The Reverend Barbara K. Briggs
July 20, 2008
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 11, Year A

Remember what it was like to line up shoulder to shoulder in gym class and have the gym teacher select two captains, who would then in turn pick their team?  I dreaded that moment.  It felt like judgment.  If I was picked early on, I was afraid of not playing up to expectation.  If I was picked last, my self esteem eroded with each name that was called while I stood there waiting.  In either case, by the time the teams were chosen, I didn’t want to play the game.

If God were the gym teacher, each member of the team would feel valued, honored, and respected, and everyone would be eager to get in there and play the game.  We might have been surprised by some of God’s rulings and some of us may have called out – “Hey, that’s not fair” – since God’s ways are not our ways.  The way God does justice isn’t fair according to our standards.  Jesus is constantly telling stories to illustrate this fact.

Or, how about story we just heard about the weeds and the wheat?  Is it fair that the bad should be left in with the good?  Should the good and the bad have to suffer each other’s presence all together in the field?  To complicate matters, the weeds in this parable are  plants that look exactly like wheat until they mature and produce fruit.  Not only that, but the fruit this plant does produce is actually toxic to human beings.  So, in the end, it is dangerous NOT to separate them.  It is also too dangerous to separate them early on.  For one, it is impossible to discern which plants are poison and which are good, and if you could tell the difference, their roots are so intertwined that if you pull out the bad, you will also uproot the good, and the crop will be ruined anyway.

Since we are in the season of gardening, some of us may recognize in ourselves the duty to pull up the weeds.  We choose which plants are desirable and which are not, and we rid the lawn and garden of the messy stuff.  If we let too many weeds coexist with the grass or the plants, we may even be accused by our neighbors of being lazy or negligent.  With God, the weeds and the wheat coexist by design.  God leaves us together in the garden on purpose.  We are planted in God’s kingdom, and God is the gardener.  Lucky for us:  we are not plants.  We have the possibility to change from weeds to wheat – maybe not on our own, but through God’s grace.  Through grace, we are transformed from weeds to wheat, from toxic to nutritious.  As Paul writes to the Romans, “You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.”  In other words, we don’t need to be afraid of being good enough to remain in the garden, because God wants us here.  It is here in the kingdom, right here and now, that God is transforming us by God’s grace.  When God gets a hold of us, it is not to weed us out, but to help us grow.

The problem in the Church sometimes is when we become overzealous gardeners instead of letting God do the work.  When we try to weed each other out, no one grows and we are all impoverished.  We risk ruining the crop in our efforts to purify the field. This parable is inviting us to take the time to let God do the work without jumping in too soon, assuming that we know what God wants.  This is not an invitation to inaction or indecision, but an opportunity to not feel we need to fix everything.  Sometimes giving things time can let the Spirit of God in to produce the marvelously unexpected and the wonderfully surprising.  Maybe that is why the Archbishop of Canterbury decided that the bishops at Lambeth would not be gardeners this time:  no legislation.  Rather, the bishops are coming together to admire God’s garden and let themselves be inspired by the wisdom and beauty of such a thing.  It will be interesting to see what fruit such a world-wide gathering of bishops will produce.

And what about our interior garden?  All of us have weeds growing there inside us. It is called sin.  Instead of being judgmental, or angry, or self-deprecating, maybe we can learn to let the gardener in there, too.  Instead of trying to manicure the inner garden and only opening the locked gate when it looks just right, maybe we could simply open the gate and allow the gardener to come in and care for it in the only way he knows how:  with patience and love.  If we can learn to let God do that for us, we will definitely be better able to do it for each other.

The Kingdom is messy, a mixed garden where the good stuff and the bad stuff are so intermingled it’s not safe to separate them!  The kingdom is not just when the weeds are burned and the wheat is gathered in.  The kingdom is also this present moment.  This moment of transformation and of grace.  This moment of expectation and hope.  This moment and every moment of our lives.  God moments, each of them.  The place where God breaks into our garden and gets to work.  So let’s unlock our gates.  Amen.

© Copyright 2008 by the Reverend Barbara K. Briggs