Sermon by Reverend Dr. John W. Mann | July 23, 2023

Matthew 13:24-30

Last week I said that I like an orderly existence, and that you wouldn’t know that from looking at my yard. My yard is the last bastion of chaos. In the neighborhood where I live, there are people who maintain their yards to a garden tour level of excellence. I marvel at the amount of work that requires. Not a weed in sight. I could do that, if that’s what I wanted to do.

Before I was old enough to get a job, I did yard work around the neighborhood. Mowing lawns, raking leaves, pulling weeds. I earned a whopping fifty cents an hour pulling weeds. Hour after hour. For me, pulling weeds is like the Greek myth of Sisyphus; he had to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down again. Up he would push, over and over. No matter how many weeds I pull from the flower beds, they always grow back.

Such is the nature of growing things; they grow. As for weeds, if they are green and produce a flower, they get to stay. The front yard I have to mow because of “city ordinances.” In October the leaves fall and get mulched into the grass. Then it snows and I’m off the hook yard-wise for six months.

Jesus told stories about life, about what life is like, what God is like and how our hopes and dreams about life connect with God’s expectations. These stories are called “parables.” A parable is a way of re-imagining truth in story form. Imagination allows for different ways of seeing something.

Jesus told a story about growing things. A fellow planted a field of grain. He did all the right things to ensure a good crop. But one night soon after the crop was planted, an enemy came by. Some joker who under cover of darkness, went through the field with a bag of weed seeds scattering them everywhere. The nasty part of it was that no one would notice until both the weeds and the good crop came up together.

When the crop started growing, it revealed that the field was infested with weeds. A servant of the farmer wanted to pull them up. But the farmer said to just leave them be. He would harvest the whole mess and sort out the good from the bad then.

Conventional wisdom would say that is not good farming practice. All those weeds will cut into the profit margin. There will be less to eat. How does that make sense? Like most parables Jesus told, the story is not meant to make sense. The story is meant to raise questions about the meaning of life.

What may seem disruptive and offensive to some, may actually be a reflection of the complexity and diversity of life. Our crops can very well reflect the necessities of modern farming practices, but life, even life as God intends it, is not like a well-tended field. In God’s garden of life, good and bad exist side by side. Life is not always uniform and smooth. Is it meant to be?

Out of curiosity I looked for information on the benefits of weeds. I learned that –

1. Weeds are essential to pollinators.
2. Weeds feed wildlife.
3. Weeds benefit microorganisms.
4. Weeds are good indicators of soil health.
5. Weeds can provide nutrients for other plants.
6. Weeds prevent erosion.

Sooner or later, we all end up with a few weeds. They appear in the form of regrets; those things you wish you never did or things you would do differently if you could go back and do it over. They are all those little nagging things that you don’t like about yourself, all the things you wish you could change. Some weeds appear in the form of other people. The co-worker you’re stuck with, the relatives who just won’t go away, all those people who bring trouble into your life and without whom you think you would be so much better off.

Some weeds come from life experience. We may wish they aren’t in the garden of our life, but there they are. Maybe these weeds are the wounds and traumas we know through no fault of our own. Could these weeds be essential to God’s landscape? I can think of many ways to answer that question.

Before my Dad died, he said he wished he would have been more loving to his children when we were growing up. That would have been a different family experience. It would have changed my experience. When I had children of my own, I wanted to be a different sort of Dad than my own Dad was. In the last years of his life, he made a point of saying, “I love you.” My thought was, better late than never; that if he could come to that conclusion, then there must be a God.

In the parable Jesus told he said an enemy planted the weeds. Is this a way of saying that in order to explain the existence of weeds, we need an enemy to be responsible?

Blame it on the enemy. Enemies provide us with good excuses for why things are the way they are. If it wasn’t for “them” and what they are doing to mess up our well-ordered version of life, life would be much better. Life would be much better without “them.”

Maybe the best the thing would be for the enemy to be destroyed. It makes sense. The enemy is trying to destroy us, so we should destroy them instead. It gives us an excuse for violence, revenge and war, as well as working the political, social and religious systems to our advantage.

Sometimes we contend with actual enemies. But in the absence of actual enemies, we tend to create them. Someone to blame for what goes wrong – a scapegoat that means we don’t have to take responsibility. Maybe the enemy serves as a convenient excuse for not dealing with the weeds in a healthy and constructive way.

I’m also aware that I could be the weed in someone’s otherwise pristine garden. The power of re-imagining the life God makes possible is found in the words of Jesus who said, “Love your enemies.”

There is a line though, and it’s not necessarily a fine line. There are times when the weed has to be pulled up right now. One time one of my boys told me about his best friend Chris, who was being abused by his father. He was in high school at the time. He witnessed this dad using his fists on his friend. I decided to call children’s protective services and make a report. In making the report, I did not request anonymity. The report was taken seriously, and the Chris was removed from the home. The dad in question was livid. He wanted to know why I didn’t talk to him if I had such concerns?  I told him that in my line of work, I am a mandatory reporter. If abuse comes to my attention, I am required by law to report it. Some weeds need to be dealt with.

Chris grew up. He joined the military and served with distinction. He married and had a family. A few years ago, he wrote me a letter thanking me for intervening in his life. Unfortunately, life is not a perfect garden. Next week my son is attending the funeral of his best friend, who died of a fentanyl overdose.

It would be nice, if in a sermon I could always tell stories of how the truth of the matter was put to positive use; I wish that the stories had happy endings. Endings as a way of saying, “this proves it!” or “this is how it always works.” But life is not perfect and faith in God is not about being perfect in a perfect world. Faith in God is about living in an imperfect world, with an awareness of spiritual realities. Realities that show us there is more to life than we can see and touch for ourselves; realities that give us a sense of hope.

God says, “Leave them be. If you go digging around too much and you’ll hurt the good growth. We’ll sort it out when the time comes.” That doesn’t necessarily imply a kind of cosmic, “Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord.” It’s more like the good and bad grow together and often what we think of as a bad situation, experience or people in our life, are actually an essential part of what makes us who we are.

As for my yard, I’m working on how to welcome the weeds. The back is a great space to develop natural habitat plants and a kind of miniature prairie environment. I see deer back there eating some of the growth and resting in the shade. There are rabbits, birds, insects and other wildlife. Not so much a perfect garden, as it is a peaceable kingdom.

If God is the master gardener of life, then there seems to be room for weeds in life’s garden. I think what Jesus is trying to get us to imagine in parables about the realm of God’s possibilities, i.e. “the kingdom of God,” is that life invites us to both ponder its mysteries and imagine its possibilities. Amen.