Scripture: Matthew 13:24-35
So what about weeds? Well – I don’t know about your experience, but my relationship with weeds depends a lot on where we are in the growing season. We have a good-sized garden plot in the backyard that we plant with vegetables every year – potatoes, beans, tomatoes, peas, cucumber, squash, that sort of thing. And in May and June, when the plot is clean and the seeds we’ve planted are just starting to sprout – oh, am I zealous with those weeds! I’ll kneel in the garden and pick out every offending vine and root. In our garden it tends to be sedge grass, knotweed, buckwheat, purslane and, of course, dandelions. But at a certain point in June the tide begins to turn. The weeds flip into another gear, and the individual approach is no longer tenable. So then for a while it’s the hoe going between the rows, clearing out whatever’s come up where it’s not supposed to. And there are weeds that get established closer in to the vegetables, and sometimes I’ll try to ease a few of these out when they really catch my eye. But I’ve given up trying to get them all.
And then, inevitably, July comes and we go away for a week or two. And by the time we come back, it’s clear that the garden doesn’t belong to me anymore. It’s now the domain of these vegetables I’ve planted, but also of enormous weeds that have settled in and made themselves at home. I’ll go pull some here and there in fits of enthusiasm, but not with any real conviction. The weeds are here to stay, only growing stronger as the potato foliage withers and the pumpkin vines grab hold of them.
And there I stay resigned to the matter until it’s time for the shovels of August and September to come dig it all up and see what’s hiding under the dense canopy of vines and leaves now covering the soil. And I feel some kinship with the farmer Jesus describes, who says: “just leave the weeds alone to grow together with the grain, and we’ll sort it all out at the harvest.”
This is certainly some interesting counsel, and not only for the gardeners and farmers among us. The Kingdom of Heaven is somehow like this, Jesus says. The wheat and the weeds live together on a shared piece of land, and for the good of the wheat you’ve got to let this situation be. The harvest is coming, when things will get sorted out, but until then you’ll just have to be patient.
Mennonite traditions have a bit of a complicated history with this parable, as it turns out. On the one hand, the story of the wheat and the weeds seems a good example of Jesus’ insistence that taking up arms is not the way of God’s Kingdom. Do we use violence to rid ourselves of the weeds that we see in the world around us? Do we cut down whatever opposition we may encounter? This was probably a live question in the minds of Jesus’ listeners, as they felt the squeeze of Roman occupation and longed for some kind of revolution. Longed for the foreign weeds to be ripped out and tossed away. But Jesus says that the Kingdom of Heaven is not like that. The good news of Jesus is not a license for holy rampage. For the wheat to keep its integrity as good seed, it will have to live among the weeds and bear witness to its calling. We can’t force God’s hand or hurry up the process. All we can do is trust in God and grow where we have been planted.
So, an important parable for a tradition like ours that values its peace witness. But it’s been a tricky parable for a tradition that’s also tended to put a lot of emphasis on purity. And some of this has roots right to the very beginnings of the Anabaptist movement in the 16th century. One of the key Anabaptist convictions was that the church ought to be made up of believers and disciples of Jesus. They rejected the state churches of Europe, in which every citizen was automatically a member. Where civic birth records and church baptism records were one and the same. Where it was understood that the church was a mixed bag, and God would sort it out the true faithful in the end. The Anabaptists thought rather that Christians needed to live transformed lives, and follow Jesus even when it caused a break with other obligations and responsibilities – like taking up the sword. And so they started baptizing adult believers and forming communities of disciples which looked distinctive enough to be quite troubling to the powers of their day.
For the Anabaptist tradition, making the church visible has been a really big deal. That’s where our witness is. We are to be a city on a hill, a holy nation set apart, a demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God. This is how we proclaim the good news of Jesus that is for all peoples. By how we live and love and serve as a community of disciples, demonstrating that Jesus is Lord over all other loyalties that might call to us.
But a visible church will always struggle with questions of purity. Who’s in and who’s out – who can be baptized, become a member, receive communion, provide leadership, represent the community? If the lines start to get too blurry, we fear losing our witness, our calling, our identity, our purpose. A visible church will be challenged by a mixed field of wheat and weeds – especially when those weeds resolutely grow all over, and make it difficult for the wheat to circle the wagons and draw clear lines around its borders.
Some of you may have read the feature article in the December 2 issue of The Canadian Mennonite by Carol Penner: What If We Stayed Together? She takes this parable of the wheat and the weeds and reads it in the context of divisions within the church. What do we do when we disagree with others in the community? Not an empty question in our time of great polarization on a whole bunch of fronts. Carol reads the history of her own congregation – The First Mennonite Church in Vineland. And she pulls out three examples of intense conflict that led to splits and broken relationships over the years in that community. Each situation had to do with different understandings of faith or theology, or concern about what people might be bringing in to the church from elsewhere. And in each situation, the attempt to uproot the “weeds” caused great damage to the whole community.
Carol wonders about her own congregation, but about the broader picture too: “How might our history in the Mennonite church be different if we took this parable [of the wheat and the weeds] to heart,” she asks. If we allowed a bit more space to live with those whose path we can’t understand? What if we had the capacity to wait with the patience that the sower in Jesus’ parable advises?
Who knows what difference this parable might have made to the First Mennonite Church in Vineland? I suspect we’d have our own history of conflict and division here at St. Jacobs if we scratched the surface a little. These questions about purity and patience have no doubt rattled around in our story as well. But this parable of the wheat and the weeds has a way of poking at parts of our Mennonite tradition in ways that are probably healthy.
Carol makes one final point in her article that I think is really important: it can be surprisingly hard for us to discern between weeds and wheat – especially in the midst of tension or conflict. What are the weeds, and who is sowing the pernicious seeds in a particular time and place? What if the seed of the enemy is a judgmental attitude and pride that makes us think we know better than our neighbour? Some humility is surely called for here, and some patient work of discernment together that’s prepared to listen and learn.
On the other hand, I don’t think this parable gives us an excuse to turn a blind eye or offer the ugly and unjust parts of our world a free pass. It’s not about throwing up our hands because there’s no point, or because the field is too far-gone. It’s not about skipping over good discernment because we can’t judge between good and bad anyway. The sower in Jesus’ parable has a pretty good idea of what is wheat and what is weeds. The problem is more that the two are bound together under the surface in some pretty complex ways.
I wonder if this image of tangled roots reminds us that even in this mixed field, the wheat still has an important calling. It doesn’t just turn in on itself and ignore everything else, but remains closely engaged with its neighbours – offering its own unique gifts for the healing and well-being of all. It still bears witness to the purposes and the grace of God, standing and growing tall amidst whatever else surrounds it. The wheat neither grafts itself to the weeds nor strikes them down in judgment.
But maybe even more importantly, I think the mingling of the wheat and the weeds speaks to a profound truth about ourselves as followers of Jesus. We are, each of us, both wheat and weed: a fruit of the good seed, but also marked by our brokenness and failures. And on this side of the great harvest, we cannot easily pull the two apart.
I think it is important that the church be visible in the world. That we are able to say: here – this is what it looks like to follow Jesus, to live out the reign of Christ that’s here now and coming soon. God is healing creation and redeeming this world, and we have become a part of that good news. The church does need to look different, peculiar, transformed by this relationship with Jesus. Good seed taking root and bearing fruit for all to see and enjoy, by the grace of God. We have a high calling and a marvelous gift to share.
But we are also mixed up with weeds. We know this. The history of the church, ours included, is riddled with stories of failures and inadequacies – even the harm it has inflicted on others. So much so, that by now the more pressing question for a lot of people is whether there is anything of value in the church at all. We are a broken body, with faultlines running through us in all directions. Can we always assume that we’re on the side of the wheat? What if sometimes we become weeds that block or choke out the things that God is trying to do in our world? This is always possible, and part of the reminder in Jesus’ parable. We have to be really careful about how we make our witness visible as communities of faith. Not through purity or hard divisions between us and them. But through our openness to receiving grace as people in need of healing ourselves.
This tangle of wheat and weeds is the story of the church, but it’s also the story of our own lives and our own hearts. Any line of division that we might want to draw will cut through each of us too. We are grown from good seed, but our hearts are no more pure than our church communities. Thanks be to God, the sower is patient enough to let the wheat and the weeds live together in the field for this time that we have. Otherwise, we‘d likely be plucked up too! We are a tangled bunch, but by grace growing still towards the purposes for which we were planted.
So what is the call to courageous imagination in this story? I can see a few possibilities. One might be to live in trust that God is at work even when things seem tangled and messy as far as we can see. Can we imagine the patience of the sower, letting go of the temptation to cleanse the garden and rip out the elements that offend us. Those who are at home in the kingdom of heaven are more like farmers than fighters – planting, tending, waiting and trusting. Leaving space for God to act. Maybe that’s the point of those other two brief parables that Jesus also tells about the mustard seed and the yeast. The good news won’t knock the world over the head and re-order it all in the blink of an eye. It won’t come with a weedwhacker or a bulldozer. It starts small, like a seed or like a bit of yeast. Or like a tiny child. But it grows and moves and spreads and transforms all things with a different kind of power.
A second call in this parable might be to see ourselves for the tangled and complicated creatures we are. This kind of honest assessment certainly takes a lot of courage. We are grown from the good seed, bearing fruit as a sign of God’s work of salvation and reconciliation in this world. But we are also tied up with weeds, and sometimes we may not be on the side we think we’re on. Part of our witness as a visible community of faith is our willingness to confess and to repent and name our failures as we work to make them right.
And a third call might just be to have the courage and imagination to believe that God is still doing something wonderful and amazing through this community of disciples that we call the church. Even when we’re mixed up with weeds so badly that we can’t possibly get ourselves untangled. Even when we look at ourselves and realize that we’re just ordinary and often flawed human beings. We are still the fruit of good seed, sown in love and set to grow as a promise and a sign for all of creation.
“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in their field.”
May we grow with courage and imagination where we have been planted, trusting in the grace of God that makes all things whole.
Amen.