Homily | 👹The Devil's Only Weapon Is Your Help

8th Sunday After Pentecost

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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Quite the parable we have today, right? The parable of the weeds, as it’s called.

I love the servants in this story. You can picture them in your mind. They walk the field one morning and they see weeds. Everywhere. Tangled right in with the wheat.

The servants come running to the farmer with the most reasonable question in the world: “Do you want us to go pull them up?”

I mean, yeah. Right? That’s what you do with weeds. Ask any gardener in this room. You pull them, and you pull them early, before they seed.

The servants here aren’t villains. They’re the employees of the month. They spotted the problem, they reported the problem, and they volunteered for overtime.

And, to this... The farmer. Says...

No.

Not “Be gentle about it.” Or “Naaah, wait until Tuesday.” Just — no. Let them grow. Both of them. Together. Until harvest.

Which, agriculturally speaking, is insane. Robert Capon, who wrote THE book on the parables, admits this is no way to run a farm. And then Capon points out something I’d never noticed before when reading this story: the weeds aren’t hurting anything.

Go ahead and read it again; the wheat’s fine. The wheat’s growing, bearing fruit, doing great.

Nobody’s crop is in danger. The weeds aren’t a threat.

Sure, they’re an offense. They’re an eyesore. The field doesn’t look the way a field is supposed to look, and the servants can’t stand it.

Now — before we get too comfortable — some of us grew up with the other version of this sermon. The rapture-chart version. Anyone read those Left Behind books when they were younger? The version where the whole point is figuring out who’s wheat and who’s weeds and making very sure you’re standing in the right section.

Maybe you’ve rolled your eyes at that. I have.

But here’s the thing about rolling your eyes at weed-sorters: When you do that... You’re sorting weeds yourself! It’s unavoidable!

We all keep a list. It might just have a brother-in-law on it. A politician. A church that does it wrong. A version of yourself from twenty years ago that you still haven’t forgiven. We walk our fields every morning, same as those servants, and something in us cannot rest until every single weed is pulled.

Some people call this “the compulsion to closure.” The itch to get everything resolved, sorted, settled, so that life can finally start. Get the inbox to zero. Get the country fixed (whichever fix you’re waiting for). Get your own contradictions ironed out, so you can be one consistent person instead of a cacophony of contradictions you actually are. Then, we tell ourselves. Then I’ll rest.

The parable has bad news about that plan, and it comes in one small detail. The enemy who sowed the weeds? He sows them at night, and then he leaves. He doesn’t stick around to fight. He doesn’t have to. Because his weeds can’t do a thing to the wheat, his whole strategy is to get the servants to do his work for him. Get the good people so worked up about the bad seed that they tear up the field themselves, in the name of protecting it.

Every purge in history was run by people who were sure they were saving the wheat from the weeds. Every war, too — including the one running in the background this morning.

These particular weeds were called bearded darnel. They were the notorious wheat-mimic of Palestinian agriculture. Until the heads form, they look exactly like wheat. By the time you notice them, their roots are wrapped around the wheat roots underground. If you pull one, you tear up the other. The servants can’t safely separate them.

And neither can we.

Because the line between wheat and weed doesn’t run between people. It runs through them. Through you. Through me. Every one of us is a mixed field.

And to be clear, this isn’t about staying in harm’s way. Getting yourself or someone you love out of danger isn’t weed-pulling we’re warned about here; it’s what the daylight asks of you. The parable is about something else. It’s about the verdict. Who’s ultimately in. Who’s ultimately out. Who deserves to exist.

If God harvested people the way the servants wanted — pull everything with weeds in it — heaven would be empty by lunchtime today. And if we instituted that weed-pulling policy on earth, no one would be left standing.

So we’re stuck. We can’t stop sorting, and we can’t sort straight. We’re at a dead end.

There’s a strange word in our passage today the farmer uses. Our Bibles translate it “let” — let both grow together. Not to Greek out on you or anything, but in Greek, the word used is aphete. It’s the same word Jesus taught us to pray: Forgive. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Same word: Let. Release. Forgive.

The farmer’s response to the enemy’s sabotage isn’t a jug of Roundup or a counterattack. It’s forgiveness. A letting-be spoken over the whole tangled field, weeds and all. Let. It. Be. (Paul McCartney) And in case we thought that was just a nice sentiment from Jesus. One of those hippy-dippy, airey-fairey quips that gentle Jesus says all the time... In Jesus, God went and did it in public. On the cross, surrounded by the people pulling him up by the roots, Jesus says it one more time: Father, forgive them. And when he rises, he keeps the scars... so nobody can ever accuse him of being wishy-washy or changing the policy.

The field was never in danger. The kingdom grows, the parable says, while everyone sleeps. And the sleeping isn’t a failure. The servants worked all day. They planted, they tended, they did everything the daylight asked of them. Amazing. Well-done good and faithful servants. It’s what human hearts and hands are designed for. Good, joyous work.

And then night came, and the seed grew anyway. In the dark, off the clock, with no one watching.

Some of you have worked that field for fifty years — the family, the church, the country — and the work was real. Good. Honest. Thanks be to God!

But the ultimate outcome was never riding on you. That part was always God’s shift. You can sleep.

And the fire? Yes, there’s a fire at the end, and I won’t dodge it. But look at what gets thrown in that fire: all causes of sin. The stumbling blocks. The tangles.

If every one of us is a mixed field, then the fire isn’t coming for you, it’s coming for everything in you that was never you to begin with. The grudge, gone. The fear, gone. The sorter itself, finally, mercifully, gone. That’s not a threat to you. That’s God finishing the weeding we were never qualified to start. The last thing the fire burns is the list we keep of two columns: wheat and weeds.

Until then, we live in the tangle. The brother-in-law stays on the Christmas list, even though you haven’t figured him out yet. You keep showing up to the church that does some things wrong, because, well, so do you. You look in the mirror at someone who’s generous on Tuesday and petty by Thursday, and you stop waiting for that person to get consistent before you let them be loved.

Because someone with scars on his hands and side has already said forgiven over the whole field. So the weeds don’t get the last word, and neither do you nor I.

Right now, the farmer looks at this field — this room, these particular weeds and this particular wheat, all of us tangled together — and he doesn’t reach for the sickle. He sets a table in the middle of the crop and invites you to supper.

Bread and wine, given for you. He’s not waiting for the sorted-out version of you, the you who finally got the weeds pulled in time. He offers it now... For you, as is, tangled roots and all.