wheat and weeds

The gospel reading for Sunday July 20, 2014, as per the revised common lectionary, was Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.  It recounts Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds, a story I don't remember hearing before.  Between the two chunks of the passage listed in the lectionary lie the parables of the mustard seed and of yeast.  I know those parables well, as they both made an appearance in my children's bible growing up.

I happened to have volunteered to preach at the Wednesday night service prior to this particular Sunday, and we often use the lectionary texts for the coming Sunday.  I was trying to figure out what to share with our small congregation, whether to stray from lectionary (which is totally fine) and maybe recycle all or parts of a sermon I'd used before, or take the challenge of creating something new from the prescribed scripture reading.  I opted for the latter, though having read the passage from Matthew, I knew that this challenge would be interesting.

I posted this plea to my Facebook friends.

and got a slew of suggestions.  Thank goodness for social media!

Here are many thoughts and ideas on this parable.

Some ideas are mine, 

some I've paraphrased, 

some are simply someone else's. 

As best I can while still maintaining some amount of privacy for my friends, I have given credit where credit is due.

[Warren Carter]
The parable warns us that now is not the time to be presuming to know final outcomes.

[David Lose]
Our lives are littered with situations where there is no clear or easy answer. And yet we rarely talk about these things in church. Maybe we don’t know what to say. Or maybe we ourselves aren’t quite sure how the faith relates to this. But I hear in this parable Jesus’ promise that in ambiguous, challenging situations we have the promise that, in the end, God will sort things out.

[Karoline Lewis]
Can't God do something about the enemy, right now? Our plan as Christians is not to eradicate the world of all evil at every turn - that's God's job.
Who do you think you are? God?
When we start going down the road of making our lot in life electing what is good and evil, we may very well discover that others will make similar conclusions about us.
It's God's job to sort the wheat from the weeds - not ours.
This parable tells us simply to BE.
The workers ask, "should we pull the weeds now?"
The farmer tells us, "no the harvesters and I will take care of it later." (aka it's not your job!)

[Chris]
weeds/wheat = sinner/saint (woven in, cannot be separated easily) and burned/gathered = the process of cleansing, new creation rather than the troublesome heaven/hell concept.

[Bridget]
{Tom Long} thought that the parable is really about reconciling a loving God with the fact that bad things happen in the world. When the disciples ask, "Where did the weeds come from?" they are asking, "God, why did this happen? Is this your will? Is this your fault?" And God says, "An enemy did this," or "No, I didn't bring evil to the world." The servants ask, "Can we fix it, or will it always be this way?" God reassures them that one day hurt and brokenness and evil will be eliminated, but until then we will all live with the bad things that happen to us. He is obviously ignoring the part where Jesus explains the parable, but it's possible that Jesus didn't actually say that part and Matthew put it in to encourage/give incentives to the early Christian community.

[Barb] 

It’s too easy to separate humanity into two groups - them and us; the good and the bad. In reality, life is not like that. Most of us are both good and bad - wheat and weeds. People are like a field into which both good and bad seed have been sown. Jesus’ concern is not to separate the wheat from the weeds, but rather than none of the wheat be lost.

[an article from Rachel Held Evans]

This Sunday I ended up going to a Catholic church,

because I was out of town, 

and just for kicks. 

Lo and behold, the same gospel passage arose!

Coming from a Protestant background, I didn't know what sort of angle the priest might take in his sermon.  I certainly had a brief fear and preconceived notion that it would be a "fire and brimstone" message, but I was pleasantly surprised.  Just goes to show that you can't judge a sermon (or someone's faith/beliefs) on the denomination.

We live in a world of both wheat and weeds.
As imperfect beings,
made up of both the good and the bad,
God calls us to be the best wheat we can
and wait for the day when God will take care of the weedy-ness of the world.
Let God be the judge
and let us just be.