Year A Proper 11 Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Jesus put before the crowd another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.

Jesus’ listeners were people who, unlike us, were closely acquainted with farming, with the importance of getting in a good crop. Today, while we may worry about the climate and the rise in food prices, we trust farmers somewhere out in the Midwest to provide the grain and produce we can still buy at the market. Some of us may have small vegetable gardens, but it is unlikely a crop failure for us could produce a state of famine for the multitudes. Nonetheless, those of us who do have gardens, be they vegetable gardens, or merely flower beds, understand about weeds.

For many years, gardening has been one of my passions, not because I'm particularly skilled at it, but because it gets me into the out-of-doors, and often produces plants and flowers of great loveliness. Being particularly sensitive to pollen, humidity, and heat exhaustion, and currently Canadian smoke, when it comes to gardening, one thing I'm not good at going outside to do the weeding. This summer there's been a new dimension added to my "weeding woes", the contractors who did a lot of outside work for me and my husband last fall, left me with an entire, and rather large, side yard filled with weeds. This spring, as things began to sprout, with my limited knowledge of plants it was impossible for me to determine what was wanted and what was weed.

This problem, it appears, is a rather ancient one. Jesus chose for today's parable a situation that was quickly recognizable to the farmers of his day. What our Bible refers to as "weeds" is actually darnel, a plant that grew much the same as wheat, and shared external characteristics with it. The only way to tell the two apart was when the heads, where the grain itself is found, started to appear, so weeding the wheat field before the harvest was both foolish and unproductive. Jesus' wheat field is one left to follow its natural course, until such time as the farmer can determine which plants are the good crop and which will offer a little extra kindling for the winter fires.

What do modern gardeners and farmers of old really have in common? Chiefly that the decisions concerning our own plot of land are pretty much left up to us. We can plant and sow what we want, and if we chose, uproot the whole plot and start over. We make the decisions about what will be trimmed, what will be fed, what will be harvested, what will be pulled out and destroyed.

Experience quickly teaches us that over manicuring, over watering, and over feeding, do not produce good results. Like ancient farmers who held on and waited for the harvest before removing the darnel, allowing things to develop naturally, modern gardeners strive for natural beauty, a garden that is kept up, but also allowed to develop and expand along natural lines. As it says in Habakkuk, "You who are sovereign in strength, judge with mildness, and with great forbearance you govern us." Patience, forbearance, is one of the hallmarks of good farming. No good crop develops quickly, and no good crop results from over attention.

A couple of years ago, a friend and I both bought tomato plants at the same time and place, and brought them home to put in huge pots in sunny locations. Instead of hanging over my plants, I seemed to remember to water them and pinch off the suckers somewhat infrequently. Every time I would look out at them, they were a foot taller and loaded with more flowers. My friend, who was at that time new at this, ended up with a scrawny yellow plant from which the flowers fell at a touch. When we called the greenhouse to determine what was wrong, they said, too much water, too much attention.

This is, in some ways, a hard concept for the modern gardener to grasp. Our society encourages us to always "be on top" of things, to be attentive. Good parents spend endless hours nurturing and rearing their offspring, good workers spend long hours at the job, success can depend on that little bit of extra effort, those special times we take to spend with our kids, those unpaid hours of overtime. We are charged up to work hard, to do more, and in this way to achieve success. Obstacles are to be removed whenever possible. "Cut the slack", weed out the unnecessary and the unwanted, and always push, push, push.

In many ways, our society has become an over tended garden. Patience, as in "hands off", is at a minimum, while pruning and weeding are rampant. To see this on a large scale, we need only look at the recurring trend to downsize corporations, cutting benefits, laying off employees.

Taken to extremes, our desire to “weed out” can become terrifying. I have a friend in Britain who was born with a serious disability, one that disfigured his body and means he needs a wheelchair in order to get about. He's intelligent, witty, and politically active. Many l years ago, he wrote to tell me of a bill being discussed in the British parliament which would allow a woman to abort any disabled fetus, even in the last trimester.

My friend was appalled, not only because he was the sort of person who obviously would never be allowed to be born, but because hundreds, perhaps thousands, of intelligent, productive, artistic individuals would also never become part of our society. With the best intentions, and an eye on the bottom line, the British establishment was seeking to eliminate suffering and the financial burden disability produces, despite the fact such “weeding” can, as my friend emphasized strongly, wipe out all the disabled writers, artists, actors, scientists, and statesmen, yet unborn. This bill has since gone on to become law in the UK, and has withstood legal challenges.

Weeding! The problem is, we get caught up in being gardeners, and we just can't resist the temptation to take control. As our society moves faster, becomes more efficient, compartmentalized, and technologically advanced, we want to eliminate anything that doesn't fit, isn't efficient, costs too much money, or causes suffering. Up to a point, this makes sense. We don't want to find salmonella in our hamburgers, on the other hand, do we never again want to see a well-adjusted, intelligent person with a disability? We have no patience. We're moving so fast, we've lost track of two extremely important things.

First, to be interesting, to be joyous, life requires the mysterious, the different, the diverse, the unexpected. Passion and suffering are not abnormal or aberrant to the natural way of things, they are part of it, as our Lord has shown us. Without the mysterious, without suffering, we lose the sacred. Faith must co-exist with doubt, and the desert experience must continue to inform and enrich our everyday lives. We strive for order, for the formal gardens, the long straight rows of grain, but what is hidden cannot be revealed outside of the wilderness experience.

Second, we are not called to be the gardeners. We are the seeds our Lord has sown, and we have fallen into what was then, and still is today, a weed infested garden, a wilderness, and it is only in this setting, that the fruit we bear can reach maturity.

Our purpose is not to weed, not to micro manage the garden, but to be patient, and to bear fruit for a gardener who tends us with a gentle hand. There will be sunny, bright days, but also there will be dry days, desert experiences, and suffering. We will have our share of joy, but we will also have dark days, and when things are difficult, we may wonder if our Gardener has stopped paying attention. It is then we must remember that God is with us, watching, caring, doing what is necessary for our souls, and waiting to gather in the harvest, waiting to separate what is wanted from the weeds.

At the end of the age, the Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire…. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!

Let us pray:

O God, heavenly Father, who by your Son Jesus Christ has promised to all who seek your kingdom and its righteousness all things necessary to sustain their life; Grant us grace that we may honour you with our substance, and, remembering the account which we must one day give, may be patient and faithful, through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN