Weeding

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.27.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 13:24-30; 36-43

I’d really and truly meant to get around to weeding.  

There they were, right there in front of my house, the two little everbearing strawberry patches that I’d put in over the last two years.  They’d been wildly productive last year, to the point where I found myself with more strawberries than I knew what to do with.

I mean, here I was with so many strawberries that I was making big batches of homemade strawberry jam on my Monday mornings, which was both delicious and satisfying and vaguely unsettling to my self-image.  Homemade jam?  I’m making homemade strawberry jam?  I’m a loner and a rebel, born to be wild, a manly man!  I almost left the kitchen at that moment, almost threw a leg over my motorcycle to roar around Annandale like Brando in the Wild Bunch.  But I was worried that I might feel compelled to stop at Michaels for knitting supplies, so I just went on making jam.

I almost lost those berries this year, as voles nibbled and gnawed their way through my patches.  Terrible little beasties, voles are, more or less just little little hairy tubes with teeth at the front.  They don’t just steal the berries, like those chipmunk devils.  They eat the leaves and the roots and the whole plant, leaving your patch looking like the set of some World War One movie.  But I beat ‘em, and the patch recovered enough to yield enough strawberries for at least one little jar of delicious jam this year.

As summer got rolling, though, things got busy.  Kid shuttling and wrangling picked up.  I started more aggressively reading and prepping for my doctoral project.  And as the strawberries continued to recover, their spring fruiting done, I just couldn’t quite get around to them.

Here and there, other plants began to push their way in.  A little bit of barnyardgrass here, and a spot of clover there, a little bit of creeping spreadwell over there.  But I was busy, and life was busy, and it really wasn’t that bad.  Just a little greener, and a little less orderly.  So the days went by, filled with reading and writing and shuttling, and then came two weeks away on vacation.  I just couldn’t worry about it.  And strawberries are robust things, I’d tell myself.  They can handle it.  So I left it.

When I returned after a week and a half, you could barely see the strawberry plants.  Both patches were almost completely overgrown, swamped by a riot of grassy and broadleafed invaders who had taken advantage of my distraction.  Some of the weeds had grown so tall that they were pushing up the netting I’d put into place to keep out the birds, making the whole garden look like a tent, like a tiny little circus of weeds.  The strawberries were struggling, poking their heads out here and there.

It had been too long, and the process of uprooting the great tangle of matted life that was crushing out next years jam was going to be a long and difficult one.

You just can’t put off weeding.  You have to stay on it, constantly and consistently, or your garden won’t be the thing you hope it to be.

That image--of a garden teeming with weeds---is the central metaphor in the story Jesus tells today about a garden.  Most of the parables that Jesus tells play their way out across all three of the synoptic gospels.  When Matthew has Jesus telling a story, the odds are that Luke and Mark will tell it.

This story--of the wheat and the tares, or the wheat and the weeds--is unique to Matthew.  It comes in a sequence of teachings, all of which have to do with harvest and growing things.  There’s last week’s Parable of the Sower, then today’s parable, then the Parable of the Mustard Seed, followed by the Parable of the Yeast.  Growth and grain and harvest, it’s one after another.  The earnest soul who compiled the Gospel of Matthew likes things orderly and logical, and from all of the oral histories and written fragments he had available from Jesus he gives us this neat little thematic package.  

If there’d been a Parable of The Husband Who Went to Home Depot Five Times In One Day, this is where you’d find it in Matthew.

As Jesus plays these teachings off of his primarily agrarian audience, they would have struggled with them. Parables were, as I mentioned in last week’s sermon, designed to challenge and push a group of listeners, and this one was evidently no exception.

Again, we hear that the disciples came to him.  This one, at least, they were more straightforward about asking him to ‘splain.  “Alright, we know, we know, you’re at it with the parables again.  What did *that* one mean.”

Jesus breaks it down in terms of an apocalyptic conflict, with weeds and wheat being the different sorts of individuals that populate the field of the world.  Like most apocalyptic thinking, it tends to be binary in character.  There is good, and there is bad.  There is black and white, right and wrong.  It’s like a lightswitch, or a single bit of data.  So here we get weeds and wheat, and later in Matthew we get sheep and goats.

The point of this teaching is to help the listeners frame their understanding of existence, and to help them grasp why there are so many weedy people in the world.  And here, we’re not talking about the citizens of Colorado or Washington state.  We’re talking about the folks who seem to live to crowd out every seed of new promise that rises up.  Why, when so many human beings have only peace and compassion as their hope for being, are there so many others who seem to yearn to destroy that compassion wherever they find it?

Understanding this was particularly important for Matthew’s first audience, the church to which he wrote.  They lived at a time of intense challenge for the church, as the early followers of the Way of Jesus were both being thrown out of the synagogues where they’d grown up and being persecuted by the Roman authorities. Remembering this story would have been important to them, and to Matthew.

“Why,” say those who are being harmed, “are there people harming us?”  Why, they would have wondered, is the light we are trying to shine into the world being blotted out?  And what should we do about it?  To them, this parable counsels patience and forbearance.  Keep growing, it says.  Trust that God will settle all.  There is no call for vengeance, or for the children of the kingdom to take up the sword.  

And that’s important, because I think there’s a powerful and dangerous tendency for human beings to hear this parable in a very different way.  We hear it, and we know, of course, that we’re the righteous.  Of course we are.  Everything we do is right, and everything we think is right, and so say all of us, and so say all of us.

We look to those with whom we disagree, and we see weeds.  We look to our opponents, and we see those who need to be rooted out, torn away, burned, and discarded.  It becomes an excuse to set ourselves apart as the good and the valuable, and others as weak and worthless.  And so we start tearing them out, ripping and attacking, and in doing so, we don’t just pull up weeds.  We tear out the good with the bad, doing more harm than if we’d simply waited until everything bore fruit.

Reading across all of the teachings of Jesus, this just doesn’t fly.  Jesus showed no such partiality, not in any of the Gospel stories.  Still and all, it’s a dangerous temptation, one that I try to avoid by taking this teaching of Jesus one level deeper.  

I focus less on worrying about whether or not you’re a dandelion or kudzu and how much Holy Ghost Roundup I should be spraying on you, and more on the weeds that I have let run riot in my own soul.  What matters, and where we have the right to make change, is within the boundaries of our own selves.

And there, I’m deeply aware of the dangers of my own laziness, of the deep risks of avoiding the discipline it takes to be a disciple, and just letting whatever grows grow.

Be sure, as you live, not to let yourself be indifferent to the one place you can have effect, and to spend your life worrying about the business of others.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.