Sermon – July 17, 2011 – Grow Together

Grow Together

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli at St. Matthew’s UMC July 17, 2011, the fifth Sunday after Pentecost.

                                                Text:  Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43                                                        

“Us” versus “Them.”  This age-old human tendency to separate between “us” and “them” has done considerable damage through the centuries.  Unfortunately, our current political situation provides a ready example of how much factionalism, division, and partisanship continue to threaten the greater good.  I, for one, wish we would all just get over it and recognize once and for all that we’re in this thing together.  Whether we serve in public or private, we all have a responsibility to serve others more than—and, at the very least, as much as—ourselves.  In fact, the idea that my own life is really my own, disconnected from you and your life, is an illusion, at least according to Judeo-Christian faith (not to mention most other spiritual traditions).

Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way:  “All I’m saying is simply this, that all life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”  In our heart of hearts, I believe we know that all people are beloved children of God, that we are interrelated, all part of God’s family.

I just think it’s easier to believe that truth when we don’t have to actually deal with all those pesky people.  And, let’s face it, people can be challenging and frustrating and downright confounding.  Add to that the fact that there are important issues at stake in our familial, congregational, denominational, local, national, and international relationships.  No wonder lines get drawn in the sand and divisions occur between people and communities and ideologies.  Human relationships are complicated and difficult, and so it becomes easier to find a group of like-minded folks who don’t tend to challenge your own perception of how things should be to hang out with; the next step in this cozy set-up is to forget that other groups of like-minded folks (who happen to be on the polar-opposite end of our own ways of thinking or acting) are, in fact our sisters and brothers.

It’s not that we are all supposed to think alike or to sacrifice our deepest values for the sake of just “making nice.”  It’s not that an “I’m OK you’re OK” approach, with no critical thinking or debate, with no stand taken on anything, is what is required.  Rather, I think the issue for us as Christians is to try to remember that there might be an alternative framework within which to understand and live our lives in community with others, even with those members of the human family who challenge us most.  In other words, perhaps “us versus them” isn’t the only way to live.

Jesus offers us some insight into this alternative way to live through his teachings about the Kingdom of God (or, in Matthew “the kingdom of heaven”—so called due to the fact that Matthew’s community was largely made up of Jewish converts who refrained from speaking the name of “God”).  While the language of “Kingdom” might lead us to think of a place (like “The Magic Kingdom” for example), when Jesus teaches about the Kingdom of God he is speaking about something that is not confined to any one place.  He describes a dynamic way of life and relating that mirrors God’s own way of life.  So that, for example, when truly selfless love is offered anywhere, the kingdom is there.
And so today, Jesus teaches us through another parable of the kingdom.  And we learn some important things about how to live together as God’s family, as those intertwined so closely to one another that to try to pull out or cut off any part will do harm.  But to get to that we have to sort out the fact that the parable itself, if taken on its own, resonates quite differently from what we’re left with after the allegorical explanation given to the disciples in the following verses.

“If you read only the parable, then in the end you are left wondering just what it might mean to let the wheat and the weeds co-exist and grow together for now. You [may] ponder how and why pulling up the weeds would threaten also the wheat.”[i]  You might consider that wheat and weeds most likely co-exist within your own soul.  You may consider how the “nettlesome” aspects of yourself or of others give you an opportunity to choose to nurture the “wheat” in your midst and to be discerning about what is a weed.  You might even hear a word of hope—that by God’s grace, all that would threaten a good harvest will be cleared away one day, leaving only the fruit that is desired.

“That’s what happens if you read just the parable.  But once you get finished reading the explanation, you [may be] tempted to forget some of that, [you may be tempted to focus less on your own place in the garden, your own responsibility and accountability and turn toward anyone you consider a weed.]  You may start rubbing your hands together because you feel so satisfied to know that all those annoying, “weedy” folks will get their comeuppance in the end.  Suddenly you start to wonder less what it means to be wheat in the midst of weeds and start to focus more on that coming day when the roll is called up yonder and the weeds get burned at long last.”[ii]

In other words, the allegory offered in verses 37 to 42 gives us some juicy opportunities to practice “us versus them.”  It does seem to encourage us to focus on a future, promised, divine weed-be-gone intervention.  But here’s the question:  is “them” really different than “us” when it comes right down to it?  Are any of us—or any of our chosen communities—completely weed-free?  Have any here today never sinned or broken the law of God’s perfect love?  If we focus too much on others’ deserved “comeuppance” then we run the risk of allowing poisonous weeds to grow up within us.  We can become like the weeds in the parable—a specific kind of plant (beaded darnel), in fact, that looks just like wheat in the beginning, but whose seeds turn dark and poisonous as it grows.  And the fact that the writer of Matthew is writing for and about the church is instructive for us as well.  The implication is that in the church—just as everywhere else—there are folks who may look like they’re weeds who are wheat and those who look like wheat who are weeds.  This keeps us from being able to say that the wheat—as “us”—stands in pure contrast to the weeds (“them”) who are outside the church.

The church is the primary place where we learn about and try to practice living as members of God’s kingdom.  And yet right in our midst we know there are weeds and wheat.  Our task, then, is to stand as a witness in the world to an alternative way to live with that reality.  “The farmer in the parable seems to believe that the weeds themselves won’t threaten the wheat–the two are capable of growing together.  The weeds do not threaten the wheat but instead the threat comes from how we react to the weeds.”  Ripping out the weeds, trying to root out any perceived sin, may be our first impulse.  But what Jesus teaches in the parable is that our real challenge is finding the strength to resist that temptation.  “In verse 30 the master tells the servants just to “let” things be; the Greek word used there is the same word used in the Lord’s Prayer and elsewhere for “forgiveness.””[iii]   The farmer counsels patience to those who would rush in and start weeding like crazy.  Patience and forgiveness are kingdom values.  They are divine attributes.  And they are offered to each one of us by a patient and forgiving God.  Therefore, as those who seek to live in the kingdom of God, we are called to offer them to others.

We already know that forgiveness is hard work.  And the patience I’m talking about isn’t passive, isn’t “there isn’t any other option but to take a breath and wait” patience (like when you’re sitting in a doctor’s reception office or stuck in traffic, powerless to do anything else—even though you would if you could!).  The patience that is suggested by this parable of Jesus is an active virtue; it is strong, allowing us to bear with the challenges we face in community in love, gentleness, mercy, compassion, instead of lashing out, cutting off, casting out.  “Why is it, after all, that rooting out the weeds may well damage also the wheat?  Because when anger, a desire for vengeance, or an insensitive lobbing about of accusations starts to happen in the church, grace gets eclipsed.”[iv]  Gentleness gets sacrificed and “us versus them” takes over.  Compassionate forgiveness, forbearance, understanding, and grace are those things that ought to define us as Christians and as Christian community.  Unfortunately, this is not always the case.  And more than the perceived “weeds” are harmed as a result.

You know, Jesus teaches elsewhere in Matthew that it is God’s will that none be lost (Mt. 18.14).  This helps to temper the fire and gnashing of teeth that appear in our text today.  But we would miss the point of today’s text if we failed to see that our easy tendency to want to point the finger, draw lines in the sand, judge others, cut others off, fail to listen to other points of view, to lash out at those who push our buttons, to decide who’s in and out of God’s grace—all these things are poison to our own souls and poison in our community of faith.  And poison can be deadly, it burns.  We are invited to remember that we are all seeds planted in God’s garden, that we are all God’s beloved children.  There are always wheat and weeds around.  Our call is to have patience and to trust that—since in the kingdom of God grace and mercy are the primary values—what appears to us as a weed might turn out to be wheat.

Who knows?  The one who changed water into wine might just transform poison into honey.  That is for God to sort out.  For us, we can try to live the alternative to “us versus them”—by speaking our own truth in love and by listening for understanding, by humbly acknowledging that we may not always recognize wheat or weeds for what they are, by having patience with the perceived weeds within ourselves and within our church and within our communities, and by allowing that patience to make us “strong enough to hold back, to follow God’s way of grace and forgiveness instead of the world’s quick and easy solutions of vengeance, punishment, and violence”[v] even when the issues at stake are important and the debates grow heated.  The focus isn’t on some day in the future, the focus is on what you do, how you respond, how you love, whether you forgive TODAY.  Why not trust God enough today to have patience with yourself and with others?  Why not give thanks that God’s mercy has been extended to us—and to all?  Why not rejoice that we are given the opportunity to grow together, awaiting the harvest of peace that God has promised?  Why not?  [My guess is that those who are looking to the church to offer some light, some hope, would ask us the same question:  why not?]