus doesn’t give any easy answers. He doesn’t explain God’s actions or lack of them, doesn’t try to explain the origins of evil. He simply says that life in God’s garden is a messy enterprise of weeds and wheat growing up together, and that when it comes to the harvest, God insists on only one thing: waiting.
Patience is a virtue, but one that not many of us possess. We don’t want to wait for the bread to rise, the cake to bake, the tomatoes to ripen, the dawn to break. And, for the most part, we don’t have to: We flip a switch, swipe our debit card, and we can have whatever we want, right now.
But just as Jesus doesn’t answer our Why questions, God doesn’t act on our schedule. Because God waits, we wait; and we wait, as St. Paul says in our Second Lesson, with confidence that we are children of God.
Still, waiting is difficult. And Jesus says, basically, that if you don’t want to wait, that’s your problem; deal with it.
And deal with it we can, in a couple of positive ways.
We can, as this parable suggests, cultivate the whole field but pay special attention to cultivating the good. In his letter to the Philippians, St. Paul writes: “ … whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:8) The remarkable thing about this letter is that Paul wrote it while he was in prison, surrounded by ample opportunity and reason to concentrate on the dismal instead of the good.
Upset about the rising cost of energy? Do what you can to make your home more energy-efficient; ride a bike; walk more; do less.
Disillusioned by public officials who prove themselves to be incompetent? Don’t complain; get involved in a political campaign.
Discouraged that our national culture isn’t more focused on God? Don’t complain; come to a Bible study, get involved in a service project – begin to make a change in your own personal culture.
“ … whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, … think about these things.” And, we might add, actually do them!
The second thing we can do while we wait on God’s timing is to acknowledge the fact that people – you and I – are a complex tangle of both weeds and wheat.
Psychologists tell us that when we judge people, we actually condemn those qualities and characteristics in others that we find most objectionable in ourselves.
For example, I don’t like to be around selfish people. And I have to admit that there’s a streak of selfishness that runs through me. I don’t like it, but it’s there.
I also don’t like to be around prideful people. And I have to admit that there is a streak of pridefulness in me. I don’t like it, but it’s there.
In fact, we’re a mix, the kind of mixture that Luther had in mind when he said that the Christian is both saint and sinner at the same time. So thank God that God doesn’t weed us out when our own weediness threatens to overtake the good that God has planted in us. Instead, God lets us grow, wheat and weeds together, saint and sinner together, always cultivating us, always calling out from us our best, always calling us to choose what is good and honorable and life-giving.
On an autumn evening in Long Island, New York, 18-year-old Ryan Cushing and a few of his friends were out for an evening of joyriding and mischief-making. They thought it would be fun to stand on a freeway overpass and drop pieces of ice on cars as they sped by below. They thought it would be fun until Ryan dropped a large chunk of ice on a car and shattered not only the windshield but also the face of 44-year-old Victoria Ruvolo.
Ms. Ruvolo survived the incident and underwent a number of surgeries to try to restore the broken bones in her face. Ryan was arrested and charged with assault. Because of the severity of the crime, the prosecutor wanted to seek the maximum penalty: 25 years in prison. But at the trial Ms. Ruvolo insisted that the prosecutor offer a plea bargain: six months in jail and five years’ probation, the lightest sentence possible.
The judge was stunned, the prosecutor was stunned, the defense attorney was stunned. Grace exists, but you don’t expect to find it in a courtroom.
At the end of the proceedings, after Ryan accepted the plea bargain, he and Ms. Ruvolo encountered each other for the first time, in the courtroom. There they stood, face to face; only Ryan couldn’t bring himself to meet Ms. Ruvolo’s gaze. He stood there, head down, sobbing. He said he was sorry; he begged her to forgive him.
And she did. She embraced him for a moment, then stepped back and put a finger under Ryan’s chin, to lift it up so they could see each other face to face. “Ryan,” she said through the tears that streamed down her own damaged face, “I just want you to make your life the best it can be.”
She had a number of responses that she could have chosen, but Ms. Ruvolo chose what was good and commendable and life-giving, to Ryan, and to herself.
We wait, and while we wait for God to act, we cultivate the good. And we lean into that day that Jesus promised us, that day that is coming, that day when everything that defies the will of God, when everything that damages human life, in creation and within ourselves, will be burned away by the purifying and all-encompassing love of God. May we lean into that day with hope, and courage, and strong purpose. Amen.
