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A World Full of Weeds
A sermon by Dr.
Jim Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
July 20, 2008
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew
13:24-30, 36-43
Let me ask you a question:
What are good, God-fearing people like you and I
supposed to do about all the evil in the world? You won't find that question
anywhere in the Gospel of Matthew, but it is that question, or one very much
like it, that lies behind the parable of the wheat and the weeds here in chapter
13. “What should we do about all the evil in the world?” someone asked, and
Jesus said, “Well, let me tell you a story:
A farmer had a field, perfect and pure, ready to produce nothing but
good grain, but in the night an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat that
had been sown. And later, when the wheat had grown up, the servants who worked
in the field came to the master and said, ‘Didn’t you sow good seed? Look at
this. Your field has weeds growing in it!’” And Jesus would say, later, that
that field is like the world: Weedy. Corrupt. Not the way it was supposed to
be.
No one needs to tell
you we live in a world like that; you know it for yourself. You read the paper,
you watch the news, and if you do it often enough you often find yourself
shaking your head at the enormous difference between the way the world ought to
be and the way it actually is. Most of the time that difference leaves you
feeling powerless. What can you do about it? But there may be other times,
when you are feeling especially outraged or especially brave, that you think
maybe you could do something about it, and like the farm hands in the story you
might find yourself volunteering to go out into the world and rip evil up by its
roots. And that’s when the master says, “Wait.”
And that’s what
surprises me about this parable.
Do you remember what I
told you last week, that we need to pay attention to the surprises in these
stories, to those places where expectations are upset? Well, this is that place
in this story, because what you would expect from the master is precisely what
you don’t get. You would expect him to say, “Yes! Pull the weeds as quickly as
you can. Get that stuff out of my field.” But instead he says, “No. Let the
wheat and the weeds grow together until the harvest.” If this story really is,
as Jesus says, a story about evil in the world and God’s response to it, then
what Jesus is saying is that God doesn’t have any immediate plans to uproot all
the evil among us. God’s plan, for now, is to let it be.
That’s hard to believe,
isn’t it?
Every once in a while I
will talk with someone who has worked himself into a lather about some evil or
another, about some movie that seems sacrilegious or some television show that
pushes the boundaries of good taste, about people selling liquor-by-the drink in
small towns or bringing the lottery across a state line. “We’ve got to do
something about this!” they will say. “We’ve got to put an end to this kind of
evil!” And if, on the basis of this story, I suggest that we shouldn’t do
anything, that it isn’t our business to uproot the evil in the world, they can
hardly believe it.
“What?!” they ask.
“Are you telling me that in a world full of weeds God doesn’t want us to go out
there and pull them up?”
“Well, yes, if we’re
going to be faithful to the teaching of Jesus in this parable, that’s exactly
what I’m telling you.”
Remember what the
master said to the slaves? “Don’t pull up the weeds, for in gathering them you
would pull up the wheat, too.” In other words, “You’ll do more harm than good”
(in the Greek text the distinction is clear: it doesn’t say they could
pull up the wheat, but that they would), because the type of weed that is
sown in this story is a very specific kind. It is Lolium Temulentum,
also known as “darnel,” an annual grass with long, slender bristles that looks
very much like wheat. It would be easy to mistake it for the real thing. And
in a frenzy of weed-pulling you would yank up the good along with the bad.
Can you see how the
same caution might apply to dealing with evil in the world? Sometimes it’s hard
to tell the difference between the good and the bad, and sometimes, in pulling
up what you think is a weed, you may in fact be pulling up wheat. And it
doesn’t just happen in the world; sometimes it happens in the church. Back in
1979 the Southern Baptist Convention adopted “Bold Mission Thrust,” an
initiative to take the gospel to every person on earth by the end of the
century. But in that same year some people who felt the denomination was
drifting too far to the left launched an initiative of their own, a plan to take
control of the Convention and purge it of its liberal influences.
And that’s just what
they did.
Over the next ten years
they fired a whole host of professors and journalists, seminary presidents and
denominational employees. Others resigned while they still had a choice. A
great many more left the denomination, weary of the conflict. By the end of the
century, instead of being known as the people who reached the world for Christ
we were known as those people who were always fighting with each other. Our
witness suffered, our reputation was hurt, and the name “Baptist”—which we once
wore so proudly—became something of an embarrassment. Many Baptist churches
don’t even use it now. Some have changed their names to “community” churches in
the hope that visitors won’t be scared away. I don’t think those people who
wanted to purge the denomination of its liberal influences envisioned such
results, but in their zeal to pull up the weeds much good wheat was lost, and
maybe some day even they will be able to look at the uprooted field of the
denomination and realize that more harm than good has been done.
In the story Jesus
tells, the enemy sows his evil seed and then goes away. He seems confident that
the damage he intends will be done. Robert Farrar Capon says that the enemy
doesn’t have any real power over goodness anyway: the wheat is in the field,
the Kingdom is in the world, and there is not one thing he can do about it.
But, Capon adds, “He can sucker the forces of goodness into taking up arms
against the confusion he has introduced, to do his work for him. That is why he
goes away after sowing the weeds. He has no need to hang around. Unable to
take positive action anyway—having no real power to muck up the operation—he
simply sprinkles around a generous helping of darkness and waits for the
children of light to get flustered enough to do the job for him.[i]”
But in the parable, at
least, that’s not what happens. The master says, “Wait. Let the wheat and the
weeds grow up together until the harvest, and when the harvest comes I will tell
the reapers to collect the weeds and bind them in bundles to be burned, but
gather the wheat into my barn.” Can you see that it’s not as if the master in
this story likes having weeds in his field, it’s just that he has a different
plan for dealing with them. His solution to the problem is ultimate, rather
than proximate. And Jesus wants us to hear that more often than not, this is
God’s way of dealing with the evil in the world, in our cities, in our families,
and in our selves—not immediately but finally, once and for all.
And Jesus should know.
There was plenty of
evil in his time. If he had asked any of his disciples they could have pointed
out a dozen social problems that might have been eased by divine intervention:
Poverty. Injustice. Prejudice. Prostitution. Oppression. Drunkenness.
Drought. Disease. “Look at the world,” they might have said to him. “It’s
full of weeds. Surely this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be!” And surely they
were right about that. But their way of dealing with those problems was
different from God’s way. They thought that by overcoming the Romans,
re-establishing Israel as a political kingdom, and electing the right man to
rule it everything would be as it should be. They thought they could fight
their way, legislate their way, vote their way into the kind of Kingdom that
would please God.
They were wrong.
Read the Gospels
carefully and you will be amazed by how little faith Jesus puts in the political
process. He seems much more concerned about rescuing people than about rescuing
programs and he does it God’s way, by going to Jerusalem, where he is arrested,
tried, and crucified. As he hangs there on the cross it would be easy to
believe that God’s way has failed, that evil has triumphed, that the field of
the world has been completely overcome by weeds. But that’s not what happened.
In the death of Christ we who believe believe that evil was somehow, ultimately,
conquered, so that while it might exercise dominion for a while, it will not
exercise dominion for ever.
We believe that one of
these days all the evil in the world is going to be gathered up into bundles and
burned in the furnace. “It may not be today,” Jesus says, “it may not be
tomorrow, but one of these days Evil is going to catch it right in the teeth,”
and when that day comes, “the righteous will shine like the sun.” In the
meantime I think we ought to begin trusting the one who will deal with evil
ultimately rather than fussing over it so much proximately. I think we should
accept the fact that we live in a world full of weeds rather than trying to pull
up every plant that looks vaguely suspicious. The truth is that none of us is
completely free of evil. There is more evil in the best of us, and more good in
the worst of us, than any of us, in this life, will ever know. All the more
reason to stop judging everyone and everything, to leave the sorting of good
and evil to God and his angels, and for our part—for our part—to spend most of
our time trying to be wheat rather than pull up weeds. When the harvest finally
comes that’s what will matter most.
I asked the people at
my church in North Carolina to imagine what would happen if we adopted a policy
of weed-pulling, if we drew a circle around the little town of Wingate and made
a vow that no evil would cross that line, that no weeds would grow within that
border. I said, “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 our energy and most of our
time. But what if we did it? What if we succeeded? (and they started to get
excited about the idea). What would we have?” (Hmm, they wondered. What
would we have?). And then I popped the bubble. “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 that church in
Wingate began a ministry to the children of a nearby trailer park we had to
decide what kind of ministry it would be. We 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 round up child abusers. Instead we
chose to put up a basketball goal, sing songs about Jesus, tell stories from the
Bible, serve cookies and Kool-Aid. Most of all we chose to love children who
didn’t seem to have a lot of love in their lives. And two years after we
started that ministry, two years of going out there Saturday after Saturday to
do those things, I got a note in my inbox with five words on it: “Adrian wants
to be baptized.”
Adrian. Terror of the
trailer park. The one person who had made our work most difficult during the
previous two years. Who would have guessed? Instead of pulling weeds in the
field where she lived we just tried hard to be wheat, and somehow Adrian saw
that, and admired 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. In a world full of weeds maybe the best strategy we can adopt as
Christian people is the strategy Paul suggests in Romans 12:21:
“Do not be overcome by
evil, but overcome evil with good.”
—Jim Somerville ©2008
[i]
Robert Farrar Capon, Parables of the Kingdom (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 1985), p. 102.
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