Pentecost 10 – July 20, 2008 – “To Weed or Not to Weed” Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43      Pastor Charles Pegg

When I was a kid, we moved into a new house in June, 1940. I remember it was raining that day and my mother was fretting over the fact that the movers would ruin the nicely varnished floors in the house. As we settled in after the move, Dad’s concern was the yard and the need to get some grass growing. He hired my oldest brother, Bob, and a couple of his friends to rake the yard, picking out the stones and smoothing the ground so grass seed could be planted.

Dad took great pride in the yard and did a fair amount of landscaping, planting bushes and flowers, and developing a garden to grow carrots and tomatoes and other vegetables. He did a great deal of work to make the yard look nice.

As I grew older, through my grade school years and into my teens, my older brother, Don, and I got to share in the tasks of making the yard look nice. Instead of being able to play as much as we wanted with our friends, we got to rake leaves in the fall. We raked them into big piles in the back yard and then into an old blanket so they could be carted to the compost pile. It was a time when we could rake the leaves from the front yard into the street and burn them

Spring and summer meant different work in the yard. Much to our dismay, we got to spend summer evenings on our knees in the yard pulling crabgrass. Dad laid out strings in the yard and we were each assigned a row to do. Sometimes the crabgrass came out easy; sometimes the roots didn’t budge. If it had recently rained, all the roots usually came up; if the ground was too dry, much of the time only part of the roots came up. Stubborn dandelions required the use of some sort of digger to get the roots.

Regardless of how hard I tried, it was very difficult for me not to pull up some grass with the weeds, and I’m sure I had a reputation with my father for missing some weeds that I should have pulled out. (I undoubtedly pulled some grass instead of weeds, too.)

Fast forward 8-10 years to my days in college. My roommate lived on a ranch in Eastern Montana where his father raised corn and sugar beats. I spent several breaks from college there and helped he and his brothers with the work that had to be done. One morning they put me on a tractor to cultivate a corn field. The objective was to break up the soil so it would capture the moisture if it rained and, of course, to get rid of weeds in the corn and give it a better chance to grow.

It was my first time and I did pretty well until . . . until a couple of corn plants got stuck crossways between two cultivators. When I finally got the tractor stopped, there was a nice pile of corn plants in the row. I presume my roommate’s dad found them when the field was harvested in the fall.

Both of those tasks – at home working on our lawn and in Montana cultivating corn - were attempts to get rid of weeds. My dad knew, and my roommate’s dad knew, that there was a time to pull weeds and a time to let them alone.

This is the key to understanding Jesus’ parable, the Parable of the Tares. Jesus tells the story of the landowner to his disciples as another way of looking at God and understand- ing how things are in His Kingdom. A landowner goes out and plants good seed in his field. While he and his servants sleep, someone, an enemy, according to Jesus, comes and sows weeds in the field. When the plants sprout and the servants see what has happened, they go to the landowner and ask if they can pull out the weeds. His answer is simple and straightforward – leave them alone until the harvest; if you pull the weeds now, you’ll uproot some of the wheat; the weeds and the wheat will be separated at the harvest.

It’s important to note a couple of things here. First, as with many young plants in a field, it would be difficult to tell the wheat from the weeds because they looked so much alike. Indeed, the weed was called darnel, it was poisonous, and it looked almost exactly like wheat. When they both matured, it would be easy to tell the difference and the weeds could be more easily separated. Second, there was the real danger of pulling up weeds and wheat because their roots were intertwined.

So, says Jesus, an enemy has done this to the landowner – contaminated his crop, sown weeds where good seed had been planted. What kind of enemy would do this? One whose objective was to shame the landowner and make him a source of ridicule. In the ancient world feuds seemingly went on forever. Someone born into a family not only inherited parents and other family members and the family’s honor, but he or she also inherited the family’s enemies.

Families became enemies for a variety of reasons – a slight at a social function, a dispute over land, a rivalry for someone’s hand in marriage or someone’s property. It didn’t matter. Whatever the affront or rivalry, real or imagined, the outcome was always the same: a feud that could go on for centuries. Anything you did to your enemy – taking property, killing a family member – brought shame to him. It was always necessary to be on one’s guard lest an enemy shame the family.

In the case of this parable, Jesus has sown the seed in the world and someone is attempting to shame the work of the kingdom which Jesus is doing. However, the shame does not become full blown until the plants mature and the landowner’s friends and neighbors can see it exposed. They express their derision when they discover what has happened, and even more when the landowner forbids his servants from ridding the field of the weeds until the crop matures. The landowner’s friends and neighbors expect him to exact revenge; instead he appears helpless and defeated by his enemy.

But appearances are deceiving. The landowner is shrewd and a savvy framer. He knows the wheat can grow along with the weeds, that it can tolerate the competition for moisture and nutrients. He knows also that after the harvest he will have the wheat, as well as the weeds as extra fuel for his needs. So the weed strategy backfires and shames the enemy. The landowner has the last laugh.

Unfortunately, those feuds invade our society to this day. Not only was there that famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, but today gangs like the Bloods and the Crips fight over territory or put to death rival gang members in retaliation for any number of offenses, as a way to shame each other.

So Jesus’ hearers recognize that this is not a story whose main emphasis is on sound agricultural practices. More likely Jesus is offering a commentary on his culture’s values. There is certainly something different about the activity of the landowner, and it may well be his refusal to seek revenge. Yet it is just that which enables him to be successful against his enemy. His success, by seeming to do nothing and reaping the benefits of the wheat and the weeds, is a powerful lesson.

Once again Jesus’ disciples fail to understand the meaning of Jesus’ words. They need an explanation as to what this parable means. As they learn, the parable addresses basic human questions, especially that nagging one of the majority of people who feel they have no control over their lives. They are at the mercy of others who have control over them, and it was their common experience that the wicked often flourished and the righteous often suffered. The consolation for those who were righteous was their belief that ultimately God would get those who are evil.

It was for them, as for us, a question of waiting for the Kingdom. Why was it necessary to wait for that promised separation, that division between the evil and the righteous, that judgment? The answer is simple, even though it may not be what we want to hear. First, God has appointed the time of judgment. It is in His hands, and no one can speed up the process or change the time. Second, as we understand from good agricultural practices, we can’t separate the weeds from the wheat without doing damage to the wheat. Separation done before the appropriate time could result in the loss of some of the good with the bad.

So, again, as in many of Jesus’ parables, a key ingredient of the Kingdom is patience. When our children were very young – 3, 4, 5 – the youngest had a difficult time being patient. We had a problem when it came time to celebrate Joe’s birthday, because his younger brother, Jeff, couldn’t understand why Joe was getting presents and he was getting nothing. He was very unhappy until we solved the problem by giving Jeff a present on Joe’s birthday, even though his birthday wasn’t for about six weeks.

Many areas of life require patience. It might be circumstances we come upon as our children grow up, waiting for a raise, expecting a birth, the arrival of visitors. All these things and countless more experiences in our lives require patience. And there is nothing we can do to speed up the arrival of a friend or the growing up process in our children. All of these things happen, like the coming of the Kingdom, in their own good time.

So the Parable of the Tares teaches us many things. We learn that there are hostile powers in the world and we need to be on constant guard against them; that it is difficult, even sometimes impossible, to distinguish the good from the bad, those in the Kingdom and those not (how often have neighbors been shocked to learn that some criminal activity was going on in the house next door or across the street, and they were not aware of it?); that we should not be too quick to judge others when we don’t know all the facts; that judgment will come in the end; and that the only one with the right to judge is God.

Amen!