+Today our Gospel is the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds. Or, as it was called in the old days: The Wheat and the Chaff.
Parables are confusing because they don’t just mean what they say. As a matter of fact they may not mean what they say at all. There’s more to them…a hidden truth. You see these stories, while not actually factual, are often VERY TRUE.
Although none of us is actually a crop, a plant or a flower….sometimes we are wheat, and sometimes we are weeds.
Parables, as Jerome Berryman, the creator of the Godly Play church school curriculum says, are difficult, so we need to be ready to dig into them. You see parables, when we’re ready to hear and explore them usually tell us just what it is we need to hear….not necessarily what we want to hear, but what we need to hear. They’re designed for us to visit again and again, taking a little something else out of them, something different, something more, each time. But this requires work, for if we don’t work at it, if we don’t dig into it, we’ll just stay on the top of it, hearing the story, but missing the meaning.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to stay on the top of this parable. On the surface, it suggests there’s an “in group” and an “out group,” that God would take God’s own beloved children and banish them to eternal damnation and hellfire. I just can’t believe that. I just won’t believe that. It doesn’t gibe with who I experience God to be. And, it makes me nuts to think that someone who has been injured by the church would choose today to finally walk back through these doors and hear this parable, without any explanation, without any digging. For only in digging can we reach the richness of the dark and fertile soil which makes up this story.
On the surface, the world seems divided into two camps—the good and the evil. The in and the out. The wheat and the chaff/weed. But it just isn’t that cut and dry: as anyone who has tried to weed a garden can attest, weeds can look like flowers and flowers can look like weeds. At first glance, it’s really difficult to know what you’re looking at: a weed? A flower? Is it wheat? Or is it chaff? Do you know that hostas, those ubiquitous plants of hearty character and wide variety was originally considered a weed? Which is wheat and which is weed? It’s hard to tell. Today’s weed just may be tomorrow’s wheat. (or hosta!)
We all have weeds. We all have wheat. We all have both, we all are both. Some days we’re more weedy than others. And, thankfully, other days we’re more wheaty. Some days we’re who we want to be, other days we aren’t.
The Evil One, the sower of weeds, lurks within each of us-- there’s no outside creature doing this-it’s an inside job. As St. Paul phrases it in today’s Epistle: “if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” We are all “groaning in labor pains” as we strive to be the creation God intended, losing the old ways of decay and death, embracing the new ways of growth and life. We can hold on to the old ways or we can let them go. It’s up to us. We can stay as a weed or we can grow into wheat. Weeds are easy—they grow fast, need virtually no tilling, no fertilizing, no encouragement to grow. Crops like wheat, flowers, plants, are trickier, they need attention, they need nurture, they need care.
You’ve heard me preach about whether we’re doing things that move us toward God or whether we’re doing things that move us away from God. When we’re moving toward God, we’re letting the light of Christ nurture us and care for us, when we move toward God we are tilling our very souls with faith, belief and hope. When we’re moving away from God we’re letting the darkness of doubt, the uneasiness of disbelief and the decay of despair rule. These doubts, this disbelief and this despair is the stuff of weeds, the stuff of evil, the stuff of the devil, blocking us from the richness of God.
And this so –called Evil One, this devil? It isn’t an outside force, it’s totally is within our control, because it is within us. Each of us. You see, the battle between Good and Evil isn’t waged between God and some cartoonish being with horns, a tail and a pitchfork, the battle God wages is within us, convincing us to shun fear, shatter doubt and thresh disbelief from our very souls. We need to listen and to look, we need to hear and to notice, we need to continually move toward God…doing what we know is right, standing up for what we know is just, believing that what we’ve been promised by God, through Jesus Christ, is always available to us.
So when we find the weeds infiltrating our life, when our choices have led us astray, our decisions become mistakes, and our faith withers, don’t give up on the harvest; till your life with loving care, focusing on the wheat, the flowers, the good: The stuff of God in your life. For, when we focus on the Good, the bad and the evil, the “not of God” stuff will be overcome, overwrought and overthrown by a power greater than any weed, a force stronger than any evil, a Love bigger than any Doubt. To repeat the words of Jesus: “Let anyone with ears listen:” God doesn’t toss any of us into an unquenchable fire. We do it to ourselves. We may be weeds a lot more often that we wish. We may move away from God more frequently than we care to admit. We may blame our choices on some fictional caricature of a pitch fork toting red tailed being with evil coursing through their veins, but once we settle into the promise of our faith, once we till the soil of our souls, once we dig deep enough into our desire, we’ll discover that God has always and will always be there, deep within us, ready to toss the chaff of fear, the weeds of doubt away, freeing the garden which is us to bloom into the bouquet of Love which is God. +
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