A sermon on Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 by Nathan Nettleton

One of the things I frequently hear said around here is echoed in the lines of the gospel reading we heard tonight. I hear it said in various forms:

“How come people in the church don’t behave more Christianly?”

“Why aren’t people in the church able to get along peacefully and lovingly?”

“Why is it that the way people treat each other in the church so often seems even more petty and nasty and treacherous than what you experience outside the church?”

“You’d think the church might be one place where you’d experience the unconditional love and encouragement that Jesus spoke about, so why is everyone behaving so badly?”

Have any of you ever heard anyone say those sort of things? I thought so! Perhaps you’ve even heard yourself say those things? I know I have. If I was Shelley, I’m sure I’d have been thinking things like that this afternoon when she was the only person in the whole congregation who turned up to the working bee on a perfect day. In tonight’s gospel reading we heard the same bewildered questions as “Boss, that was good clean seed you sowed in the field wasn’t it? Where then did these weeds come from?” The gospel writer is addressing this story to people who are asking the same sort of questions as us. And as is so often the case in the parables of Jesus, there is something of a shock in the response. We are expecting advise on how to get rid of the problem, but we don’t get it. Instead we are told that we had better learn to live with the problem or we will end up becoming the problem.

I was very tempted to re-preach a used sermon tonight, because I didn’t really have much time for preparation, but I only had sermons on the other readings, and I really felt the need to preach on this one. You see, this issue connects pretty directly with some of my current fears about this congregation and especially with some of the dangers facing our life with me going away for four months. It seems to be speaking right into our context, so I had to go with it. And at the moment, because I’m leaving for four months in just three weeks time, my sermons are starting to come out like that big farewell speech that Jesus makes in John’s gospel – it is all coloured by “while I’m gone, please….” kind of thinking!

Getting ready to go away has caused me to reflect on some things about where we are at as a congregation, and especially about the way I relate to the congregation. And I’m realising some challenges. One of the things that most has to happen around here over the coming year is for us to grow in the way we share around the responsibilities and all use our gifts. But I’ve started to realise that one of the biggest obstacles to that happening has been me. Some years ago, this church was on the brink of extinction and there weren’t many people here with the gifts required to keep things happening, and so I took on nearly everything and made it work. But one of the things that has become apparent as we have grown, is that one of the reasons I was good at that is that I was actually addicted to it. I was addicted to being that important and that in control of everything. I was addicted to being the “big daddy” of the family who looked after everything for everyone. Now we’ve got plenty of gifted people who are willing and able to take many of these tasks off my plate, and I’m having trouble letting go. One of the good things about me taking this big chunk of time off is that it is forcing me to hand things over, and it will be important that you folks keep me accountable when I return and make sure I don’t start taking them all back.  But there is a bit of a problem dynamic shaping up at the moment as I distribute these responsibilities in a bit of a rush. Having kept the congregation in a state of dependent childhood, the transition is now a bit sudden, and it is as though the group is being slammed into adolescence.  And with adolescence always being a troubled time anyway, there is a danger that as I divest tasks to other people, a kind of sibling rivalry begins and people start resenting each other and being critical and taking shots at each other.

Now when this happens, the cry of “how did these weeds get in here and how can we get rid of them?” becomes even louder. In some ways, when I am here, there is a bit less pressure, because people point out the weeds and naturally expect that it is my job to tackle them. They are less likely to begin violent weeding themselves. But while I’m gone he dynamic will change. There will be some looking to Jill or our Visiting Pastoral Overseers to do it, but because Jill will have her part time workload way too full anyway, and because we have been talking about the need to take more responsibilities out of the hands of the pastors and into the hands of the congregation as a whole, there will be some people ready to get the hoes out and start hacking into each other. And so in my worst case scenario nightmare, I come back in December and find blood all over the floor and nobody left standing. And if you think I’m just  deluding myself with my own indispensability again, I only began thinking about this issue this week because I witnessed a couple of nasty little instances of it happening already.

So what is Jesus telling us about the sort of people we are and the sort of situation we face in this church and in every church?

The first thing he is telling us is that the presence of maliciousness, pettiness and nastiness in every congregation of his church is inevitable. He gives one reason in this parable, but it is not the only one. The reason he gives is that where the Messiah sows good seed, the satan will be sure to be trying to sabotage it. The satan always reserves his best efforts for the places where love and peace and justice are most threatening to break out, so the more a church endeavours to follow Jesus, the more the satan will seek to infiltrate them with the seeds of bitterness and violent rivalry.

Another reason, and one that may be especially relevant in this congregation, is that places that hold forth the promise of healing and renewal will attract those who are the most damaged and unstable. While it is certainly true that the Christian church promises to be a place in which people can grow into the ways of love and mercy and justice, if the church is also fulfilling its mission of drawing in more of the unloved victims of our society, then it can expect to also be constantly finding within itself the passive or not-so-passive bitterness and rage that are going to be present in those who have been battered and smashed.

Another reason is the strange paradox that some people come to church to hide from God. I know it sounds weird, but if you want to hide the fact that you are resolutely resisting God’s call to be renewed in the image of Christ, then one of the best ways of doing it is to hide among those who are seeking to respond to that call and talk their language so that you give the impression of responding to God without actually doing so. Every church has some of those people.

But before we star looking around and trying to categorise each other, the even more important truth is that there is something of each off these things in all of us. I come here with raw nerves and a fair amount of bitterness and anger from the wounds of my past. So do each of you. I come here with parts of me willing to respond to the call of Christ, and parts of me resisting at every turn, but trying to keep my resistance hidden. And so there are plenty of times when the lovelessness and hostility that poison the community are carried in by me. And the same could be said for all of us. But of course, being human, we always find it much more recognisable and offensive in other people than in ourselves!

Whenever that ugliness rears its head and we witness acts of pettiness and hostility within the congregation, the temptation is to seek to weed out. We want to get rid of those people or things we perceive as infecting the community with these poisonous attitudes and actions. We want to take action to purge the community, to make it holy, to make room for the good wheat of love and mercy and justice to grow and flourish without being challenged and choked by these noxious weeds.

On the surface, this seems well motivated. It is our passion for justice and holiness, our passion for love, isn’t it? And so we look to Jesus for advise on how to go about this weeding which we would do in his name and for his sake. But Jesus says “Don’t! Don’t even try!”

There are three reasons implied in what he says. One is that any weeding that is to be done is not our job, but God’s. Our job is to be good wheat, not to be the gardener. Leave the gardening to God and get on with growing.

The second is the likelihood of being completely mistaken. The weed described in the story is a common grass that looks a lot like wheat. The good wheat and the weed are often difficult to distinguish from one another. And given that we are all something of a mixture of each, no wonder. The violence of our attempts to weed out evil are almost inevitably misdirected. The people who killed Jesus fervently believed that they were purging their community of the one who would infect their community with evil and lawlessness.

And the third reason, and the one that is most worrying me here at the moment, is the danger that any attempts to weed out the problem people or problem things will actually uproot and harm the innocent. No matter how well-motivated and appropriately targeted we think our violence is, the emergence of new violence always does as much harm to the innocent as to the deserving. Violence always begets violence, and so perpetuates itself. Our attempts to destroy evil in our midst become an evil in and of themselves.

And when this happens, it shows us again just how clever and devious the satan is. He doesn’t have to actively destroy us. He simply sows the weed seeds and then stands back and waits for us to begin destroying one another in our attempts to root out those weeds. He actually suckers well-meaning people into doing his destructive work for him in the name of holiness and purity. Just as the servants in the parable would have seriously damaged the whole crop in their misguided weeding, so we get conned into doing the satan’s work in the name of righteousness.

There is an amazing little thing in this passage that we don’t notice unless we can read it in Greek. It is the Greek word at the start of the farmer’s instruction: “Let the wheat and the weeds grow together.” It is that word “let” or “permit” or “allow”. The same Greek word  also means “forgive”. This is not just a passive ignoring of the problem. It is an active naming and forgiving of it. We are not called to pretend that the wheat and the weeds are no different. We are not called to refrain from calling for repentance and change. We are called to refrain from attacking what we think might be weeds. And most importantly we are called to actively forgive and to suffer the ongoing presence of those whose attitudes or actions seem to threaten our comfort or wellbeing. We are being told that the means to purge the community of malice and pettiness and nastiness is not through the violence of weeding, but through the grace of courageous forgiving and accepting.

So please, while I am gone and when I return, remember firstly to be a people who forgive, who let the weeds grow, because to seek to destroy them would be to become one of them and to escalate the violence within the community. Remember that any attempt to purge our congregation of all those who bring bitterness and hostility into our midst will end up with blood all over the floor and no one left standing, for every one of us bears weed seeds within our own hearts and minds. What looks like a weed may just be an immature wheat stalk, and even if it is a weed, you’ll probably kill or wound a couple of good wheat stalks in your attempts to pull it out. Forgive. Tolerate. Let your only experience of evil or of violence being in suffering it, not in inflicting it.

And please be encouragers. The people who are taking on tasks are doing so because I have asked them too, and they will need all the encouragement they can get as they begin to exercise their gifts. Even if you  happen to think someone is not doing something as well as I did it, you won’t be doing me any favours by criticising people until there is no one still willing to keep doing these tasks when I get back. People need to be encouraged and supported while they find their feet and then find their wings. This is going to really matter here. I can’t grow out of my addiction if you sabotage each other’s endeavours to take these tasks out of my hands. And we won’t  survive our congregational adolescence if we spend it labelling each other as weeds and seeking to tear each other up by the roots.

Let’s allow the weeds and the wheat to grow together until the harvest, and when the harvest comes, we may find that we have a whole lot more wheat and a whole lot less weeds than we thought.