Sermon for July 19, 2020 - The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 11A - The Rev'd Isaac P. Martinez

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

It’s hard to believe, beloved, but it’s now been over four months since we have been able to gather in person for our worship. And I’m finding there is more bleakness in my heart now than when this strange new life took hold. The physical threat of a dangerous virus grows once more. Our nation yet again reckons with the reality that Black, brown, Asian, and indigenous lives seem to matter less, but with much rancor and division. Economic and psychological damage takes an increasing toll on tens of millions of people and any sense of certainty is painfully minimal. Meanwhile, our distracted and overwhelmed society exacerbates the causes of the climate crisis and wastes almost all opportunities to address it. It’s bleak enough that when Paul writes “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains” waiting for its redemption, I can almost really hear that groaning. The suffering is immense; and with apologies to Paul, I am not just groaning inwardly, but very much outwardly as well.

            So imagine my dismay when I started to delve into today’s gospel, hoping to find words of hope, but only getting another agricultural parable, one with an end-times twist. And if you’re anything like me, the eschatological nature of Jesus’s interpretation of his parable brings you up short. Instead of encouragement for the hard times at hand, at first glance, today’s parable of the wheat and the weeds seems to only point to a final future judgment. What does eternal punishment for evil and reward for good have to do with our present suffering?

            Well, to answer that, I think we need to explore what Jesus means by the “kingdom of heaven.” As you may know, in Matthew’s gospel, the phrase “the kingdom of heaven” refers not just to an otherworldly afterlife, somewhere up there, but to the reign of God coming here, to this physical reality. Through Jesus’s life, teaching, death & resurrection, the coming of the kingdom allows all of creation to “obtain the freedom and glory” that God intended from the beginning. Thus, when Scripture speaks of the kingdom of heaven or of God, it is not a mere replacement of an absolute human monarch with a divine one. Rather, it redefines what kingdom means altogether, a kingdom where the law is an expression of God’s love, and where enforcement of the law is predicated on amazing grace.

            With that understanding of the kingdom of heaven, let us see what this parable of the wheat and the weeds has to do with hope for our time. First, Jesus reminds his disciples that God first called creation very good. [1] The field that was planted with good seed is like Eden and we were created to live in harmony with our Maker and in unity and solidarity with each other.

“But an enemy sowed weeds among the wheat.” The weeds, zizanía, in Greek, were a particularly pernicious plant that was indistinguishable from wheat when it first started sprouting. Only as it matured could a farmer tell the difference. This metaphor speaks to how hard it is for we humans to see evil for what it is when it first starts to show up in our lives. It shows how nearly impossible it is to foresee the impact our individual and collective actions will have generations into the future. And, it gets even more complex.

For “even as the crop matured, the field was a mess; the crop was threatened, and the workers, [who stand for us Christians], nearly made things worse by trying to take control of the situation [and judge for themselves.] [Only] at the owner's insistence, [do] the field hands endure the wait between weeds appearing and [the] crop maturing.”[2] Jesus says the wheat are the children of the kingdom of heaven and the zizanía are the children of evil. The temptation is to categorize ourselves as “good” and our opponents and enemies as “evil,” leading us to destroy the evil around us, like every superhero movie has taught us. But I don’t think Jesus lets us off the hook that easily. What if the metaphor of the wheat and the zizanía growing so tightly together that the slaves can’t uproot one without uprooting the other is not really about two different categories of people, but the struggle within our very selves between the inherent goodness we have as God’s creation and the potential to sin and cause harm that we all have.

We then might worry even more about the final judgment, the harvesting of the wheat and the weeds, with the wheat to be stored and the weeds to be burned. If what is good in us can’t be fully separated from what causes us to do evil, even with supernatural assistance, then what is hope is there for suffering to be overcome and for creation to be made right and whole.

Well, I think we need two things to find that hope. The first is found in our reading from Romans and Paul’s theology of grace. Through Christ, God adopts us into His family. Because God freely comes to us as Jesus and dies for us, our hope is not in ourselves or what we can do to make ourselves better people. Our hope is in a God who graciously gives and gives and gives some more. It is God’s Spirit that allows us to call on God as a parent, and in that rush to Their arms, reminds and reassures us that we are beloved, before and beyond anything we can do.

The second thing we need is in the verses our Gospel reading skips over and saves for next week. With apologies to Pat who’s preaching next week, I’ll give you a sneak peek. In vv 31-33, Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven being like a mustard seed that grows into a disproportionately bigger tree and that the kingdom is like yeast in flour, working invisibly to make a dough grow and rise. But why insert these two parables in between the parable of the wheat and weeds and its interpretation? I think it’s because Jesus wants to teach us that when we believe in him, we become citizens of the kingdom of heaven, and the innate goodness that God sowed at the beginning of creation and of our individual lives grows like a mustard seed and spreads like rising bread. There is so much evil and suffering around us and always the potential for evil within us, but as Christians, we know there is also the hope of goodness, truth, and beauty that outstrips evil and the suffering it causes. Finally, although we can’t fully understand how it will work, I think the parable of the wheat and the weeds tells us that in the End-with-a-capital-E, we will be refined, the sin within us purified, and we will be the righteous creation God intended all along, through Her everlasting grace. I think that is the glory that will be revealed to us.

But maybe you’re still wondering: “What is the kingdom of heaven really like, especially during this bleak time?” Well, the kingdom of heaven is like a Greater Boston Interfaith Organization rally for police reform on the steps of the Statehouse on Friday. What is the kingdom of heaven like? It is like 4 of our St. Paul’s youth learning and sharing their wisdom about racism with our bishops a few weeks ago. The kingdom of heaven is like this community finding ways to come together despite the need for physical distance, a church that refuses to let the overturning of our normal life overturn our faith.

So my friends, let the good wheat that is planted within us grow. Let love, hope, peace, and joy grow faster within us than the zizanía of selfishness, pride, or envy. Let us trust that God has a plan for this world that They created and love so much. And as Paul invites us, let us place our hope in what we can not see, in God’s abundant grace that is redeeming us and all creation as we wait and work with patience. Amen.

[1] Mary Hinkle Shore https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=4515

[2] Mary Hinkle Shore https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=4515