Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Matthew 13:24-30 April 13, 2008

He put before them 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. 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?' He answered, 'An enemy has done this.' The slaves said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he replied, 'No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'"

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For the following story, I'm grateful to Craig Wells, who sent it to me yesterday without knowing how well it would fit into today's sermon. The story goes like this. A husband and wife, both 85 years old, had been married for sixty years. Though they were far from rich, they managed to get by because they watched their pennies. Though not young, they were both in very good health, largely due to the wife's insistence on healthy foods and exercise, throughout their lives together but especially for all of the last decade. When the end came, it wasn't because their good health failed them. They had gone off on one of their infrequent vacations and their plane crashed, sending them off to Heaven.

When they reached the pearly gates, St. Peter escorted them inside. He took them to a beautiful mansion, furnished in gold and fine silks, with a fully stocked kitchen and a waterfall in the master bath. A maid could be seen hanging their favorite clothes in the closet. They gasped in astonishment when Peter said, "Welcome to Heaven. This will be your home now."

The old man asked Peter how much all this was going to cost. "Why, nothing," Peter replied, "This is your reward in Heaven." The old man looked out the window and right there he saw a championship golf course, finer and more beautiful than any ever built on Earth. "I suppose the green fees are outrageous?" grumbled the old man. "No. This is heaven," St. Peter replied. "If you like, you can play for free, every day."

Next they went to the clubhouse and saw a lavish buffet laid out, with every imaginable cuisine from seafood to steaks to exotic deserts, free flowing beverages. "Don't even ask," said St. Peter to the man. This is Heaven, it is all free for you to enjoy." The old man looked around and glanced nervously at his wife. "Well, where are the low fat and low cholesterol foods, and the decaffeinated tea?" he asked. "That's the best part," St. Peter replied. "You can eat and drink as much as you like, of whatever you like, and you will never get fat or sick. This really is Heaven!" The old man pushed, "No gym to work out at?" "Not unless you want to," was the answer. "No testing my blood sugar or blood pressure or..." "Never again; all you do here is enjoy yourself." At that point, the old man turned, glared at his wife and said, "You and your bran muffins. We could have been here ten years ago!"

Now believe me, I've preached enough sermons to know that there is no way to ruin a good joke faster than subjecting it to analysis. However, now that we've all had a good laugh, allow me to point out that the humor of this story depends on our not always knowing what is in our own best interests. Those of us who are health conscious try to keep up with the latest studies of what we should be eating and how much we should be sweating. But since we can't actually see the future, God only knows, literally, whether we are ultimately doing ourselves any favors. Maybe, as the story implies, we would be better off doing what we can to hasten our arrival in heaven. Personally though, I happen to like bran muffins, and if eating them means I have to wait a bit longer for my eternal reward, I guess that's just the way it is.

In a larger sense though, this story makes much the same point that we find in this morning's parable. How do we separate the weeds from the wheat? How do we know what's right and what isn't, and what do we do about it? How do we tease apart the good from the bad without making a monumental hash of things? Obviously, these questions have implications that go far beyond just trying to know how to eat right. They strike to the heart of what it means to live right, to truly act in our own best interests.

The problem though, is that the parable of the weeds and the wheat does a better job of raising these questions than it does answering them. The story itself seems pretty simple. The master of a rather large plantation plants good seed in his fields. An enemy steels in at night and plants bad seed on top of the good. The seeds grow up together until the servants realize what has happened, at which point they ask the master what they should do about it. They are told not to try to separate them, lest some of the good wheat be destroyed, and they are reassured that, in the end, the bad and the good will all be sorted out.

William Barclay, that famous old New Testament scholar, explains that the story would have made perfect sense to a Palestinian audience. "The tares," he said, "were a weed called bearded darnel (lolium temulentum). In their early stages the tares so closely resembled the wheat that it was impossible to distinguish the one from the other. When both had headed out it was easy to distinguish them; but by that time the roots of the wheat and the tares were so intertwined that the tares could not be pulled up and weeded out without tearing the wheat out with them." Barclay goes on to say that the tares and the wheat were so much alike that the Jews sometimes called the tares "bastard wheat."

So, the story makes sense in the context of ancient agriculture. But the minute we try to apply it to life, things start getting complicated. As an analogy to our lives, it's easy to see that good and bad, represented by the weeds and the wheat are, 1) all mixed up together, 2) sometimes very difficult to tell apart, and 3) even when we can be tell them apart, are hard to pull apart without damaging both.

Take the War in Iraq for example. Across the broad spectrum of people in this country, we have never been able to agree that this war has been a good, or even a necessary thing. We can hardly distinguish our friends from our enemies. We don't agree on a solution, and we can't tell whether the actions we're taking are making the situation better or worse. This is a classic example of the weeds and the wheat being all mixed up together, and no matter how certain any one of us may be about what we think is the right way forward, the fact is none of us know what the future holds, and none of us can anticipate all the unintended consequences.

So what do we do? Well, here's where it becomes complicated. If we take the parable literally, at face value, standing all by itself, what we do is precisely, nothing. The servants are told that, for the time being at least, that anything they could do would only make the situation worse, and they are advised to stand idly by until "The Master," feels the time is right to sort it all out.

Now, I believe, and I certainly hope you agree, that in spite of the fact that it comes from the Bible, doing nothing, making no effort to sort out right from wrong and good from bad, is simply not an acceptable solution. And because it's not an acceptable solution, it seems pretty obvious that it can't be a healthy interpretation of this passage. This is a good illustration of the dangers of lifting one small passage out of the Bible and making it the whole of our theology. So how then do we understand this parable in a way that makes sense? What is it trying to tell us? To me, the main message is, life is complicated, and sometimes our problem is that we try to make life out to be too simple.

I had a friend in the Coast Guard some years ago (a good many years ago actually). We were roommates in the barracks for about two and a half years. He was a good man; interesting, quiet and determined. He also happened to be a member of a nearby fundamentalist church. He wasn't obnoxious about his faith. He wasn't preachy or self-righteous. He was like some I've known who are intent on shoving their beliefs down other people's throats. But, he was absolutely clear about what he believed, and life seemed very simple from his point of view.

At the time I had lots of questions, and so we talked, endlessly. Throughout our time together as roommates, we carried on a conversation about God, Jesus, the church, the Bible… virtually anything that had to do with the nature of faith. He was always very respectful and patient. He never got bent out of shape as I tried to poke holes in his beliefs, which I did frequently. I don't think that he was ever quite sure that God was going to figure out a way to get me into heaven. But he seemed to be content to leave that in God's hands. And I distinctly remember thinking how nice it would be to have such a simple and uncomplicated view of the world. I found his simplicity and his clarity very appealing. But at the same time, it was profoundly obvious to me that I could not, in good faith or good conscience, believe what he believed. If there is a continuum, with black and white thinking at one end and shades of grey at the other, much as I have sometimes wished it were otherwise, I have always lived mostly in the grey zone.

And that's one of the reasons we get along so well here isn't it. Our United Church of Christ, Congregational tradition tends to attract people who appreciate the subtleties of life. Mostly I think that's a good thing, but it can also leave us a little at sea sometimes. When everything is gray, when all decisions have to be re-examined time and time again because no conclusion is ever final, it can be awfully hard to feel confident about what we think we know and the judgments we need to make. I don't feel any great need to tell you that life is complicated. That is something we already know.

But looking back at the parable, it seems to me that the people Jesus was talking to didn't necessarily know that. There were, in his day just as much as in ours, people who tended to see the world in absolute terms. The Pharisees were one group. The Essenes were another. What little we know about these people suggests that they felt great clarity, and great self-righteousness, about who was and who wasn't right with God. It could be that this parable is simply meant to tell people who thought this way that they might be better off if they weren't so quick to judge, like that other story about taking the log out of our own eyes before we remove the speck from the eye of our neighbor. It could be Jesus was simply trying to tell them that life isn't as straight forward as they seemed to think. Life is a mixture of good and bad. It isn't always easy to tell one from the other. It isn't always easy, even with the best of intentions, to separate out the weeds from the wheat without doing violence to the very goals we're trying to accomplish in the first place. If self-righteous, black and white thinking is our problem, then maybe we do need to hear that we're better off doing nothing. Maybe we do need the message that God knows better than we do and our standing idly by could actually prevent us from doing more harm than good.

But, if we already get that message, then sitting by and doing nothing is exactly what we don't need to hear. The problem, for those of us who live in the grey zone, is that it is too easy to become paralyzed by not knowing the right thing to do. And if that's where we are, what we need to do is tune ourselves in to some of the many other parables, passages and statements of Jesus that encourage us to act, with humility, in ways that nurture the good and mitigate the bad.

Certainly, we can't see the future, but that doesn't mean we can't contribute. It's true we can never know for certain that our best intended actions will always turn out for the best. But, if we allow ourselves to be guided by the basic principles of our faith - the principles of love, humility, charity, generosity, and compassion - the choices we make and the actions we do take will at least be guided by the Spirit of Grace. Life is complicated. But just because it isn't black and white, that doesn't mean we have simply been abandoned in the gray zone. There is always the possibility of seeing our way forward. Not always clearly or completely, but more like, as Paul put it, "through a glass dimly." Far from doing nothing, we need always to be guided by the principles of our faith into living, within our complicated world, in ways that are healthy and honest and loving.

Amen.