Good News for Weeds

Good News for Weeds

Matthew 13:24-30

Today is Bread Day here at Nelson Memorial, and there are lots of wonderful loaves of bread available for purchase this morning, which goes to support the work of our United Methodist Men. Bread is appropriate here in the church, of course. Jesus multiplied bread to feed the five thousand. Jesus broke the bread and gave it to his disciples in the Upper Room. The eyes of the disciples at Emmaus were opened with the breaking of the bread. The life of the early church, as recorded in Acts 2:42, was “devoted to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Besides being nourishing and pleasing to us, bread in the church carries deep meaning for us.

Of course, bread can carry other meanings, as well. When Pam and I were first married, she was working as a project clerk at an engineering firm, and I was a full-time seminary student and part-time pastor. It usually fell to me to have dinner on the table. Pam quickly learned what kind of day I had by what I prepared.

If it had been a good day in class and at the church, then supper was a simple affair – hamburgers, salad, and pasta. Pam knew when she saw a simple dinner, it had been a good day, and that the conversation would be easy.

If there had been a challenge at school or at the church that caused a little frustration, then there was a good chance that there would be home-made cookies for dessert. The smell of chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies would fill our small apartment, and Pam knew that the conversation would be easy.

If it had been kind of a rough day, with crisis and chaos breaking out, then there was a good chance that there would be a cake made. And if it was the kind of day that might tempt someone to consider another line of work, there was a really good chance that there would be freshly made bread.

Making bread gave me a chance to knead the dough and to punch down the dough to let it rise again – you can work out a lot of aggression making bread! But when it was done, our apartment was filled with this wonderful aroma, and Pam knew that the conversation would be easy. Whatever the problem may have been, it had been worked on, worked over, and worked through so that it wasn’t going to be a problem in our relationship. And at the very least, there was warm fresh bread to eat with her supper!

That’s one way to deal with the weeds in your life. Work out your frustrations by kneading the dough and punching it down, so that it leads to something wonderful. You can also do a lot of praying while you are working the dough! My daughter, wearing her therapist hat, would say that baking bread was a good coping mechanism for working through my frustrations.

Maybe this never happens to you and you don’t get frustrated, but sometimes it feels like there are enemies sowing weeds in your life. You have done the right things to get the right kind of harvest, and yet there is always someone else messing it up for you.

And if you deal with the weeds, there is often less good in your life than what you had before. Instead of reaping your rewards, you have to deal with the pettiness, and the meanness, and the baggage of others, and it all takes away from your joy and pleasure. It is as if they have stolen it away from you – at least, it feels like theft. Sometimes, they are stealing your ideas and taking credit for them. Maybe, they are stealing your time with what they think is important but for you is only a distraction.

What else can the enemies steal from you as they are planting their weeds in your life? Your reputation? Your sense of well-being? Your identity? Your job? Your family? Your friends? Your home? Whatever it is, if you want to keep these things and these people in your life, it requires you to deal with something you didn’t want to deal with in order to protect what you have been working for – and you still end up with less than you started with before these enemies attacked you.

If your life becomes obsessed with these weeds, the tendency in our culture is to cope by taking matters into our own hands. We want to get rid of the weeds that threaten what is ours. And then we try to find ways to cope so that our frustration doesn’t cause us to lose the harvest we are working so hard to get – a loving family, a successful business, a supportive community of friends, a life of comfort and ease.

But it doesn’t matter how well we cope, and how hard we work, because there are things that we can’t change that seem like weeds, that seem like they are taking over our lives. Our neighborhood changes. Our job description changes, or is cut. Our homes are affected by floods or tornadoes. Our parents die; our children move away. Our bodies start to fail us. This is not the harvest we have been working towards; it is not the reward we have been seeking.

So we do things that will have no effect on the weeds, but which we hope will make us feel better. We “self-medicate” by drinking or eating too much. We ask our doctor to give us something to take the edge off. We share our pain by being a pain to others. We take a walk, or hit a bucket of balls, or even bake a loaf of bread. If we have been raised in the church, we “take it to the Lord in prayer.”

The problem, though, is that this condemns us to a life that is so much less than what God intends for us. It condemns us because it doesn’t deal with the real problem – which has nothing to do with weeds.

A farmer once taught me the definition of a weed. A weed is anything that the farmer doesn’t want in his or her field. It doesn’t matter how good or useful or valuable something might be; if the farmer doesn’t want it, it’s a weed. Corn is a weed in a wheat field. Watermelons are weeds in a carrot patch. Roses are weeds in a bed of irises.

And that is the rub. Anything we don’t want, anything that does not please us or fit into our kingdom, we consider a weed that must be gotten rid of, pulled out, tossed into the fire, and destroyed so that it will never bother us again.

Yet Jesus keeps asking us, “What is the kingdom of God like?” You notice that Jesus doesn’t ask, “What is the kingdom of Nick like?” It is always a sin when we try to make them one and the same.

What is the kingdom of God like? Most of us would say that the kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven, will be a “weed-free” place. It will be a place of peace, joy, love, happiness, comfort, and ease. Isn’t that the usual depiction of heaven, whether we picture it with clouds and angel harps or with Elysian Fields and animals lying down together in peace? The kingdom sounds like a pretty good place for us.

But that is not what Jesus says the kingdom is like. The kingdom is a place where tares are sown among the wheat, and the householder allows them to grow together. The wheat is good to eat; and the tares, while toxic, are good for fuel. The householder sees that both the wheat and the tares are part of the harvest – one provides the grain for the bread, while the other provides the fuel to bake the bread, so both are necessary and valuable. The householder, God, doesn’t see any weeds in the harvest because God sees the value in everything and everyone.

The life of discipleship is not about having better or more pious coping skills than those persons who are outside of the church. The life of discipleship is about conforming our lives to Christ, and being able to see the value and worth of those persons that those in power consider weeds. And if this is all we get out of this parable today, that both the tares and the wheat have their place in the kingdom of God, we will have heard good news. But I believe there is something more we can glean from this story, something that we can’t point to as being in the story itself, but is there all the same.

My home church had a choir of high school and college students that sang every week at the early service during the school year. When summer came one year, the members of the choir decided that they liked singing together so much that we agreed to spend our summer putting on the musical “Godspell” at our church, and at any church that would have us. I re-wrote the script, and we practiced before going to summer jobs in the morning, and 3-4 times each week during the evening hours.

Because I was re-writing the script, I wanted it to be based a little more closely on the Gospel of Matthew than the original. As any one who has seen the Harry Potter movies know, there is only so much of the book that you can squeeze into a production. So you include the main themes and the most memorable stories the best you can. But there was one parable that was not in the original script that I wanted to include, and I found a unique way to do it.

In an actual theater, with professional actors, there are accepted conventions for signaling the end of the intermission and the start of the second act. But those conventions are not always available in a church basement. My solution addressed both the need to gain the focus of the audience and to introduce the additional parable. We turned out the lights, and I would sit on the edge of the stage alone in the spotlight. And then I would do a devotion on the parable of the wheat and tares.

Even though I knew that I was loved and accepted by the people at the church, I often felt like the tare, the weed, when compared to the other members of the choir. Their families came to church with them; I came alone. The other members of the youth group had two parents; mine were divorced. They had parents who were almost all college-educated; my dad barely got out of high school and my mom dropped out when she was 15. They were almost all only children or had one or at most two siblings; I am the oldest of six. They wore new clothes and took private lessons and went on nice vacations; and I didn’t.

So, I suspect I heard this parable differently than they did. For them, it was a message about being tolerant of those who didn’t believe. They were to practice Christian charity, living and growing alongside of the weeds in this life, secure in the knowledge that they would be part of the harvest, and that the weeds would be thrown into the fire.

For me, however, this parable has been, and always will be, about hope and good news for the weeds. I knew something very important – I knew who was telling this story that made it clear that the weeds were not to be removed from the harvest of God.

The story-teller is the one who can feed 5000 people from 5 loaves and two fish. The story-telleris the one who can heal the sick and raise the dead. The story-telleris the one who can change water into wine. Jesus, the story-teller, is the one who has the power to change the weeds into wheat. And I knew he had that power because he had changed me.

That word of good news isn’t obviously in the parable. But if we look at the life of Jesus, we know that he spent a lot of time with the persons the Pharisees considered weeds. His closest companions were fishermen, tax collectors, women of power, women with reputations, zealots, and hot heads. His ministry was among the lepers and the lame, the blind and the bullied, the demon-possessed and the dead-to-us Samaritans and Romans. None of these persons had any place in the kingdom of God as envisioned by the religious authorities. But they all had a place in the kingdom of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Jesus did not see them, or any of us, as weeds. And in the power and grace of Jesus Christ, we are not weeds. We are the people God loves, made in God’s own image. We are the people Jesus came to redeem in our sin, dying for us on the cross. We are the people who are reborn, given new life through the power of the resurrection. We are the vessels through whom God still pours out God’s love onto the world.

When we believe and give our hearts to Jesus, we become the wheat which makes up the Bread of the Worldthat feeds the world hungering for good news from God. This is the love divine, all loves excelling, revealed in Jesus Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, which brings the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven!