Since March this congregation has experienced a smorgasbord of preaching. I could well imagine that you are ready to settle into some kind of pattern where assurance can be given that one of our three staff members will be in the pulpit. When our Lay Leader, Bill Price, asked me to preach this morning it was with some trepidation that I answered in the affirmative. Preaching is a craft that is enhanced by the discipline of doing it week after week. Use of the lectionary is a part of that discipline that discourages the dissolute use of favorite textual material rather than being open to study and inspiration sometimes afforded by less familiar scripture passages. If I am rusty with preaching, I am no stranger to dealing with weeds. We have three acres on the less affluent end of Thumb Butte Road. Already this Spring and Summer I have cut the weeds three times and the summer monsoon rains are yet to appear. Whatever else, I am familiar with the ongoing nemesis of weeds.

Jesus was adept in the use of parables in his teachings. Most rabbis were. The parable read in your hearing this morning is one of his Kingdom of Heaven parables. It is an earthy story depicting the tribulations encountered in a religious community…enemies sowing discord, well meaning servants who are determined to weed out the trouble makers, the problems experienced in being judgmental and the dreaded promise of the final judgment. The encouragement that Jesus gives consists of understanding the problems, patience, discernment between what is good and evil and the righteous living that is worthy of the final judgment, which of course, can only reside with God. Did you hear all this in the parable? Let me see if I can help.

Arch rivals of Jesus for the mind of the religious person of the day were the Pharisees. Their very name meant “the separatists”. They saw themselves as the holy community. They doted on a spiritual supremacy , and we know from one of their books, The Psalms of Solomon, that they expected a great separating of the sinners from the saints when it pleased God to send his Messiah and establish his kingdom.

But then you know the story as well as I do. When the Messiah came and said what the Kingdom of Heaven would be like--the Pharisees that saw themselves as the chosen and were incensed that Jesus was admitting all kinds of new people into the new community. Those of us who have lived our lives in the church are familiar with the contemporary Pharasaic cry…“I don’t know anybody here anymore--everybody is new and there is no place for old timers.”

So Jesus had to speak to the issue. He told a story about a farmer whose wheat field was infested with weeds. The weeds were bearded darnel--and in the early days of its growth was difficult to distinguish from wheat. The eager servants offered to rush into the fields and rip the weeds out. The farmer objected, cautioning that when the weeds were pulled out, the wheat may also be destroyed. Let them grow together until the harvest, then we will burn the weeds and gather the wheat into the barn.

Well this is the story. Three centuries later, the Donatists in North Africa--strict and strait laced Christians--declared that the church must be holy and demanded the weeding out of sinners. It was Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, that remembered this parable of Jesus that is our textual material today. Perhaps Christian denominations today struggling over “inclusiveness” would do well to know the mind of Jesus when he gave this teaching.

St. Paul struggled with those who wanted to throw the bums out of the church in Corinth, and he said, “Pass no premature judgment; wait till the Lord comes. For he will bring to light what darkness hides and disclose men’s inner motives.” (I Cor. 4:5)

Do I need to say that I find in this parable an obvious rebuke to our perennial temptation to make the church a club for saints more than a hospital for sinners?

The main thrust of the parable is undoubtedly a warning against premature weeding. Judgment is a task for God rather than persons. Many of the ultra conservative Evangelicals might read this parable and understand it as they attempt to hold Washington hostage and to seize and restore the country to the Christian faith once again. Surely, it is a truism that “we see according to what we are, and our judgments are the most revelatory things about us.”

Permit me a couple of observations that probably have already occurred to you.

I. First of all, I see that there is no possibility of excluding evil. Good and bad must live together.

There is always a hostile power loose in the world, seeking to destroy the good seed. The newest name for evil is terrorism. Its ruthless killing of a number of westerners to make psychological prisoners of us all goes unchecked despite our four years of war to rein it in. When we think about it, we know that on a personal level we know that both good and evil influences are exerted upon our lives, the influences which make the good seed grow and the influence that seeks to choke and destroy the good seed before it can come to fruition. The lesson is that we must be ever vigilant.

There are two errors into which we can easily fall. First we can be the sentimentalist and say with the writer of the hymn, “This is my Father’s world‘…thus avoiding the tension between the bad and the good. While it is God’s world, it is not a paradise nor hardly anything like it.

The other error to which our generation is even more prone is that of falling into cynicism and despair. Modern forms of mass communication tend to spotlight cruelty, violence and evil. We sometimes feel that there are simply more weeds in our field than wheat.

I believe that the Christian realist has the best vantage point--avoiding both pitfalls. He celebrates the steadfast love of God acting creatively in Christ and through the Holy Spirit in life. He believes in the good seed of the Gospel. He refuses, on the other hand to look at life only through rose colored glasses.

From my library, I pulled a book by the late Bishop Gerald Kennedy entitled The Parables. He was writing about this parable and said something that I think this congregation might find useful:

“Many a church has the idea that all of its problems would be solved if it had the right preacher. So there is usually a short honeymoon period when the new preacher seems to be the answer to all their dreams, but in a little while he proves to have some faults and some weaknesses. Then the people begin to enlarge on his less admirable qualities until they have forgotten about his obvious gifts. Soon they believe that they made a mistake or the bishop betrayed them and they must find another preacher. It would be so much better if church members would simply realize that there is no perfect preacher. Every preacher has some wheat to offer, but people must take some weeds along with it.

The preacher on the other hand, often seeks for the perfect church. His troubles are due to imperfect churches, but somewhere out there is the ideal parish. There is no perfect church, and no congregation is made up only of saints. The sooner ministers learn that weeds in the wheat are not unusual but a rather normal condition, the sooner they can settle down to become good ministers of Jesus Christ.”

I might also add that there are no perfect marriages. When I hear someone say that there has never been a cross word in their marriage, I think of the old Englishman who died only a couple of weeks ago after being married for 80 years. When asked the secret to the longevity of his marriage said there were two words that he learned early on…”Yes, dear”. We have to learn to live with imperfections in ourselves and those we love. And while I am at it, there are no perfect jobs, either. I’ve known people who never held a job more than 18 months because “somewhere out there is a job that fits them.”

What can I say? Good and bad must of necessity live together. The way to peace of mind is to accept the way life is and then do the best one can with it. Life demands a great deal of patience and persistence.

Now, if good and bad , weeds and wheat, are to continue together, of necessity we must….

II. Be able to distinguish between the weeds and the wheat.

In the parable, darnel and wheat are so similar in appearance that only the well trained eye can discern between them. Most people would need to see the full grown grain to tell the difference between them. The grain of the bearded darnel is slightly poisonous. I’m told that it can cause dizziness and sickness and is slightly narcotic in its effects and even a small amount has a bitter and unpleasant taste. The color of the bearded darnel grain is slate gray, instead of the golden color of wheat.

Whatever else this parable has to teach, it teaches us that appearances are deceiving. Things are not always what they appear.

One of my least happy remembrances in the parish ministry was when I was pastor in Chandler and having to deal with transients in winter (they were hardly a problem in summer) and sorting through the stories of hardship to determine who really needed our help. One time a man, wife and two small children, appeared at the church, out of money on their way to California. It had been a particularly frigid winter in Watertown, New York, blizzard after blizzard practically paralyzing the city. The man told of losing his job there, being evicted from his rented house and having called a relative in Southern California, had been urged to simply jump in the car and head west. His story was so convincing, and our having children at home, I was sure that there was something we could do. I called a stalwart member of the church who had a farm on the edge of town. He had a vacant cabin on the farm formerly occupied by hired help. He would allow the family to live there while the man worked and got enough money to move on to California. The church members learned of the family’s plight and showered them with gifts of money, food and clean clothing. The husband secured day labor work and all of us were happy that we could be doing what the church ought to be doing. On the morning of the fifth day, the cabin was vacant, the family gone. They had left in the middle of the night. We later learned that the New York plates on the car had been stolen. All of us had been victimized by our Christian vulnerability. I had failed my congregation because I could not discern between the weeds and the wheat.

We know when we think about it that advertising agencies have an easy time with many of us because we are anxious to fool ourselves. We are culpable because the weeds of our lives to us have the same appearance as the wheat.

While my mother has been deceased more than three decades, I can hear her warning words as freshly as if they were uttered yesterday..“Be sure your sins will find you out.” “A bird does not outfly its tail” is yet another way of putting it. As I lived with this text over these last days, I could not dismiss from my mind the words “till the harvest”. These are hopeful, yet ominous words. Even though weeds have sprung up in the fields of our lives, things are not out of hand. God’s ways may seem slow, but they are not impotent.

Not all the promises of politicians nor the pulpit thumping threats of preachers can determine the destinies of mankind. Things are always inevitably moving “toward the harvest”.

One further thing we must not miss:

III. Can we wait for and deal with the harvest?

I remember my cotton farming friends always racing the coming of the winter rains. Life is always reaching a crisis of harvest. Call it death, if you wish. It comes to each of us as the un-masking of our souls, indicating the end of the masquerade.

The so called good and the so called bad may be confused during the period of growth, but never in the period of harvest. Evil has a certain fate in the world, despite our thoughts to the contrary. Jesus indicated that the weeds are doomed to the fire. This is not so much threat as promise. It is the natural end for weeds.

Harvest reminds us of the miracle of growth and the beauty of maturity. We experience the glory of God’s creative acts which brings us to an experience of calm, tranquility, renewal and assurance. It bespeaks usefulness and hope for new crops; the feeding of the hungry and the preservation of the continuing cycles of life.

Some may dread the harvest, because they do not see it as the continuation of the life cycle. They see it only as the ultimate end and judgment. But according to Jesus, judgment need hold no terror for us if we are to be adjudged worthy of saving.

We already know something of God’s judgment whether we live like it or not. There is a time of harvest when weeds will be destroyed, and wheat saved. If a person accepts these fundamental principles and lives by them, right paths will be taken and right choices will be made. It is always a personal decision and cannot be forced, though a person has to accept responsibility for it.

As we wait for the “final harvest” I think Jesus, master of the use of parables in teaching, would find the work of one of my favorite poets, Robert Frost, to his liking. It is entitled “Fear of God”.

If you should rise from Nowhere up to Somewhere,
From being No one up to being Someone,
Be sure to keep repeating to yourself
You owe it to an arbitrary God
Whose mercy to you rather than others
Won’t bear too critical examination.
Stay unassuming, if for lack of license
To wear the uniform of who you are,
You should be tempted to make up for it,
In a subordinating look or tone,
Beware of coming too much to the surface
And using for apparel what was meant
To be the curtain of the inmost soul.

Sermon delived by Rev. George Randle on July 17, 2005.