Sermon

Wheat and Weeds Together

Genesis 28: 10-19a, Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43

Earlier this week I was looking at some potted flowers on the front porch and I noticed that two of the plants, in addition to the flowers, had some new shoots of beautiful green foliage. In fact the new green foliage was so bright and colorful that it added body and beauty to the plants in the flower pots. Because of the beauty I assumed that these were additional flowers coming up in the soil.

I was wrong. It turns out they were weeds and had I let them continue to grow they would soon have overpowered the flowers and I would be watering and nourishing a flower pot full of weeds. Pretty weeds but, never-the-less, weeds.

The gospel lesson today is about good seed and weeds. But the farmer cannot tell the difference until both seed and weed has matured. So he lets them grow together and then at the time of harvest he collects the weeds first and burns them so that he can he can gather his good wheat.

Jesus says life is that way. We cannot tell just by looking who are the children of God’s realm and who are the children of evil. So, at the harvest, or the end of the age, the reapers – the angels – will collect out all causes of sin and all evildoers for destruction. But the righteous will shine like the sun in the presence of God.

We can see this good seed, bad seed growing together almost everywhere we look. One of the reasons it is so hard to resist evil is because evil is so attractive.

The gospel lesson is fairly straight forward: good and evil exist together and sometimes we cannot tell the difference. But eventually that difference will become obvious. In the final analysis evil will be destroyed. I must admit, looking at the world today, it is sometimes difficult to imagine that good can overcome some of the world’s evil.

The “kingdom parables” show us what life was like in an empire. Laurel Dykstra in a recent edition of Sojourners magazine points out that: The rich risk their profit, the poor (risk) their lives and the lives of their children. The few live in luxury sustained by enmity, scarcity, profit and accumulation and they are supported by the labor of those who struggle with poverty and constant vulnerability. The fear-based logic of the empire is not confined to the past.

Dykstra tells an account of the Monsanto Chemical Company, the largest producer of weed-killer in the world. But Monsanto also sells patented food seeds that are resistant to the herbicides Monsanto produces. In August 1998, the multinational billion-dollar biotechnology giant sued a 67-year-old Saskatchewan farmer, Peter Schmeiser, for patent infringement. Some of Monsanto’s genetically modified weed-killer resistant seeds had blown into Schmeiser’s fields from a neighbor’s crop. Schmeiser cultivated the plants along with his own, saved the seeds and planted them the following year. In 2004 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Schmeiser, by doing what farmers have done for generations (saving seeds from one harvest to plant the next year) had deprived Monsanto of the “full enjoyment of their monopoly.”

Jesus, says Laurel Dykstra, offers the same kingdom of abundance and just distribution to the tenant farmer and wealthy landowner, the biotechnologist and the local farmer, national governments and migrant workers. Whether it is seed that produces a hundredfold or an invasive weed is a matter of perspective.

Turning attention to Jacob: Jacob, according to the ancient accounts in Genesis, is one of those people God chooses to use in spite of a spoiled and pampered past and the appearance, at least, of being a bad seed. You recall that Jacob was a master deceiver. He pretended to be his brother Esau and went into this blind father, Isaac, and through cunningness stole the birthright that was rightfully Esau’s as the first-born.

Listen, my friends, if you think you have a messed up family at times, “you ain’t seen nothing” to equal the messed up situation in the family of Abraham, Jacob’s grandfather. Abraham had two sons, Ishmael, who was born to Hagar the Egyptian, and Isaac who was born to Sarah. Isaac grows up and marries Rebekah. They have two sons, Esau and Jacob. Jacob is a “momma’s boy” and his mother becomes a co-conspirator with him to trick his brother out of the birthright.

History was changed because of the birth of Ishmael and Isaac. The conflict in the middle-east today is of biblical proportions because of the outcast of Ishmael and the favoritism of Isaac. Islam traces its roots to Abraham through Ishmael the rejected son. The Jews trace their roots to Abraham through Isaac the favored son.

Then it gets screwed up even more when Isaac has twin sons and Jacob steals the birthright and goes off to find a wife in the country of Haran. On the way he comes to a certain place as the sun is setting and he sleeps there, using a rock for a pillow. In his sleep he has a vision of a ladder reaching up into heaven and there are angels descending and ascending on the ladder. But more importantly God appears and stands beside Jacob and re-affirms that this is the God of Abraham and Isaac and will even now keep faith to the promise of the offspring of Abraham. God promises Jacob, “I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you.”

When Jacob awoke he declared, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it.” He goes on to say that where he has slept is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven.

So he takes the rock which he had used as a pillow, pours oil over it and blesses it and calls the place Bethel.

Today Jews and Muslims and Christians are still fighting over whose land is it? On the one hand, we may be more interested in making sure we have access to oil. On the other hand, the ultimate battles in the middle-east are ancient battles over holy land – the house of God, the gate of heaven.

In trying to make the connection between the gospel reading in Matthew and the Genesis reading, there are two things that caught my attention. First is the presence of angels in both readings. In Genesis the angels appear on the ladder coming from and going to heaven. In Matthew, the angels are the reapers who will help separate the good seed and the bad seed.

A second connection I believe could be the seeds themselves. In Matthew the seeds are literal seeds – probably wheat was the good seed and a grass called “darnel” was the bad seed. Darnel looks a lot like wheat when it is immature; but its roots can intertwine with wheat so that if you try to pull up the darnel you would easily destroy the wheat at the same time. When both wheat and darnel mature you can tell the difference and then you can destroy the bad seed and preserve the wheat.

When you look at Jacob you could easily assign him to the side of the bad seed in his young years. It is only as he matures and encounters God at Bethel that he is transformed. So what looked like and at one time was perhaps the “bad seed” has sprouted and is profoundly changed in this encounter with God.

Jacob has a profound change in his understanding of who God is. The God of his father Isaac was a remote, uninvolved God. But now God is close at hand. Jacob experiences hearing God’s voice and feeling God’s presence. It is a life-changing encounter. Jacob makes a vow and declares and accepts God’s promise: “I am with you and will keep you wherever you go … I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you.”

The farmer plants with the expectation that God will provide. Jacob goes out to seek a wife in a foreign land, at first in fear and insecurity. But at Bethel he gains new strength because he is now aware that God is with him.

So it is with us. I don’t know about you, but there are so many times in my own life when I have lived in a fear I did not need to live in. I have lived in turmoil about the future because I did not trust enough that God was in control of life. I have worried about providing for self and family because deep down I did not really believe that God would provide. Even after all of the times I have seen God provide, all of the times that worry turned out to be over things that never came to be, and all of the times turmoil was bearable and even strengthening once I realized God was able and steadfast, never-the-less, I am the type that still looks with some fear and trepidation at unknown futures.

On the other hand, I can look back in life and see times that I have experienced my own Bethel; times I came to understand that “surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it.” There have even been times when out of the fear, the turmoil and the worry, I could proclaim, “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” In every instance the discovery of knowing “the Lord is in this place and this is the gate of heaven” has come unexpectedly when an outcome I had anticipated or hoped for did not happen the way I wanted.

In 1893 Amanda Smith, an African-American woman found herself at her own Bethel when she was in turmoil about her life and did not know what to do or where to go. She said that as she looked over the past and compared it with the present she could only pray, “Lord, save, or we perish.”

One day she had a conversation with the Lord. Here is Amanda Smith’s account of this conversation 115 years ago: “As the Lord led, I followed, and one day as I was praying and asking Him to teach me what to do I was impressed that I was to leave New York and go out. I did not know where, so it troubled me, and I asked the Lord for light, and He gave me these words: ‘Go, and I will go with you.’

“I said, ‘Lord, I’m willing to go, but tell me where to go and I will obey Thee;’ and clear and plain the word came, ‘ Salem.’ I said, ‘ Salem! why, Lord, I don’t know anybody in Salem. O Lord, do help me, and if this is Thy voice speaking to me, make it plain where I shall go.’ And again it came, ‘ Salem.’

“’O Lord, Thou knowest I have never been to Salem, and only have heard there is such a place.’

“I remembered that five years before while in Philadelphia, I was at Bethel Church one morning, and the minister gave out that their quarterly meeting was to be in held in Salem the next Sunday.”

(Just as a footnote: Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church was the first congregation of the famous denomination of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, whose official date is 1787.)

Amanda Smith continues, “I could not go (to Salem) – I was at service – this was all that I had heard about Salem, or knew. I said, ‘O Lord, don’t let Satan deceive me, make it plain to me, and if this is Thy voice, speak again to me, and tell me where to go,’ and I heard the word coming, I was afraid, it seemed as though the Lord would strike me down, and I drew down as though to hide, and the word came with power, ‘Salem,’ and I said, ‘Lord, that is enough, I will go.’” (Quoted from Conversations With God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African American, James Melvin Washington, Ph.D., editor. Copyright © 1994 by James Melvin Washington. HarpeCollins Publishers)

Amanda Smith, however, still had her doubts. Reading about her you find that she still challenges God – if you really want me to go, provide me with some shoes. Or, “Lord, you know I don’t have the money to make that trip.” And so on. In each instance, God provides.

Jacob leaves his mother and the security of home escaping the wrath of his brother, Esau. Along the way he has an experience with God that is life-changing. The farmer plants his seeds and patiently waits until the harvest to separate wheat and weeds. Amanda Smith sets out as a single African-American woman to go to a town where she knows no one in order to preach and teach.

Where are the times in your life when you have “gone out” and left the place of security and relied on a faithful God to care for you? Give it some thought this week. I have a hunch that all of us have a little bit of Jacob in us - in both his good and evil ways. All of us have to wait impatiently at times until something matures and we can know the decisions we should make. All of us have struggled with newness and the insecurity as we try to hold fast to the trust that just as God has provided for others generation after generation, so will God provide for us. I hope you will discover those times in your life that you now can say, “Surely the Lord was in that place – and I did not know it. It was none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven.”

Amen.

Jim Bell 7/20/08