Weeds

Isaiah 34: 13-14

Hebrews 6: 7-8

Matthew 13: 24-30

Weeds

When I was a kid growing up on a farm in Northwest Ohio, I learned a little about weeds. We had livestock, but all my uncles had crops of various kinds. Sometimes tomatoes, sometimes pickles, sometimes sugar beets in addition to corn, wheat, oats. My uncles all had farms adjacent to each other, and I was cheap labor for them. I was often sent out during early summer to hoe the tomato fields or the sugar cane fields. Chemicals have taken care of some of that for many crips now. One of my uncles once taught me that all weeds were not the same and could not be destroyed in the same way.

Some had shallow but widespread roots and had to be pulled out to get all the roots—not a fun job. If you hacked them off at the ground level with a hoe it would be back in a week. A milkweed has a very long tap root that could not be pulled out. If you did try to pull it up, three separate sprouts would be back in a week. Milkweeds had to be hacked off with a hoe and would "bleed" and die as the sap ran out. If you didn't handle the weeds right, hours of backbreaking work in the sun would be completely wasted. Also, if you weren’t careful, you could hack out good plants with the weeds. So it wasn’t all just hoeing, it involved a lot of hand weeding close around the plants too. Tedious and hard work for a kid in the field alone on warm summer days.

I kind of liked the approach to gardening Emment one of the maintenance crew in our parks in New Jersey had. He planted a big garden.  He worked the soil well, planted his stuff very carefully, and then let it all go. He didn’t bother with weeding. His attitude was that what survived was the best, and he simply harvested it amongst the weeds.

Jesus knew his weeds well. The meaning of Jesus' parable about the wheat and the weeds becomes clearer when we look at the specific kind of weed he talks about. The weeds Jesus spoke of are called tares in that part of the world, and that is the word used in the King James version. Tares are bearded darnel, and they are mentioned only in Matt. 13:25-30. It is the Lolium temulentum, a species of rye-grass, the seeds of which are a strong soporific poison. It bears the closest resemblance to wheat till the grain heads appear, and only then the difference is discovered. It grows plentifully in Syria and Palestine.

The problem with taking our hoe to the evil weeds of the world is that good and evil sometimes look so much alike. It only becomes clear later.  You know, you and I could spend the rest of our lives protecting that boundary, standing shoulder to shoulder with pitchforks and clubs, making sure that we kept drugs and alcohol and pornography and gambling safely on the other side. I think it would take all of our energy and most of our time.

But what if we did it? What if we succeeded? What would we have? We would have a town characterized by the absence of evil, which is not the same as a town characterized by the presence of good. And maybe this is what Jesus was talking about all along, that it's better to have a wheat field with weeds in it than a field with nothing in it at all.

When a church in Wingate, North Carolina, began a ministry to the children of a nearby trailer park, they had to decide what kind of ministry it would be. They could have chosen to root out all the sources of evil in that place-to chase down the drug dealers and the deadbeat dads, to confiscate handguns and arrest child abusers. Instead, they chose to put up a basketball goal, create a place to tell stories from the Bible, to feed and put their arms around little children, and sing songs about Jesus. And listen to the older ones when they wanted to talk and ask questions.

 And two years after they started that ministry, two years of going out there Saturday after Saturday to do those things, the pastor got a note in his box at church with five words on it: "Adrian wants to be baptized." Adrian. The terror of the trailer park. That little girl who had made their work most difficult during the previous two years. Who would have guessed? Instead of pulling weeds in the field where she lived, they just tried hard to be wheat, and somehow Adrian saw that and fell in love with it and wanted it for herself. After she was baptized, there was a little more wheat in the field. And because she was there, soon, there was even more. Other youth came to be baptized as well  And they began to change the community far more than the church people could have if they had simply started out to get rid of the adult weeds.

It is not up to us to judge. It is our task to serve.

There are pastors and even whole church groups who continually want to cull the field, making decisions on the basis of belief ... behavior. Over the centuries whole wars were fought over rather petty differences in beliefs. And some people were burned at the stake for being different. The church leaders wanted them weeded out. Then they burned them up.

As for me, I don't always know whether I am weed or wheat. Wasn't it Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said: "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." Which, I suppose, includes my heart. For all I know, I may even be the weed in somebody else's garden. Perhaps in your garden.

If you read just a little further on, you see then that Jesus left the crowd and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field."

Jesus answered, "The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.

"As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear."

On its surface, there is not much more to be said about this parable except make sure we are not the weeds.

Amen