Today our Gospel is the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds. Or, as it was called in the old days: The Parable of the Wheat and the Chaff.
Parables are confusing because they often don’t mean what they appear to say. If we just stay on the surface of the story we won’t really “get it”-- and 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 can’t believe that. I just won’t believe that. It doesn’t gibe with how I experience God. And, it makes me nuts to think that someone who has been injured by the church before, someone who’s been demeaned or degraded by someone “in the name of God” would choose today to finally walk back through these doors and hear this parable, without any explanation. Parables need to be dug into…for only in digging can we reach the richness of the dark and fertile soil that 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 weed. But it just isn’t that cut and dry. As anyone who’s 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: Is it a flowerI? Or is it a weed?
Do you know that hostas, those ubiquitous plants of hearty character and wide variety, were originally considered a weed? But over time and through some intentional taming, we now consider it a viable garden plant. 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.
This is because the Evil One, the sower of weeds, lurks within each of us-- it's not an outside force—it’s an inside job. As St. Paul says in today’s Epistle: “if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” Throughout biblical history are stories of people being jealous of each other, of desperately wanting what another has. Not because we donLt have enough, but because somehow we want the other person to have less. We don’t like this part of ourselves, but this part is within all of us…just looks t what happened between Cain and Abel and then as we heard earlier, Jacob and Esau? Working to live into the fullness of God means that we have to turn away from the deep-seated ways of the past—-of dog eat dog, every man and woman for themselves mentality. We need to lose the old ways of decay and death, and embrace the new way 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. Wheat—-Gorgeous flower gardens, rows of crops are trickier—they need attention, nurture, and care.
The theologian Karl Rahner says that in all we do we’re either moving toward God or 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 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, disbelief and despair are the stuff of weeds, the stuff of Not-God, the stuff of darkness—-blocking us from the fullness of God.
Sometimes we are wheat…and sometimes we are weeds. Sometimes we do the work of God—-feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, standing up for the abused and the discarded…and sometimes the darkness wins and we serve ourselves instead of our neighbor, we pass by the lost, we dismiss the downtrodden and we fail to respect the dignity of every human being, regardless of the color of their skin, the gender of their beloved or the name they use for God.
But don’t fear when the weeds infiltrate our life, when our choices lead us astray, when our faith withers, don’t give up on the harvest— focus on the good: the wheat, the flowers, the stuff of God in your life.
Because, when we focus on the Good, 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.
“Let anyone with ears listen:” God doesn’t toss any of us into an unquenchable fire.
We may be weeds a lot more often that we wish. We may move away from God more frequently than we care to admit, 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 for the Good, we’ll discover that God has always and will always be there, deep within us, ready to toss away the chaff of fear and the weeds of doubt, freeing us to bloom into the bouquet of Love which is God. +
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