JULY 17, 2005 PASTOR SCOTT FULLER
ISA 44:6-8; PS 86:11-17; ROMANS 8:12-25; MATT 13:24-30, 36-43
Weeds and Worries
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we may believe and in believing we may obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
How many of you have ever worked on a farm or in a garden?
Did you ever worry about WEEDS in your field or plot? What threats to they pose to a crop? They use up water, nutrients, stunt growth, reduce yield, produce seeds of their own…
I’ll never forget the time we drove up to my brother-in-law’s hobby farm for a visit. It was the year that Greg had committed himself to nurture his 40 acres of oats…organically – using no weed killer or chemical fertilizer. Obviously none of you were there that day, but I’m sure you could still describe the scene as well as I. Lush, leafy…weeds towered over his shriveled, shortened crop.
Weeds are a worry…even when they don’t directly threaten a harvest.
I spent my summers during high school working on a friend’s farm. The dirt around my hometown of Shelby, Mont., isn’t the best quality. In fact, most farmers around there have to leave half their land fallow, unused every year. The soil is just too poor to sustain crop after crop, year after year.
Yet still the farmers have to plow that unused land every spring. They need to keep the weeds not only away from their crops, but also from depleting the ground of its precious nutrients and moisture. So, really, to farmers and growers of any kind, the only good weed is a dead weed.
Weeds and Worries
Are there weeds in Life’s fields that concern you and me? The newspaper has more than a few unsettling articles…Methamphetamine labs; suicide bombings; war; rape; forest fires; oil prices; hunger; disease; crime…and, of course, the people who perpetrate these problems.
Whether they directly threaten us and our loved ones or use up precious resources, these weeds are a menace and must be stopped. Remember, the only good weed is a dead weed…so what are you going to do about it? How can you stop their growth? What can you do to root them out and rip them up? to denounce, deter, defeat and destroy them…?
Well, that kind of talk is what occurs in the mob scene of just about every monster movie – from Frankenstein to Beauty and the Beast. It’s where the good townspeople are finally convinced that they must root out the evil that threatens their lives. With pitchforks and torches, they build up their courage with the war-like chant, Kill the beast…! Kill the beast…! and off they go to do just that.
Yet, this is not just the stuff of movies. Back during WWII, the German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was conflicted by this very issue. He explained to his sister-in-law, Emmi why he felt compelled to join a plot to kill Adolph Hitler. Said the pastor, If I see a madman driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.
So what are you and I supposed to do when confronted with such weeds in our lives?
Well, at a certain level, I think there’s no question: we are compelled by God’s concern for the well-being of our neighbors. Like the passengers on that terrorist-hijacked jet over Pennsylvania on Sept. 11th, they tried, as Bonhoeffer did, to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the madman who was driving.
But that’s not always the right course of action. What does Jesus say we should do in our lesson for today?
We must be very careful about deciding who or what is evil…and then be doubly careful about deciding to destroy their harmful presence. The slaves of the Master were quite sure that they could tell the difference between the weeds and the wheat, and that they could take care of the problem by attacking the invaders. But the master stops them from launching a crusade against those insidious infidels…Why?
1) The servants would probably destroy good plants in the process.
2) Dealing with the weeds was a job that belonged to someone else.
3) And, finally, if they focused their attention on the evil in their fields, they would be distracted from doing their positive work.
In this text, Jesus seems to force us away from focusing on what is bad in life and concentrate instead on doing what is right and good and uplifting and life-giving.
The same reasons apply for why. In our efforts to destroy the “weeds” of our society, we would just end up hurting innocent folk. Besides that, ridding the field of weeds is not our job – that is a task reserved for God’s angels. Finally, and most importantly, we were not created to focus on evil. The side-effects of that can be devastating.
In a conversation about the presence of evil in the world, a professor of mine once said, The devil is kind of hard to find. But once you’ve found him, he’s got you! We were not built, created, equipped to deal face-to-face with evil. So when the servants in the parable ask the master if they should go out into the fields and uproot the weeds or kill the beast, he replies, No, let both of them grow.
The theologian Robert Capon, in his book on the parables entitled Kingdom, Grace, Judgment, makes a big deal out of that little word “let.” On the one hand, it gives us permission to recognize and accept our limitations, our human-ness, our inability to solve the world’s problems. Let both of them grow says the master to the slaves. Let it be sang the Beatle, John Lennon. Let go…and let God says the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous. And that carries us right into the other hand.
For when we finally quit worrying and let go…of that which we cannot control, we are so much better able to focus on the good that we can do AND so better able to trust that God will take care of the rest.
Here you and I are called to do what we’ve been created to do…to let God’s Spirit take care of the weeds in life…AND to let God’s Spirit work the miracle of growth in our lives through the power of the sun (Son) and life’s nurturing elements: food and drink (Word, Sacraments, Worship, Faith, Hope and Love). Amen.