5 Pentecost

July 17, 2011

Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52

+ This past Friday I met with a wonderful young couple over whose wedding I will preside in September. We met at the HoDo, appropriately enough because they will be getting married on the rooftop there. We had a wonderful evening. I really enjoy meeting with wedding couples in such environments. The days of meeting with the priest in the priest’s office are, I think, starting to be a thing of the past. And I can tell you I get to know a couple much better over cocktails than sitting across from each other in my office. This will be my fifth wedding of the year. I was going to say that I still have three more after that—not a record by any sense of the word. Then, yesterday morning, I received a Facebook message about doing another wedding on the same day as this one in September, only later in the evening.

On Friday, in the midst of our conversation, as we got to know each other better, the future husband shared with me an interesting scenario in their family. His fourteen year son (from a previous relationship) has a nasty little habit of using the words “Gay” and “retarded” to describe things he hates. I think we all know situations like this. This couple suddenly got very passionate about this.

They said, “This is one of those things that drive us crazy. We have to jump on him immediately about how using those words is not only disrespectful, but downright slanderous.”

After a while, the boy got it. And now he doesn’t use those words anymore because he realizes that they are hurtful and disrepectful.

As we discussed this, I, of course, was thinking about our Gospel reading for this morning. And I realized that, in a very real sense, this is what means to sow good seed in the Kingdom. Now this parable we hear today in the Gospel is traditionally referred to as the Parable of Tares. T-a-r-e-s. We find this word “Tares” in the King James Version of the Bible. I personally like that word very much. This word is thought to mean darnel, which is a kind of ryegrass which actually looks very much like wheat does in its early stages of growth. To put it in a bit of perspective to Jesus’ own time, Roman law prohibited the sowing of darnel among the wheat of an enemy. To take it all a step further, we need to realize that sometimes planting darnel within an enemy’s wheat might actually be an issue of life or death. Less of a harvest, means less food. Less food means more illness, more death. So, this whole concept of planting weeds in an enemy’s wheat has much more meaning than we may initially thought when we heard this parable.

For us, it’s a bit different. For us, sowing weeds among wheat is something very different, especially when we look at Jesus’ explanaition of this parable. As I pondered this these last few days, I realized that for us, we sow darnel among wheat in very different ways. In the situation with that son of that young couple, we would sow tares, sow weeds, when we do not speak up when deragatory words are used. Yes, we know that standing up and saying “this is not right” is hard to do. Yes, it may cause us to be on the receiving end of ridicule and possibly even violence. But the fact remains that when we don’t stand up—when we are complascent—we are sowing tares. We are sowing weeds in the Kingdom. We are showing that we do not love our neighbor as ourselves and that we are not truly followers of Jesus, who would stand up and speak out against the injustices of such comments.

And we’ve all been guilty of complascency like this. We’ve all done it. We’ve all rolled our eyes and bit our tongues—or maybe even chuckled a bit—when someone has made a sexist or homophobic or racist joke or comment around us. And we have all tried to ignore when institutions like our very Church or our government on have denied certain rights to people in various ways.

And sometimes even we ourselves have been malicious. Sometimes we have endevoured to plant seeds that prevent growth. We sometimes don’t do it purposefully. But we do it.

When it comes to church, for example. We show weeds among the wheat when we are afraid. Fear is a great tare among the wheat. Fear of the future. Fear of change. These can be crippling. We sow the weeds when we are afraid that everything we once knew and found so comfortable is now being viewed as out-of-date or somewhat archaic.

One of the greatest “tares” we all experience in parish ministry is when people say things like: “We can’t do that. We have never done that before.” Saying things like that and being stuck in that mentality is a kind of sowing of weeds in the midst of the field. Yes, we need to have a healthy respect for our history and our past. We can never forget where we have came from and what has been done in the past.

As you know I occasionally love to do a traditional Rite I Mass on Wednesday nights, esepcially in the summer. It’s good for us to hear that traditional language. It might not be our “thing,” but it certainly puts into perspective where we have come from. It gives some of us a certain level of comfort. And I love doing it. I was trained in celebrating Mass with those traditional words and with those traditional actions. They have meaning and they have contributed in real and purposeful ways in what we do now in our current liturgy.

But we can never be stuck in that past. And we can’t step back in time. We cannot let what we’ve done in the past prevent us from doing the work that needs to be done now and in the future. When we get stuck, that is when the crop begins to die. It prevents the harvest from happening. It prevents growth from happening. It makes the church not into a vital, living place proclaiming God’s loving and living Presence, but it preserves it as a musty museum for our own personal comfort.

The flourishing of the kingdom can be frightening. It can be overwhelming. Because when the Kingdom flourishes, it flourishes beyond our control. We can’t control that flourishing. All we can do is plant the seeds and tend the growth as best we can.

Allowing the Kingdom to flourish also means that there also needs to be some pruning of the weeds. In the Rule of the Episcopal monastic order of the Society of St. John the Eveanglist, we find this wonderful statement in the chapter titled “The Spirit of Mission and Service”:

“Christ has promised that if we abide in him and consent to his skillful pruning, we shall bear fruit that abides. If the result of our labors are to last we need to root our endeavors in Christ and draw on our intimacy with him.”

Rooting our endeavors in Christ is a sure guarentee that what is planted will flourish. Because rooting our endeavors in Christ means we are rooted our endeavors in a living, vital Presence. We are rooting them in a wild Christ who knows no bounds, who knows no limits and who cannot be controlled by us. Rooting our endevors in Christ means that our job is simply to go with Christ and the growth that Christ brings about wherever and however that growth may happen. Even when that growth may seem to happening in the midst of weeds and thorns.

Last week, in my sermon on sowing seeds among thorns and weeds, I said that sometimes God even uses the thorns and weeds and that, even then, crops flourish. I believe the same happens even when tares have been planted by the enem—whoever that enemy may be. God sometimes is able to even to bring about a fruitfull harvest even when vindicitive tares have been planted in our midst. Sometimes when we encounter weeds maliciously planted in our midst, our frustration, our anger, our impatience drives us to not only root out those weeds, but to make sure another like it never happens again. And hopefully in those instances when we ourselves have planted weeeds that have stunted the Kingdom from growning, the recgonition of our actions sometimes causes us to stop and take notice of our actions and to change.

So, you with ears, listen! To be righteous does not mean being be good and sweet and nice all the time. The be righteous one simply needs to further the harvest of the Kingdom by doing what those of us who follow Jesus do. It means to plant the good seeds. And in those instances when we fail, we must allow the harvest to happen even when we have planted weeds among the good seeds.

And when we do strive to do good and to further the kingdom of God, then will we being doing what Jesus cooamnds us to do. The harvest will flourish and we can take some joy in knowing that we helped, working with God, to make it flourish. And, in that moment, we know the fruits of our efforts. And we—the righteous—we the ones who do the work of God in this world, who further the kingdom in our midst—we will shine like the sun in that kingdom of our God.