Weeds and Wheat
Fruitfulness, Part 8:
Weeds and Wheat
June 9, 2024
Pastor Mike
Matthew 13:24-30
Okay, I need everyone’s help with something. Take a moment to have a good look at the people sitting around you. Now let’s get to the bottom of it. Who here is a weed? Which of your neighbors in the pew came from a bad seed sown by the enemy? Go on, point them out. I’ve brought a hoe with me, so we can start cleaning house.
[pause]
Of course, this is not how we would ever treat one another in the church. We might navigate legitimate conflict from time to time in order to address a wrong; we might hold others accountable and be held accountable to the purposes God has for us. But at the end of the day, we know that what unites us is not our shared moral perfection but our great need for God’s love. God asks us to be patient with one another, to be kind. God asks us to forgive each other not seven times but seventy times seven. 1 Samuel 16:7 says that “people look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” In that case, let’s just leave this hoe on the altar, in God’s hands, where it belongs.
We chuckle at the invitation to start weeding up one another. Why, then, do we often insist on treating ourselves and the wider world that way? When we look inward at the field of our being and when we look outward at the field of the world, we can be so sure that we know weeds from wheat. Jesus told this parable, and Matthew wrote it down, so that we would resist the temptation to be impatiently and violently critical, judging what we don’t yet see clearly, whether in ourselves or out in our communities.
In the parable, an enemy sabotages a farmer’s wheat field. The farmer sowed good seed, but when the crop sprang up from the soil and started developing fruit, something was wrong. A second type of plant was there. Weeds! Now, this parable does not have the typical Greek word for weeds in it. Instead, Jesus uses a word for a particular kind of weed, a weed that looks a lot like wheat. The two cannot be reliably distinguished from one another until they’re grown enough to start producing differently colored kernels of grain. You almost have to wait until harvest time to be certain which is which.
The servants were the first to notice that there were two different plants in the field, so they went and told their master. They asked him if they should go into the field to pull the weeds out. But the farmer told them to wait, to be patient. “You can tell that they’re different,” he says, “but are you sure you can tell which is which? If you go in hastily and start tearing things out, you might damage what’s good without meaning to. Let them mature until harvest time, and then I’ll tell the harvesters to take care of it. And do try not to worry about it; there will come a time when the two will be sorted out. Get back to the work that you know is yours to do.”
As I’ve been sitting with this passage all week, I’ve been thinking about where in my life I feel the friction of weeds and wheat growing close together. In two weeks, I’ll be commissioned as a provisional elder at our Annual Conference session, so my vocational journey has been on my mind. Pastoring is one of the areas in which God has called me to live a fruitful life, and along the way I’ve had some weeds spring up in me that I used to think were wheat, and I’ve had some good grain growing that I had once written off as weeds.
Perfectionism is a weed that got sown in me early on. I thought pastors had to be perfect people, immune to doubt and failure, always ready with the most intelligent thing to say. For a long time, I thought this tendency at work in me was wheat. It pushed me to learn as much as I could as fast I could, to rise to the expectations, real and imagined, of other people. If you’ve ever struggled with perfectionism, you know that for a long time it’s hard to diagnose because people come to admire you and achievement creates the feeling of being in control.
But over time the reality dawned on me. Trying to be perfect was miserable, and it was keeping me from real freedom in God and from risking myself in love and commitment. Underneath the constant performance, I was ashamed and afraid. Ashamed, because I knew the inner mess. Afraid, because I didn’t know whether I would still be loved and respected if I was more honest about my struggles.
But in God’s good time, and with the help of many harvesters – a spiritual director, a therapist, good friends – I discovered that I didn’t actually want to be perfect. What I wanted was integrity. They sound similar but they are as different as night from day. At this point in my life, I have let go of the idea that I need to have it all together in order to be a good pastor. That weed – so useful, so wheat-like in the early days – has been gathered and tossed into the fire.
I’ve had it the other way, too. I’ve had a weed that in the end turned out to be wheat. The simplest word for it is emotion. Early on in my life, I began cutting myself off from feeling and expressing strong feelings. Emotions are messy; they’re vulnerable. You ever feel that way? My experience as a young boy taught me that my emotions often went unreciprocated or opened me up to mockery. Better to not have them, then. Better to think and do than to feel.
The great exception to this, for me, was when I first encountered God’s love as a middle schooler. That conversion was extremely emotional. I longed for God, talked with God, sang and danced before God. But even in the church it didn’t take long for my religion of the heart to cool into a religion of the mind. I thought that detachment and academics were the road to earning the approval of people I wanted to impress, such as my professors. I also learned to critique emotional manipulation in the church, another good reason to separate emotional expression from spirituality.
But I was wrong to try and rip this out. Estranged from my body, afraid of what I felt, I could not truly love. I could not sustain joy in God or intimacy in relationships or compassionate service on behalf of others. Jesus loved from his gut, from his heart, from the tears that flowed out of his eyes. In recent years, the most powerful moments in my life as a pastor, husband, father, and even as a thinker have come when I have noticed and integrated deep feeling. What I judged an unwanted and ugly weed has turned out to be the most lovely, most necessary of grains.
What I’m trying to show is that I’ve gotten the weeds and the wheat mixed up. I’ve been impatient. I’ve misunderstood my role in the story. I thought I was supposed to be a harvester, but I’m not: I’m called to be a servant, whose task is to love God with all my heart, soul, and strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. In God’s time, what is healthy in me will be distinguished from what is unhealthy. God is patient with us, waiting until we are ready to experience judgment as a form of mercy. I wonder what’s going on in your own inner field, and whether you might be judging some aspects of yourself too quickly.
Let’s consider the weeds and wheat of the world. Republicans and Democrats. The rich and the poor. White American citizens and brown-skinned refugees. Southerners, Northerners, Westerners. Latter-Day Saints and United Methodists. Weeds! Wheat! Are we so sure?
When Matthew wrote down this parable, his own Christian community was in crisis. They had broken from their roots in the Jewish synagogue and were dealing with the grief of that separation. They were tempted to self-righteousness, to consider themselves better than the people around them. They had gotten it right, after all, believing in Jesus. “We’re the real children of God!”
Again, Jesus’ answer is patience, humility, and turning our attention from judgment to service. Earlier in Matthew, Jesus preached these words: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father” (Matt. 7:21) – which means there are weeds in here and wheat out there, those who confess Christ but don’t live for him and those who do not confess Christ who nevertheless do God’s will. We do not know what God knows; we do not see as God sees.
What it boils down to is this: There are times when as individuals we need to repent; there are times as a congregation when we need to navigate conflict; there are times when we must address the world with prophetic urgency and righteous anger. Exploitation, oppression, and abuse call for swift intervention. But when it comes to seeing ourselves or other people in such absolute terms – weed, wheat; good, bad; true Christian, false Christan – God tells us to let it be, let it go. Instead of slicing ourselves or our communities apart with criticism, we are to seek and do God’s will: self-emptying service, radical hospitality, and only the very occasional, very calculated turning over of tables.
The world is a mixed-up place, full of both beauty and brokenness, and we see through a glass dimly. Yet Jesus joined us in our mixed-up place. He shared our “true, slow confinement in time.” He did not anticipate the will of God but received and responded to God’s will moment by moment in perfect trust. And when he pours his Spirit into our hearts, he helps us to trust God’s wisdom, wait for God’s appointed time, and do God’s will.
And instead of hoeing, let us pray:
Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.