Living With The Weeds In The Wheat
Sermon
Rejoicing In Life's 'Melissa Moments'
The Joys Of Faith And The Challenges Of Life
Life is a mixture of good and evil. Experience and observation keep that fact before us. Philosophers speculate about this common knowledge. Could God have made a better world? Could God have created a world with more happiness and less misery? You will be relieved to know that I do not propose to pursue these debates. I will report a distinction between the optimist and the pessimist. The optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist is afraid the optimist is right.
The Bible contains no arguments about possible worlds that God might have made. It does recognize that this actual world is full of trouble. Only in the Garden of Eden at the beginning and in the New Jerusalem at the end is life an unmixed blessing. In the course of history itself, paradise has been lost. Heaven is still a hope. Jesus told a simple story that illustrates the point. A farmer sowed good seed in his field. His enemy came by night and planted weeds among the wheat. Soon both were growing up together. The offending weed is apparently darnel, a grain that resembles wheat but is poisonous to eat. Shall an attempt be made to pull out the weeds? No, says the farmer, let them grow together until the harvest. Then a separation can be made. To pull up the weeds now would uproot some of the wheat as well. Perplexing problems arise with regard to the original meaning and literary history of this parable. It has been given varying interpretations over the centuries. I want to reflect on the meaning of life here and now that this story evokes in me.
In the first place, this story has meaning for our individual lives. Good and evil entwine themselves in our personal histories in unpredictable, unavoidable, and perplexing ways. Accidents and disease may overtake us. A downturn in the economy may take our jobs. The outbreak of war may send our children into combat. On the streets we are at the mercy of maniacs, criminals, drunken drivers, and next-door neighbors. A hurricane or tornado may destroy our property. An earthquake may shake down our homes. In a thousand ways life can be disrupted by forces beyond our control as well as by our foolish choices. The sinful and the tragic are interwoven in the fabric of our daily existence.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti has put it well in one of his poems appearing in A Coney Island Of The Mind. The point is that life is wonderful except for all the bad things that happen in the midst of all our happiness and fun. After listing a bunch of things that are particularly nice, he ends abruptly:
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician.1
Such are the days of our lives as the world turns; life can be beautiful, but all of a sudden we are face-to-face with the undertaker.
In the second place, the parable tells us something about the inevitable compromises and trade-offs that accompany all our efforts to improve society. Here again the wheat and the weeds are closely bound up with each other. It is impossible to root out all evil and preserve only what is good. Illustrations abound. Soon another effort will be made in Congress to lower the tax on capital gains. Some argue that it is just another undeserved break for the rich. The rest of us will not benefit. Others contend that lowering the tax will raise incentives, spur investment in new enterprises, and generally do a lot a good for everybody. Recently the question of the minimum wage has been a matter of controversy. One side maintains that it will improve the lot of entry level workers who cannot support themselves or a family on the present wage rates that many people get stuck in these days. The other side argues that the consequence of raising wages by law will be a loss of employment for a significant number of people. As business people find themselves unable to compete when their labor costs are raised beyond what the market will bear, they will fire workers. Well, who is right in these arguments? It may be that both sides have some of the truth but that neither has the whole truth. Neither side may have as much truth as it claims for its position. We can readily see how self-interest, whether economic or political, corrupts principles. Yet the contending parties cover all this up by giving their arguments a halo of pure moral idealism they do not deserve.
My wife was a chaplain in Pennsylvania when a young man was brought into the emergency room badly burned in a motorcycle accident. He was in great torment and agony. He had no chance of survival. Despite all doctors could do, his condition was horrendous. He remained conscious. He wanted to die. His family stood helplessly by watching him suffer and slowly slip away. Should he be put out of his misery? It would seem to be an act of mercy for somebody who would and did die in a matter of days. Yet deliberately to kill someone is against the law and offends the conscience. We have a term that puts the dilemma before us -- mercy killing. The moral law tells us to be merciful, but it forbids us to kill. What shall we do? Once again, weeds are growing in the wheat.
We have not even raised a question about the trade-off between unemployment and inflation. We have not touched upon whether private schools that practice segregation on religious grounds should be given a tax exemption. Not yet in the picture is whether the KKK should be allowed to march in Skokie, Illinois, where many survivors of Hitler's concentration camps live. We could go on forever, I suppose. The point is that in our social life as well as in our personal existence, wheat and weeds grow together. We have not much hope of reaching a state of perfection on earth in which that would not be the case.
In the third place, this simple story may also have implications for God's own involvement in the world. A story in the Jewish tradition makes the point powerfully. When the ministering angels saw the Egyptians floundering in the sea after the Israelites had passed over, they burst into song. The Lord rebuked them. "My children lie drowning in the sea. And you would sing?" Frequently this story is taken to mean that God loves Egyptians as well as Israelites and thus is sorrowful at the sight of their perishing. That is surely part of the truth. The deeper meaning may be that God cannot save Israelites without killing Egyptians.
Do you not see an echo of the story of the wheat and the weeds here? The farmer said, "Don't try to pull the weeds out; you will kill some of the wheat." In the very act of rooting out evil, something of value is also damaged. God's judgment in history seems caught up in this same dilemma. In order to liberate Israel from bondage, God destroys Egyptians. God loves Egyptians too.
An incident in the New Testament implies a similar truth. When King Herod heard that the Messiah had been born, he gave the order that all the male children two years old and under who lived in the vicinity of Bethlehem should be killed (Matthew 2:16). The very sending of the Savior into the world indirectly causes the death of innocent babies and brings about great weeping and lamenting among their mothers and fathers. Granted, it was Herod who gave the order to murder. The fact is that had not the Messiah been born, the children would not have died. The heart of a loving God surely was broken at the sight of drowning Egyptians in the Red Sea and of dying babies in Judea. The conclusion would seem to be that in order to be involved in our lives, to judge the wicked and save the helpless, God is implicated in violence. Thus is God also caught up in the complexities, ambiguities, and trade-offs that perplex and frustrate us.
Reinhold Niebuhr suggests that the perfect love of God can be symbolized only by Jesus becoming powerless on the cross. There he is physically and symbolically above the vicissitudes of actual life and history. The power of Jesus on the cross is found only in the persuasiveness of a life fully surrendered to God. Jesus in the marketplace is caught up in the same ambiguities that we are. Jesus was asked whether it was right to pay taxes to Caesar. He could only say that it was proper to render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's (Matthew 22:15-22). This is an answer that is no answer to the particular issues involved. It was the only reply he could give without participating in the compromises and trade-offs that we face every day.
What shall we conclude from all this? Does the fact that wheat and weeds are so entangled that we cannot do good without also doing evil mean that we should do nothing? Shall we simply sit down while we wait for heaven? No, I think not. This parable does not contain the whole truth of Scripture nor the whole counsel of the gospel. Its message is not that we cannot make things better. It is only a warning that we cannot make them perfect.
This parable was originally intended to refute those Christians who wanted to have a pure Church, free from all spiritual stain. The church, they said, should be made up of saints only, the righteous and untainted. Throw the sinners out. The message of this parable on that score is loud and clear. Saints and sinners cannot so easily be distinguished from one another. Wheat and weeds grow in the lives of all.
His name was Otis Perkins. We all called him Mr. Doog. He was the community drunk. Doog was a good man who, everybody said, would give you the shirt right off his back if you needed it. Now and then he went on a big drinking spree. Sometimes he would end up drunk lying in the grass behind our barn. He would talk, endlessly and loudly. He spoke of many things. More than once I heard him recite how he was thrown out of New Hope Baptist Church for being a drunkard. Well, all that happened years and years ago, but he still remembered. The pain was still there, and it was deep. The good folks at New Hope were trying to maintain standards. That is a good thing to do. How can you do it without assuming that the wheat and the weeds can be neatly separated? How can you do it without leaving deep wounds in the likes of Mr. Doog Perkins, the community drunk? The church is in a dilemma. It would be a perversion of the Bible as a whole to conclude that all attempts to have standards of church membership should be abandoned.
So it is in other realms of life. The fact that we cannot free ourselves from all risk and failure does not suggest that there is nothing we can do to make our lives more tolerable and satisfying. Even if all reforms in society are partial failures and even if perfect justice is always a hope and not an achievement, this does not imply that all efforts to make things better are futile. Because we cannot make absolute distinctions between good and evil does not imply that relative differences between right and wrong are impossible.
In the Church, in society, and in our individual lives, we have to live with partial successes and partial failures, with compromises and trade-offs. We gain something we want at the expense of something else that is good. Sometimes we have to be content with a little gain here and a little gain there and sometimes no gain at all and a setback now and then. You win some, and you lose some. That's life. The perennial problem is to live joyfully before God and one another without giving up or giving in. The challenge is to live lovingly before God and others without becoming complacent about the suffering around us or despairing because the battle against injustice and misery seems never to be won. The goal is to live faithfully before God and each other, accepting and enduring those stubborn afflictions in our own lives without cynicism or bitterness. The hope is that we can all live before God and each other in constant alertness to find those places where what cannot be made perfect for all can at least be made better for some with the least damage to the rest.
None of this is to deny that radical change may be called for at times. Revolution and not evolution may be God's order for the day with all the risks and possibilities that entails. The rule always is: the most that can be done for the sake of greater justice should be done. The faithful disciple of Jesus moves between complacency and despair in love and in hope to do for the neighbor the best that is possible under the circumstances. The obedient disciple seeks to be wise in discerning what that is.
Joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, success and failure, surprise and disappointment, triumph and tragedy, victory and defeat -- these opposites are interwoven like wheat and weeds in the soil of our lives. They grow together in perplexing and unpredictable ways. In this adventure we have each other for mutual support. We live in companionship with God who suffers and triumphs with us in a kingdom that is always coming in wonder and surprise to bring new life and joy in ways beyond our knowing.
____________
1. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island Of The Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), p. 89.
The Bible contains no arguments about possible worlds that God might have made. It does recognize that this actual world is full of trouble. Only in the Garden of Eden at the beginning and in the New Jerusalem at the end is life an unmixed blessing. In the course of history itself, paradise has been lost. Heaven is still a hope. Jesus told a simple story that illustrates the point. A farmer sowed good seed in his field. His enemy came by night and planted weeds among the wheat. Soon both were growing up together. The offending weed is apparently darnel, a grain that resembles wheat but is poisonous to eat. Shall an attempt be made to pull out the weeds? No, says the farmer, let them grow together until the harvest. Then a separation can be made. To pull up the weeds now would uproot some of the wheat as well. Perplexing problems arise with regard to the original meaning and literary history of this parable. It has been given varying interpretations over the centuries. I want to reflect on the meaning of life here and now that this story evokes in me.
In the first place, this story has meaning for our individual lives. Good and evil entwine themselves in our personal histories in unpredictable, unavoidable, and perplexing ways. Accidents and disease may overtake us. A downturn in the economy may take our jobs. The outbreak of war may send our children into combat. On the streets we are at the mercy of maniacs, criminals, drunken drivers, and next-door neighbors. A hurricane or tornado may destroy our property. An earthquake may shake down our homes. In a thousand ways life can be disrupted by forces beyond our control as well as by our foolish choices. The sinful and the tragic are interwoven in the fabric of our daily existence.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti has put it well in one of his poems appearing in A Coney Island Of The Mind. The point is that life is wonderful except for all the bad things that happen in the midst of all our happiness and fun. After listing a bunch of things that are particularly nice, he ends abruptly:
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician.1
Such are the days of our lives as the world turns; life can be beautiful, but all of a sudden we are face-to-face with the undertaker.
In the second place, the parable tells us something about the inevitable compromises and trade-offs that accompany all our efforts to improve society. Here again the wheat and the weeds are closely bound up with each other. It is impossible to root out all evil and preserve only what is good. Illustrations abound. Soon another effort will be made in Congress to lower the tax on capital gains. Some argue that it is just another undeserved break for the rich. The rest of us will not benefit. Others contend that lowering the tax will raise incentives, spur investment in new enterprises, and generally do a lot a good for everybody. Recently the question of the minimum wage has been a matter of controversy. One side maintains that it will improve the lot of entry level workers who cannot support themselves or a family on the present wage rates that many people get stuck in these days. The other side argues that the consequence of raising wages by law will be a loss of employment for a significant number of people. As business people find themselves unable to compete when their labor costs are raised beyond what the market will bear, they will fire workers. Well, who is right in these arguments? It may be that both sides have some of the truth but that neither has the whole truth. Neither side may have as much truth as it claims for its position. We can readily see how self-interest, whether economic or political, corrupts principles. Yet the contending parties cover all this up by giving their arguments a halo of pure moral idealism they do not deserve.
My wife was a chaplain in Pennsylvania when a young man was brought into the emergency room badly burned in a motorcycle accident. He was in great torment and agony. He had no chance of survival. Despite all doctors could do, his condition was horrendous. He remained conscious. He wanted to die. His family stood helplessly by watching him suffer and slowly slip away. Should he be put out of his misery? It would seem to be an act of mercy for somebody who would and did die in a matter of days. Yet deliberately to kill someone is against the law and offends the conscience. We have a term that puts the dilemma before us -- mercy killing. The moral law tells us to be merciful, but it forbids us to kill. What shall we do? Once again, weeds are growing in the wheat.
We have not even raised a question about the trade-off between unemployment and inflation. We have not touched upon whether private schools that practice segregation on religious grounds should be given a tax exemption. Not yet in the picture is whether the KKK should be allowed to march in Skokie, Illinois, where many survivors of Hitler's concentration camps live. We could go on forever, I suppose. The point is that in our social life as well as in our personal existence, wheat and weeds grow together. We have not much hope of reaching a state of perfection on earth in which that would not be the case.
In the third place, this simple story may also have implications for God's own involvement in the world. A story in the Jewish tradition makes the point powerfully. When the ministering angels saw the Egyptians floundering in the sea after the Israelites had passed over, they burst into song. The Lord rebuked them. "My children lie drowning in the sea. And you would sing?" Frequently this story is taken to mean that God loves Egyptians as well as Israelites and thus is sorrowful at the sight of their perishing. That is surely part of the truth. The deeper meaning may be that God cannot save Israelites without killing Egyptians.
Do you not see an echo of the story of the wheat and the weeds here? The farmer said, "Don't try to pull the weeds out; you will kill some of the wheat." In the very act of rooting out evil, something of value is also damaged. God's judgment in history seems caught up in this same dilemma. In order to liberate Israel from bondage, God destroys Egyptians. God loves Egyptians too.
An incident in the New Testament implies a similar truth. When King Herod heard that the Messiah had been born, he gave the order that all the male children two years old and under who lived in the vicinity of Bethlehem should be killed (Matthew 2:16). The very sending of the Savior into the world indirectly causes the death of innocent babies and brings about great weeping and lamenting among their mothers and fathers. Granted, it was Herod who gave the order to murder. The fact is that had not the Messiah been born, the children would not have died. The heart of a loving God surely was broken at the sight of drowning Egyptians in the Red Sea and of dying babies in Judea. The conclusion would seem to be that in order to be involved in our lives, to judge the wicked and save the helpless, God is implicated in violence. Thus is God also caught up in the complexities, ambiguities, and trade-offs that perplex and frustrate us.
Reinhold Niebuhr suggests that the perfect love of God can be symbolized only by Jesus becoming powerless on the cross. There he is physically and symbolically above the vicissitudes of actual life and history. The power of Jesus on the cross is found only in the persuasiveness of a life fully surrendered to God. Jesus in the marketplace is caught up in the same ambiguities that we are. Jesus was asked whether it was right to pay taxes to Caesar. He could only say that it was proper to render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's (Matthew 22:15-22). This is an answer that is no answer to the particular issues involved. It was the only reply he could give without participating in the compromises and trade-offs that we face every day.
What shall we conclude from all this? Does the fact that wheat and weeds are so entangled that we cannot do good without also doing evil mean that we should do nothing? Shall we simply sit down while we wait for heaven? No, I think not. This parable does not contain the whole truth of Scripture nor the whole counsel of the gospel. Its message is not that we cannot make things better. It is only a warning that we cannot make them perfect.
This parable was originally intended to refute those Christians who wanted to have a pure Church, free from all spiritual stain. The church, they said, should be made up of saints only, the righteous and untainted. Throw the sinners out. The message of this parable on that score is loud and clear. Saints and sinners cannot so easily be distinguished from one another. Wheat and weeds grow in the lives of all.
His name was Otis Perkins. We all called him Mr. Doog. He was the community drunk. Doog was a good man who, everybody said, would give you the shirt right off his back if you needed it. Now and then he went on a big drinking spree. Sometimes he would end up drunk lying in the grass behind our barn. He would talk, endlessly and loudly. He spoke of many things. More than once I heard him recite how he was thrown out of New Hope Baptist Church for being a drunkard. Well, all that happened years and years ago, but he still remembered. The pain was still there, and it was deep. The good folks at New Hope were trying to maintain standards. That is a good thing to do. How can you do it without assuming that the wheat and the weeds can be neatly separated? How can you do it without leaving deep wounds in the likes of Mr. Doog Perkins, the community drunk? The church is in a dilemma. It would be a perversion of the Bible as a whole to conclude that all attempts to have standards of church membership should be abandoned.
So it is in other realms of life. The fact that we cannot free ourselves from all risk and failure does not suggest that there is nothing we can do to make our lives more tolerable and satisfying. Even if all reforms in society are partial failures and even if perfect justice is always a hope and not an achievement, this does not imply that all efforts to make things better are futile. Because we cannot make absolute distinctions between good and evil does not imply that relative differences between right and wrong are impossible.
In the Church, in society, and in our individual lives, we have to live with partial successes and partial failures, with compromises and trade-offs. We gain something we want at the expense of something else that is good. Sometimes we have to be content with a little gain here and a little gain there and sometimes no gain at all and a setback now and then. You win some, and you lose some. That's life. The perennial problem is to live joyfully before God and one another without giving up or giving in. The challenge is to live lovingly before God and others without becoming complacent about the suffering around us or despairing because the battle against injustice and misery seems never to be won. The goal is to live faithfully before God and each other, accepting and enduring those stubborn afflictions in our own lives without cynicism or bitterness. The hope is that we can all live before God and each other in constant alertness to find those places where what cannot be made perfect for all can at least be made better for some with the least damage to the rest.
None of this is to deny that radical change may be called for at times. Revolution and not evolution may be God's order for the day with all the risks and possibilities that entails. The rule always is: the most that can be done for the sake of greater justice should be done. The faithful disciple of Jesus moves between complacency and despair in love and in hope to do for the neighbor the best that is possible under the circumstances. The obedient disciple seeks to be wise in discerning what that is.
Joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, success and failure, surprise and disappointment, triumph and tragedy, victory and defeat -- these opposites are interwoven like wheat and weeds in the soil of our lives. They grow together in perplexing and unpredictable ways. In this adventure we have each other for mutual support. We live in companionship with God who suffers and triumphs with us in a kingdom that is always coming in wonder and surprise to bring new life and joy in ways beyond our knowing.
____________
1. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island Of The Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), p. 89.
