Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
Sunday, February 17, 2019
Scripture: Matthew 13:24-43
Weeds. Wheat. Seeds. Yeast. The kingdom of heaven is like this… Like a field full of wheat and weeds. Like a tiny seed that erupts into a tree… like yeast hidden in three measures (that’s about 10 gallons) of flour… What was Jesus getting at? While it’s not really true that Jesus spoke only in parables, he did employ them over and over again. Parables: stories with multiple layers of meaning. His explanation to the disciples notwithstanding, parables rarely have a single, simple significance. They are obtuse, designed to provoke reflection, to encourage listeners to tease out multiple implications. More often than not, all is not as it first appears in a parable…
We’ll be reading and reflecting on several of Jesus’ parables over the coming weeks, so let’s start here: with the reminder that parables are elastic, provocative, often subversive. They are designed to upend our assumptions, to challenge the status quo and startle us into novel ways of looking at God and God’s world.
In the first of the parables we heard this morning, weeds are sown into the field in the middle of the night. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’
First: I love this question: “Where did these weeds come from?” If you’ve ever gardened, you know what it’s like to sow good seed, only to find your garden full of those pernicious intruders, the ones that seem to have sprung up overnight. Where do they come from? From the same soil that nurtures your tomatoes and cukes, roses or rhododendrons. As tempting as it might be to blame those herbal invaders on some hostile neighbor who crept into your garden in the middle of the night, we know that weeds are an unavoidable part of every garden ecosystem. So long as there is wind, and birds, and furry critters, weed seeds will migrate and settle into the soil, to put down roots right alongside the rutabega or the wheat.
As troublesome as they may be, weeds are inevitable. Maybe that’s why the landowner in the parable is reasonably circumspect about the situation. “Let them be,” he says. “We’ll sort it out later.” It may do more harm than good, to pull them up. Put another way, applying a little parabolic twist: it might do more good than harm to leave them there… “Let them grow together,” instructs the landowner, “And we’ll see what happens.”
Somehow, we know, Jesus is talking about people here – human community – when he speaks of wheat and weeds, right? Where the weeds pose some kind of threat to the flourishing of the field. So imagine how this may have sounded to a first century Jewish audience occupied by the Romans, surrounded by Gentiles, struggling to sustain their Jewish ways. Pharisees, in particular, were concerned with keeping the community pure, enforcing laws that separated ritually clean from ritually unclean, women from men, lepers from everyone else … So what was Jesus implying when he suggested that wheat and weeds be allowed to “grow up together?”
That the community – their own community – would always include a bit of each, wheat and weeds, all inter-tangled?
“Why not?” asked someone in Bible Study this week. “Maybe there’s even something fruitful about growing up together… about allowing us space and time to confront our own weediness… to witness, first hand, the ways we hinder one another’s flourishing and so maybe to be changed along the way?”…
Also, it’s not always easy to distinguish the weeds from the wheat. Though this gets lost in translation, the weed Jesus refers to is Bearded Darnel, also known as false wheat. Google it, and you’ll see just how much this weed resembles actual wheat. There they are, two plants tangled up in each other – one fruitful, the other not – but who’s to say which is which.
And here’s where the parable gets even more provocative: It may sound, at first blush, like Jesus is making a clear distinction between wheat and weeds. But that raises the question: what makes a weed a weed?
For over a decade, my father served as a regional minister out in Illinois. On many a Sunday morning, my dad would drive out across the wide-open Illinois landscape past cornfield after cornfield, to visit country churches filled with farmers. He once told me about a particularly lovely drive, along winding roads festooned with brightly colored wildflowers, all waving in the breeze. When he arrived at his destination, my dad enthused about the drive – and all the flowers he’d seen along the way. His hosts – all those farmers – only grumbled: “Those aren’t wildflowers,” (they said). “Those are weeds!”
On another hand, take eight-year-old Tilly.
Tilly is one of the heroines in the novel The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, which some of us read last fall. In it, eight year old Tilly and her friend Grace spend their summer searching for God in a small English village where every resident has some secret to hide. One afternoon, Tilly and Grace are in a neighbor’s backyard, learning to garden. Tilly is weeding. She comes across one small, green shoot and asks, “Is this a weed?”… “Well,” says Eric, the neighbor, “Who decides if it’s a weed or not?”
“People,” Gracie replies. “The people who are in charge.”
“And who is in charge at the moment?” Eric asks. “Who is holding the trowel?”
“Me?” replies Tilly.
“You,” repeats Eric. “So you decide if it’s a weed or not.”
Tilly put the trowel down and wiped her hands on her skirt. “It’s not a weed.”
“Then we shall let it live,” says Eric.
Here, then, is the dilemma: Weediness, may well be in the eye of the beholder. Whether it ‘belongs’ in a certain spot, or not. Whether it’s wanted, or not. Which may be lovely, when contemplating wildflowers, but what does it mean if that wheat and those weeds somehow stand in for people… Then who gets to decide?
“Not us,” said another Bible study participant. “When it’s left to us to sort out worthy from unworthy, to judge who belongs and who does not, who will help the community to flourish, and who never will – don’t we tend to get it wrong?”
So, the parable prompts, we leave it alone. We live right in the middle of the garden in which weeds and wheat are tangled up together, resisting the urge to label. Leaving that up to God, who will eventually deal with the weedy bits.
And here’s where the parable develops its hard edge: sooner or later the weeds will get, well, weeded out. In the end, there ARE weeds and they are still bad. Right?
Except that then Jesus continues, “the Kingdom of Heaven is like this: like a mustard seed…” A mustard seed, which is, itself, an invasive plant. I once discovered some mint growing wild in an alley in my Chicago neighborhood. Delighted (and a bit clueless regarding the propensities of mint) I dug it up and planted it along the fence behind my apartment, all the time envisioning all the fresh mint I’d have for iced tea and mojitos. I spent the next three summers tearing the stuff out, as it threatened to consume my entire backyard.
That’s what mustard does. It does NOT grow into a tree – Jesus is using a bit of hyperbole there – but it can grow to six feet tall and take over everything around it. After warning against weediness, Jesus turns around and compares the kingdom of heaven – God’s holy realm, to a weed. From the vantage of the occupying Romans, the big men in town, the rulers of a vast empire, declaring that the kingdom of heaven is like a prolific mustard plant sounds a bit like announcing an invasion.
And then, and then, Jesus continues, the kingdom of heaven is like yeast. Yeast, living organisms that thrive on simple sugars. As the sugars are metabolized, carbon dioxide and alcohol are released into the bread dough, making it rise. Leavened bread dough can rise to four times its original volume, aided by just a teaspoon of yeast. Yeast mixed with the three measures of flour in Jesus’ parable? That would make enough bread to feed 100 to 150 people! Like the weed, like the mustard plant, yeast can spread out of control…
Also lost in translation here is the fact that the woman in Jesus’ parable doesn’t just ‘put’ the yeast into the dough. She HIDES it.
So we have weeds that pose a problem but are allowed to grow. And other weeds that stand in as a symbol of the kingdom – prolific enough to host a whole community of birds. And a bit of subversive yeast that spreads until it leavens all the dough….what is one to think? About a man who claims to herald a kingdom like that? About the kingdom itself? Good news? Or bad news?
Again, the answer depends on where you stand, whether in the seats of power, or under the heel of the empire… Whether at the end of a bread line, or in the banquet hall… in a field full of wildflowers or on carefully manicured lawn…
IT is ALL a matter of perspective. Examine the parable up close, and you get both justice and grace: Justice for those who would prevent flourishing, who strangle and impede…. justice on behalf of those who have been denied the freedom to flourish, justice like a wild weed that sprouts and spreads until it overtakes every oppressive system and replaces it with a profligate meadow in which birds – and all the creatures – can thrive.
And grace… Grace enough to wait and see… grace enough to allow us to grow – and change – together. As for the bit about throwing the weeds in the fire? Jesus’ parable makes it clear that there are consequences for our actions. That we are, in fact, judged for the choices we make – choices that encourage or impede flourishing.
But it’s also clear that in the end, God uses everything – even the weeds – to cultivate God’s beloved community. So maybe that fire is a refiner’s fire. Maybe it serves to burn away the inevitable weediness in every life and so allow new life to spring forth.
Maybe God is working in us even now. Maybe our whole lives are a parable, wheat and weeds all tangled together…in the hands of God who calls forth life from the flourishing field and from every one of us.
Let any with ears, listen.
Amen.