July 20, 2008
Rev. Patricia L. Liberty
Who’s to Say?
One of the advantages of living closer to my home town than I have in the last twenty five years is reconnecting with friends from high school and getting caught up on the news of my long ago classmates. It’s fun and interesting to see where folks have ended up.
Some of it is predictable. Jennifer was the brainiac of our class. She zipped right through college and then went on to Harvard Law and is now a partner in some hot shot law firm. It was easy to see that coming.
Then there’s Kevin who drank his body weight in alcohol before every school function and spent more time suspended than present. He is now clean and sober, a substance abuse counselor for adolescents
Wendell, was quiet, smart ambitious, a financial wizard for a computer company, currently a resident at some country club correctional facility for crunching a few numbers right into his offshore bank account.
Carol…shy, dorky, socially awkward, wallflower type who went on to college and medical school and is a pediatric oncologist specializing in brain tumors.
What a crew….who could foresee that change and chance would launch us in such different and unpredictable directions?
Yours truly…received, in abstentia and one reunion, the most unlikely career choice award…I won’t tell you how I am described by my classmates as I would like to preserve some shred of credibility with you all. At my ordination it was my family and friends who most consistently commented, we never thought you’d make it.
The point is most of us end up some place other than where we thought we might and the combination of choice and chance and change offers more than a few surprises as our days unfold. Or to put it in a button size thought that you can wear on your lapel.
PBPGIFWMY
Please be patient, God isn’t finished with me yet.
That’s part of the message from Matthew’s Gospel today; life unfolds along a trajectory that goes beyond our limited vision. God sees the big picture and the best we can hope for is to get a glimpse through God’s eyes.
Perhaps more than any other Gospel, Matthew deals with practical, human problems; the kind confronted every day by individual Christians and local communities. Matters like anger divorce, hypocrisy, taxes, church discipline and the power and place of possessions figure prominently in Matthew’s Narrative. Readers might not like what the text says, but they cannot argue that Matthew is abstract or that the Gospel avoids, routine, down to earth issues.
So here’s practical Matthew continuing his botanical discourse in the 13th Chapter talking about the wheat and the weeds, and he’s not just giving gardening advice, but talking about the church and the people who are a part of it at any given point in time.
The gardening observation is based in truth. Middle Eastern wheat is particularly subject to a noxious weed, the bearded darnel, or the Lolium temulentum a species of rye grass. (Useless Biblical factoid for this week)
It is virtually indistinguishable from wheat until the heads appear and it cannot be removed from the field without damaging the wheat because the roots are intertwined as they grow. First century hearers of this story would grab onto that essential truth as a jumping off point for a lesson in being community.
I want to look at it two ways. First in the individual sense, we are a combination of wheat and weeds. There is good and evil in all of us. None of us comes from totally pure motives; none of us are without conflict of priorities and moral uncertainty. We are not immune to temptation. We are all works in progress, unfolding along the life journey in ways that God can see but may not be clear to us or even to others.
What one of us wants to be known for the person we were 10 years ago, 20 years ago or more? There is always the possibility that we can change, grow, become something different than we were before by God’s grace. Surely there are times when I have been more weed than wheat in God’s garden; perhaps that is true for you as well. God isn’t finished with any of us quite yet…
Leads to the second way to look at this text. If the field is the world and the church and there is wheat and weeds and it’s not quite possible to figure out which is which…there are a couple things left to ponder. One of the points this story makes is that it’s God’s business to figure it all out and not ours to go pruning and ripping up and tossing out according to what we think is a weed.
Good news, because if I was having a weed moment I might have pruned out by some overzealous gardener trying to purify the field.
Second, it means that we are to exist side by side with those who are different from us, who think differently, believe differently, who push our buttons and make us uncomfortable, who challenge us and make us think, who disagree with our theology and question everything. There’s room for everyone here and it’s God’s business to sort it out. We are to be loving and patient and tolerant and discerning, waiting for the fruit to appear in God’s good time.
Easier said than done to be sure. Who’s to say what’s a weed and what’s wheat? The point is it is not our job to judge. The church and we will always be a mixture of motives, a jumble of desire and an inconsistent ally in the goals of God’s realm. It’s just the way it is.
And it’s not our job to cast out those whom we think are weeds. The church, throughout its history, has tried to rid itself of the “impure” and make a truly faithful community.
Take a moment and look around you. The quilts that adorn our sanctuary are made by our quilt group. These are the ugly quilts, and yes I have their permission to call them the ugly quilts. Each of these quilts began with a piece of fabric that was challenging, or…just plain ugly. In the hands of a skilled quilter the ugly fabric lines up with other fabric and a beautiful quilt emerges. It takes vision and persistence and passion.
The church is kind of like that. We all have ugly moments and gratefully we get lined up with someone who isn’t having an ugly moment and all kinds of beautiful things are made for God’s realm.
This text is a reminder that we can never be the ones to judge who should be in and who should be out. If we were ever to cry and create a perfectly pure church the buildings would be empty because none of us would qualify.
And therein lies both the comfort and the challenge. Any church that would have me or any of us for that matter is already less than perfect. And any church that would have us for members is at least willing to take a chance and see what God’s grace might do.
It’s not about being perfect, it’s about being faithful and discovering new dimensions to that as life unfolds. It’s God’s business to sort it all out and our business to root ourselves in the field as best we can and wait it out.
The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary notes,
It chronically comes as shock to find that the world, that the family into which we were born, that even the church is not an entirely trustworthy place. The church can be inspiringly courageous one moment and petty and faithless the next. Good mixes in with the bad.
Acknowledging that this is true is not a call to passivity in the face of evil. It is not a divine command to ignore injustice in the word violence in society, or wrong in the church. It is, rather, a realistic reminder that we do not finally have the ability to get rid of all the weeds and that sometimes attempts to pluck up the weeds cause more harm than good.
In this imperfect world, we are, like that goofy group of kids 30 years ago launched from high school, a work in progress, standing next to others who are also works in progress,
We are, individually and together a combination of weed and wheat, and it is not fully clear how it will all turn out and that’s okay. In God’s botany who’s to say who’s weed and who’s wheat?