Hope for Wheat and Weeds - Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost July 23, 2023 by Rev. Holly Huff, Associate Priest

Today Jesus tells us the kingdom of heaven is like wheat and tares, growing together in the wide wheat field of the world. Wheat and those pesky lookalike weeds, both coming up together in this present time, hard to distinguish, even harder to pull apart. The appearance of the weeds is upsetting to householder’s slaves: “Didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from!?” There are dandelions growing right in God’s front yard! If the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, how do we make sense of the very real weediness springing up in our lives alongside the more respectable crops we think we are growing? Surely an enemy must have done this?

Jesus’s parables always defy easy one-to-one explanations, even his own, which complicate as much as they “explain.” The parables through their strangeness invite us into, provoke us into wondering about the kingdom of God and opening clasped perception to see it fresh. Let anyone with ears listen! The kingdom is already here: present, working, sown and seeded through the whole world, coming forth according to divine design by irresistible grace. And, and, this kingdom that is already here is still hidden: it is still being revealed, still being worked out into the world, and each of us can choose to cooperate with that working out or not, and that choice matters immensely for our lives.

The kingdom of heaven is already here: the whole field sown with good seed, and the best plan the evil one can come up with is to scatter in some weed seeds. Christian theology has classically understood evil as privatum bonum, the deprivation of the good. Evil doesn’t exist in itself but marks out the absence where beauty, goodness, and truth properly belong in creation made in God’s image and called good. So greed is the absence of generosity. Systemic oppression is the absence of the positive flourishing of love as communal justice. Environmental degradation is the absence of loving concern for our neighbors both human and nonhuman, and the absence of a restrained, grateful pattern of consumption that only takes what it needs. Because evil lacks its own substance, it is parasitic on the good: the weed seeds depend on the soil and sun and water and labor that nurtures the good seeds to give them any substance. The evil one in the parable has no power unless it can frighten the workers by the appearance of the weeds enough to stir them into a frenzy of anxious labor trying to fix the world and themselves. “Should we go pull up the weeds?” Should we devote ourselves to laborious cultivation of virtue? Should we cut out every hint of imperfection, in ourselves and especially our neighbors? Active intervention like this is our usual mode of navigating a world where everyone is trying to get ahead, where nothing is given. But the kingdom of heaven is already here: good seed sown through the whole field, God is bringing forth the divine purpose, i.e. our collective flourishing in love, as love, in the utterly ordinary. God is the gardener of our lives. It’s not for us to pull up weeds or start hacking away at tree roots. John the Baptist was a little overenthusiastic about that point. Better not, says the gardener, you’ll just pull up all the good plants, too. Let them grow together. Jesus is showing us that God is content to work with us as we are, wheat and tares growing up together, just as the line that divides the city of God and the city of man is a line that runs through every human heart. None of us are just one thing, no one is singular good wheat plant, and no one is all weed, either. Whatever process of winnowing and sifting out of wheat and weeds needs to take place will be under the merciful hand of the gardener—which again is not me or you! So put down the clippers. Efforts at self-improvement and even cultivation of virtue can be so much self-directed violence masquerading as spiritual practice. The kingdom of heaven is already here: virtue flowers in us when we live from the Spirit of adoption, letting Christ’s life live itself through us and out into the world, bearing with, permitting all our weedy qualities to come forth as well. The whole point is that we can’t tell which are which! Wheat or weed? Not for us to sort out. As Paul knows so well, as Christians our strengths are I think 100% of the time revealed to be the exact same qualities as our most hobbling weaknesses, which we formerly tried to cut out as worthless weeds. These same attributes are transformed as they are held in the love of God, seen in the light of God, as we depend on the living God to give us daily bread. Wheat or weed? You might be surprised.

The kingdom of heaven is already here, and it is still being revealed, uncovered as the truest reality in which we already live. This parable is imaging this space between already and not yet, a world where the kingdom of heaven is springing up, persistent, irresistible, even as all sorts of weeds apparently cover it over. Creation is still being born, Paul tells us in the sublime letter to the Romans. All creation waits with eager longing for the revelation of the children of God, groaning in labor pains, yearning to be set free into the glory of the children of God. We are adopted in the Spirit, made joint heirs with Christ, and enabled to cry out to God in love and trust: Abba! Father!

Our hope is an unseen hope. We trust in our loving God and we’re at least learning to try out the merciful loving reckless inefficiency of refusing to weed the garden. Letting ourselves, our neighbors, and the world be, as they are. And we trust that this wide-open, allowing, permitting, love will transform us. That God will bring about love and peace and justice, and that as we listen and wait patiently we will be enabled even in our weakness to cooperate with that redeeming work and respond to our hurting world with compassionate action. This hope is not a flimsy optimism, or a casual wishing for good outcomes. This hope may even start out a lot like despair, with our sense that that things are not yet as they should be. All creation groans in eager longing, and the first fruits of the Spirit in us bring us to the same groaning, stirring up a longing, a hope for something we can’t yet see. We wait for the revelation of the kingdom of heaven, already present yet still hidden. Christian Hope is hope for something that is not seen, for a reality we’ve glimpsed only in part, can hardly imagine. Perhaps we see its edges in negative, outlining the place where we can’t yet see the kingdom of heaven standing.

Our hope can start from a recognition of absence. Hope can be born when we see the weeds. Paul says we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies, our liberation from mortality, from futility, this bondage to decay. Our groaning at this pain is evidence of the spirit’s work in us as we grieve the failures of this life, especially the ways we fail each other. God’s spirit of adoption is present in all our longings for justice, for tenderness, our longings for mercy, even though we hardly know what mercy or justice would look like.

So we hope for what we do not see. It’s hard to wait patiently, without despairing, when we are so blinded by the self-obsessions and structures of violence that we do see. But the Spirit helps us in our weakness, and the inner groanings of the spirit can form the root of hope. When you find yourself hopeless, hold that hopelessness before God in prayer. Let the Spirit articulate the longings of your heart for a kinder world. Even despair can be swung around to God’s service. Hope develops out of a longing for the world to be set right, as that longing that is held continually before God in prayer. “Before God and with God, we live without God,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison. Wheat and tares grow together. We feel the birth pains and hear the groaning as we wait with all creation for the revelation of the children of God. Our hope is in a god who is transcends our vision, who has felt our fears, who works wonders for the dead. A god who is doing a work in us and through us to reveal a kinder world, where the dandelions have their glory, too.

May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.