“Dont Weed”

Karen Sloan 23/07/2023

Readings -Matt 13:24-30

He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

Carrie Newcomer – A permeable Life : From the World Around us:

I want to leave enough room in my heart
For the unexpected,
For the mistake that becomes knowing,
For knowing that becomes wonder,
For wonder that makes everything porous,
Allowing in and out
All available light.

An impermeable life is full to the edges,
But only to the edges.
It is a limited thing.
Like the pause at the center of the breath,
Neither releasing or inviting,
With no hollow spaces
For longing and possibility.

I would rather live unlocked,
And more often than not astonished,
Which is possible
If I am willing to surrender
What I already think I know.

So I will stay open
And companionably friendly,
With all that presses out from the heart
And comes in at a slant
And shimmers just below
The surface of things.

Sermon – Don’t Weed!

Stories, we all have stories.  As I’m a bookaphile I love a good story.

But our faith tradition is also full of stories.  Why? Because stories speak to us in ways that are very powerful, we can hear ourselves in a story, even if the story was written 2,000 years ago.

The parables of Jesus are stories that even today can influence how we live and work. Stories that challenge and mock us, make us laugh and cry, and above all examine how we are to be in the world. They are the most authentic words of Jesus and they have little to do about rules and a heavenly realm and a lot to do about the kingdom of God here and now, in this life.

Bernard Brandon Scott, a founding member of the Jesus seminar, and a scholar of the parables, writes “the parables give us access to the way Jesus re-imagined the possibility of living, of being in the world.  They are not just religious, not just about God, although they are that too… they are multifaceted reimagining’s of life, of the possibilities of life”. 

With that in mind, that parables can speak to us in any age, in multiple ways, let’s look at the one from today. And of course it’s quite familiar to many of us, although it’s message never gets old!

It is the second of 3 parables, set in a farming context about seeds and sowing. 

In this one we have a landowner who sows a paddock full of wheat. While a seemingly normal operation, there then appears to be an act of subversion, by an enemy.   The wheat grows but there is also a weed which grows, called darnel. It’s a grass that is found in the same zones where wheat is produced and looks much like wheat when it is immature.  Unfortunately its roots intertwine with those of the wheat and its toxic grains become loosely attached to the stem.  The problem is what to do with an infested field.  Pull up the weeds or let the darnel and the wheat grow together.

The rural areas of Jesus time were in crisis.  In a society where the rural farmers where being squeezed out by the rich landowners, where the Roman Empire and the priestly elite were all wanting their share,  where unemployment was rising and an new taxation system was being introduced there was mounting anger and frustration. There was a sense of an "us and them" mentality growing.   

As Bill Loader suggests, this is not a new phenomenon.  “A sense that there is an enemy marks many societies, religious or otherwise.  It is almost as though we need an enemy, an other, against whom to define ourselves.  This need will sometimes sustain images of enemies for survival. There is them and there is us.  This is the stuff of prejudice.  Religion is often exploited to hold the prejudices in place”.

Into this comes Jesus with his story about wheat and weeds. 

And for a moment we will only focus on the parable and not the interpretation which has been added, and which we didn’t read. You can read it later if you like.  There has been a great deal of analysing of this parable, even here in the bible, and the focus has been on judgement day and an image of God who is in the end unforgiving and vengeful.  It’s been added by Matthew partly to motivate his listeners and to suggest in the end they will be accountable to God.  Yet I don’t think this is what Jesus was on about. We need to remember parables have a punch line, a point of surprise, where expectations are overturned, here and now.  It should hit us firmly in the face, and if it doesn’t then we haven’t got it.

So what about this parable..

There were many ways to respond to it in Jesus’s time depending on your perception, whether you were the rich landowner, the peasants who have no land and are being squeezed out or an unemployed worker  To weed or not to weed would be the question they would all be asking themselves as they heard it. 

Yet Jesus says “don’t weed”.

Don’t weed…..  what!

What about my money, what about my bosses profit, what about my livelihood which is needed to support my family, what about the future of the wheat itself, those seeds will infect the crop….

In Matthew’s time the listeners may well have been the early Christian communities, who wanted to isolate those who were deemed unholy.  Or between Jewish Jesus followers and those who were orthodox.  Neither group wanted to accept the other. Each viewed the other as weeds, themselves as wheat.

But Jesus says “don’t weed”

Don’t weed….what!

What about those followers who don’t do what is holy, don’t believe what is right and true, what about those infidels who follow other Gods and other religions…

Let us place this story in our time, what does our society want to weed out..…..

Muslims, Jews, anyone whose faith is different

Christians who don’t believe what we believe.

Lazy, no hopers who continually need our welfare to live on…

Greenies who keep banging on about climate change....? Who we need more than ever!

So called refugees who come from countries in crisis to our land, take our jobs and require our support…

Those who are homeless, indigenous, those who are in jail, even those who are sex offenders….

The list can go on.

Yet Jesus says, “Don’t weed!”

……….

While  you may have a different take on the parable depending how it talks to you, this is my response..

I hear Jesus saying, don’t separate into us and them.  Don’t judge others as less worthy because we say they are! Because they don’t have the right colour, economic credentials or background or religious beliefs. It contrasts our normal ingrained notions of who belongs and who doesn’t, of who’s worthy and who isn’t.  It throws up our normal assumptions and is incredibly challenging.  It’s what a parable should do, because sometimes we have a blind spot about ourselves which can lead us to judge and judge harshly.  

As Paulo Coelho from the alchemist writes,

“If someone isn’t what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

But I also think there is more. For me, it’s also about not giving up on people.  This is not about setting aside the call of the kingdom of justice and peace, because in the end Jesus is wanting people to follow him and his message.   But Jesus also calls us to never write people off, to never forget that the basis of that kingdom is love and compassion.  Love and compassion and forgiveness for all people. And hope that it will bear fruit. That in all of us is the possibility of transformation.

So he says don’t weed, let the wheat and the weeds grow together. Let us sow our wheat, our love, everywhere, As Jim Forest suggests, “the enemy sows tares or weeds in our field of wheat, but we sow wheat in his field of tares. And thus we confess our faith”.

We keep planting. And we don’t weed.

Because maybe after all,  it’s God’s garden, and everyone, everyone belongs in it.

This is the re-imagined world of the parables.  A reimagined permeable world, where the light can get in, if we leave space. 

Amen