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Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 Susan J. Barnes
July 21, 2002 St. Matthew’s, Austin
Here we are in the long summer season of Pentecost. The altar and the clergy are all decked out in green, which symbolizes the season of our growth and maturity in faith. It's right that the gospel lessons are agricultural parables: last week the parable of the sower, this week the
closely related parable of the wheat and weeds.
Jesus used parables as teaching tools because they work. They speak to the personal experience and the imagination of each listener. But in our urban, technological society, agricultural metaphors can loose the punch of experience. Last week Merrill said he can kill a plant at 50 feet. I'm not as bad as that, but I am ignorant about growing things.
Because I'm ignorant, at the family farm my tasks are harvesting and weeding the vegetable garden and orchard. (I got taken off weeding the flower beds when I pulled up planted wildflowers by mistake!) Two weeks ago I went out to harvest tomatoes. When I saw that thick weeds surrounded the plants, I got ready to yank them out with the happy vigor I usually apply to the task. But as I got into it I realized the truth of the parable we just heard. The stems of the weeds and the stems of the plants were so closely bound up that I risked uprooting the good
with the bad. Jesus knew what he was talking about.
Unlike the parable of the sower, which appears in all three synoptic gospels--Mark, Matthew and Luke--this parable is unique to Matthew. It also has the apocalyptic ending--the "wailing and gnashing of teeth"--that's particular to stories in that gospel. When we read those stories today--with a shiver--it's important to think about the original community for which the gospel was written. Remember the context. They were a small, embattled group, very much on the
defensive. They had been rejected from their synagogue because of their belief in Jesus. The stakes were high: eternal life. They believed they were right. So, rhetorically, they justified their position by casting things in stark contrast: the righteous versus the evil; black versus white;
salvation versus damnation. They figured themselves among the righteous, the saved.
But where is the Grace in that? How do we reconcile that vision with the God who is pure, unconditional, boundless love, a God who took on human form to live as we do, to teach us, to die for us and to open eternal life for us? Would that same God just give each of us the thumbs up or down, based on our deeds, judge us either good or bad? If so, there's space aplenty in heaven.
I don't know. Nobody knows. But, based on Jesus' life and teachings, I don't think God is like that. So let me propose another reading of the parable. Instead of each one of us being a shaft of wheat or a shaft of weed, what if each of us is the entire field, a field full of wheat mixed in with weeds?
Then this parable is about the stewardship of our abilities and our gifts. It is about how we--in all of our complexity-- grow and develop through life. It is about how, in the course of eighty years or so, each of us uses the blessings that God has given us for better or for worse.
Every positive quality, every gift, can be used for good or used for evil. The corporate scandals rocking the world markets today are a case in point: the profit motive is not inherently evil. But when greed takes over it becomes so. The system that was good runs amok.
Beautiful wheat turns to weeds.
That happens in corporations because it happens in individuals associated with the corporation—employees, yes, but also stock holders who push for profits. God willing, those same individuals may come to see the error of their ways, may right themselves, may repent and go on to live well and virtuously for the rest of their lives, with abundant wheat crowding out the weeds. God's grace, God's forgiveness in Jesus Christ, provides that chance.
God--and God alone--will see and judge us in our totality. But not until the harvest, not until the end of our lives, not until then will it be clear how we grew, what we made of ourselves, whether we were good stewards of the blessings God gave us. The gospel promise is that only then will God judge.
History is full of tales of bad people who turned good. They lift our spirits. But it can go the other way. Take Fritz Haber, for instance, whom I learned about in a great pair of stories on Morning Edition, NPR. Haber won the Nobel prize in 1918 for inventing a process that turns nitrogen from the air into liquid amonia for fertilizer. Possibly the most important innovation of the modern era, it averted famine a century ago and helps more than two billion people feed themselves today. Of course, the excess nitrogen pollutes the air and water today, as well. That's another story. That's not Haber's fault.
No, Haber's was a sin of commission. Haber was brilliant, hard working, dedicated. He was dedicated to science and dedicated to his homeland, Germany. Professional ambition and patriotism: two fine qualities--potentially. But in Haber they went awry. When WWI broke
out, Haber's patriotism drove him to invent and promote the use of poison gas. In April 1915 he personally led the first gas attack in military history. From fame to infamy on the same wings, the same gifts.
I do not know whether Haber repented, but he did have a bitter end. You see, he was Jewish by birth. And even though he was a Christian convert, he was forced into exile and an early grave by the anti-Semitic laws of his beloved Germany under the Nazis. He did not die in a concentration camp. But, in a final irony, an insecticide he invented was used in the camps to kill his fellow Jews. With his great gifts, Haber went very, very wrong.
The lesson is clear. The lesson is about stewardship. We are accountable to God for what God has given to us. Listen, if someone gave you full responsibility for something that belonged to her or him--property, money, a business, children, you name it--wouldn't you have that person's wishes constantly in mind? Wouldn't you consult him or her on every decision that affected the thing that had been entrusted to you?
If you believe that all that we have, all that we are, comes from God, our relationship with God needs to be like that. It is not just a Sunday morning affair. It is a matter for every dayr every undertaking. God belongs--God should be present and in charge--of the decisions that we make. We need to bring God into in every business office, every shop, every factory, every courtroom, every home, every day. Because this life is not about us. It's about something unfathomably greater.
The Prayer of the Daughters of the King expresses well the relationship we ought to have with God. It goes: "I am but one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do I must do, and what I must do I will do with God's help." The prayer ends with the all-important question: " Lord, what would you have me do?"
Another perspective on our relationship with God is more fanciful. My idea about how God sees us: God is the supremely wise and loving parent, and--developmentally speaking relative to God--we are about 2 or 3 years old. And we're all in this big playground called Earth, bumbling about, stumbling, hurting ourselves and each other, but without a clue what we are doing, or what the
universe is really about. And, like children of that age, we WANT TO DO IT OURSELF!
As adults, we know the peril of that attitude in children. We know how badly it ends. As Christian adults, we say we believe in God. But when will we realize, what will it take for us to begin to live according to that belief--a belief in God's utter supremacy and total benevolence?
You see, stewardship is not really about money, though that comes into the mix. Stewardship is about the whole enchilada. It's about the great field that each of us is, and each of us is given to tend: it's about our entire life, everything that we have, everything that we are. God has entrusted all of that to us.
Everything comes from God. What will we present to God when the harvest time comes?
