Tares -- Who Gets to Decide? by The Rev. Dr. Donald L. Hamer, Rector
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Trinity Episcopal Church
Seventh Sunday After Pentecost – Proper 11
July 23, 2017
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
Tares: Who Gets to Decide?
This past week, I have had the privilege of travelling with the members of our Choir School and some members of our adult choir while we visited and offered Evensong in a number of England’s oldest houses of worship.
On Sunday morning we attended Holy Eucharist at historic Peterborough Cathedral, founded as a monastic community in 654 CE and one of the finest examples of Norman architecture in England.
Later that evening, we offered Evensong in the 15th Century Church of St. Mary the Virgin in the tiny Borough of Titchmarsh, home parish of Bert Landman’s friends Peter and Mary who welcomed us with a glorious buffet of snacks – the first Evensong on their newly refurbished organ.
We were in residence in the beautiful Cathedral in Ely, another small village East of London. The cathedral itself is significant, originally founded as an abbey in the 7th century. There we offered choral evensong each evening from Monday through Wednesday. The town itself is enormously significant historically as it was the home of Oliver Cromwell, who led the parliamentary forces against the King in the English Revolution of the mid-17th century. We’ll return to the English Revolution in a moment.
On Tuesday, we visited the city of Cambridge along with Kings College and its beautiful established originally constructed in the mid-15th century.
On Wednesday it was on to Norwich, home of the English mystic Julian of Norwich. There we toured another beautiful cathedral, this one established in the late-11th century around 1096.
Thursday was our final complete day when we visited London and toured Westminster Abbey. Westminster Abbey is steeped in more than a thousand years of history. Benedictine monks first came to this site in the middle of the tenth century, establishing a tradition of daily worship which continues to this day.
The Abbey is where English kings and queens have been crowned since 1066. The next day, prior to our departure, we all visited the Tower of London, famous for housing both the Crown jewels worn by English monarchs over the centuries as well the torture chambers and associated paraphernalia like the rack, thumbscrews, and similar instruments for humans to practice inhumanity on other humans. The tower also played its own role in the English revolution and its related history with the Anglican church. We will come back to this in due course, as well.
But first I want to tell you a little story about two neighbors, Julia and Tom. Now Julia prided herself on having a perfect lawn and garden. Having invested in an in-ground sprinkler system, she made sure to apply the pre-emergent weed killer in the spring, with additional fertilizer and weed treatments through the summer and early fall. Whenever she saw a dreaded dandelion, she would be out in the yard with a special tool to dig up the nasty pest that despoiled her otherwise perfect yard.
But alas, her next-door neighbor, Tom, had taken to organic gardening without the use of chemicals or other weed killers. In fact, he had recently discovered the delectable liquor known as Dandelion Wine, made from the flowers of the dandelion, and he savored the flavor of dandelion greens.
Did you know that folk medicine claims the dandelion plant is a powerful healer, used to purify the blood, settle digestion and prevent gall stones, among other maladies. The fact is the greens of the humble dandelion provide 535 percent of the recommended daily value of vitamin K, which may be the most important source of any other plant-based food to strengthen bones, but may also play a role in fighting Alzheimer's disease.
Dandelion greens also give the body 112 percent of the daily minimum requirement of vitamin A as an antioxidant carotenoid, which is particularly good for the skin, mucus membranes and vision. A flavonoid called zeaxanthin protects the retina from UV rays, while others, primarily carotene, lutein, and cryptoxanthin, protect the body from lung and mouth cancers. There are many additional benefits, but you get the point.
So here is Tom, who not only harvests his own dandelions for personal consumption – he has asked Julia if she will give to him the dandelions that she plucks out of her own yard. Furious at this request, Julia is convinced that Tom doesn’t get rid of his dandelions just to spite her, allowing the unused dandelion petals to turn to seed and blow across Julia’s yard, where they plant themselves and await the coming summer when they will once again blossom – to Julia’s immense anger. After not speaking to Tom for more than a year, she enters Tom’s yard one weekend when he is away and sprays his entire lawn with Round Up to kill all of the weeds.
While this story is a bit silly, it does help to illustrate a point: Who gets to decide what is a weed and what is a desirable plant? Both Julia and Tom find truth in their own reality: Julia wants a perfect yard so, for her, dandelions and anyone who tolerates them, are the enemy, and she projects that onto Tom. For Tom, the value is in having an organic lawn and extracting the benefit from what is there naturally.
In this morning’s Gospel passage from Matthew 13: 24-30, Jesus tells the parable of the Tares (also known as the Parable of the Weeds, Parable of the Wheat and Tares, Parable of the Wheat and Weeds, or the Parable of the Weeds in the Grain, depending upon whatever translation of the Bible you are using. It follows the Parable of the Sower, and precedes the Parable of the Mustard Seed. According to the common interpretation, the good seeds are the spiritual children of Jesus Christ and the weeds are the rest of the population of the Earth that are the spiritual children of Satan.
While Jesus is actually making a different point, the imagery of Jesus’ parable haunted me throughout my week in England. The parable assumes a black and white situation – absolute good versus absolute evil, represented by the good seeds and the bad seeds. But what about those situations – actually, the overwhelming majority of the ones we experience in life – when the situation is more nuanced, when each side has some truth to it.
The reason this parable haunted me all week was that each and every day, we visited a beautiful, culturally significant structure, built to the Glory of God by faithful people for whom beautiful cathedrals with tall spires, stained glass windows and ornately carved choir stalls were honoring God in the greatest way they could. And in each one, without exception, there were missing original, ancient windows that had been destroyed deliberately during the English Civil war, which was centered largely around religion.
King Charles I was deeply religious. He believed that he ruled with the Divine Right of Kings. He preferred a High Anglican form of worship, with ceremonies, rituals and lavish ornamentation. Charles thought the hierarchy of bishops and priests to be important. This caused alarm for some Protestants as it appeared that Charles was leaning towards Catholicism. The Puritans, who were extreme Protestants, considered all of this to be forms of ‘Popery’. They wanted a purer form of worship without rituals and without religious icons and images. Puritans believed that they had a personal relationship with God and did not need bishops. Oliver Cromwell, a committed Puritan whose home we visited in Ely, and his assertedly Godly soldiers attributed their successes on the battlefield to divine intervention and now set out to create a godly society by establishing a body of evangelical preachers, by reforming the legal system, and by introducing legislation such as the Blue Laws (1650) against blasphemy, cursing, drunkenness, and adultery.
And while oversimplified, there you have it: The seeds of a revolution where each side was convinced that they so owned the mind of God that they felt it their duty to destroy not only the other side, but to take away any evidence that it ever existed. At Ely Cathedral, in the Lady Chapel, there is only clear glass where stained glass once was, and of hundreds of carved statues in the walls, none of them have heads – each has been meticulously chopped off, as if by doing so they could change the course of history.
As we concluded the tour of Oliver Cromwell’s home in Ely, we were asked the question: Was Cromwell a hero or a villain? If only the question were so simple. The fact is, he and those he represented were part of a larger phenomenon taking place across Europe, a seismic shift as Protestantism in its many forms struggled with the One, Holy and Roman Catholic church and broke new ground in world history in redefining the relationship between church and the state. Some of what he did advanced the cause of freedom; other aspects of his movement forever and needlessly destroyed a chunk of history.
In our own day, we bemoan the rise of groups such as ISIS and, in Afghanistan, the Taliban, each of which practice not only the brutal murder of their enemies but delight in destroying any evidence of their religious and social culture, including valuable structures and their contents which contain valuable markers of our human history – all lost forever because one group of religious zealots believe that they alone own the mind of God.
But we need to remember that such attitudes are at the roots of our own Anglican religious history. In our own day, in our own country, we see the rise of religious intolerance and increased lack of respect for people whose cultural practices and values are other than our own. They are referred to as “the culture wars” for a reason.
My week in England reminded me of the dangers and arrogance associated with believing that we can ever own the mind of God. I thank God that in our own Episcopal Church in the United States we have embraced the theology of Richard Hooker, who teaches us that in most circumstances where there are differing points of view, there is usually at least some element of truth to be discovered in each side. May we always seek that element of truth in each person and each circumstance, and measure that in terms of the life and teachings of our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. AMEN.