Wheat and Weeds, Redux

On Sunday I preached the parable of the wheat and the weeds, the one where there is good seed sown by a good sower and an enemy that mucks things up by sowing weeds while everyone is sleeping.  And before that, on Tuesday evening, when we had read this parable and its explanation at an online Bible study, there was silence afterward we finished reading.  And someone said, "I don't like this parable." And I think that part of it was just that the parable itself ends with the image of the weeds being burned and the wheat being gathered, and the explanation has that line about casting out evildoers and the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

So, it's not (in some ways) what you would call a "feel good" parable, although I wrestled a blessing out of it, pointing out that God lets the wheat and weeds grow together because God doesn't want to lose even one shock of wheat, and as well pointing out that the presence of the weeds does not mean God has abandoned the field.

Afterwards my husband asked me why I had not used our own yard as a sermon illustration:  with our many weeds that we struggle to control, and our St. Augustine grass (which we had never heard of up north) which we THOUGHT was a weed, and were merrily trying to pull out.  I said that I had thought about it but I had way too much material for one sermon.  So the St. Augustine grass did not make it into the sermon.

But he also told me afterwards that the one thing I mentioned that he had never noticed before was that the reason the sower doesn't want to dig up any weeds is that the wheat would be uprooted at the same time.  In other words, their roots are too close together, even entangled.  He had never noticed that.  Frankly, neither had I.  I had always focussed on the interesting idea that this particular weed looked a lot like wheat.  But the fact that it might not even be possible to uproot weeds without uprooting some wheat along with it -- that never made an impression on me.

But I'm thinking more and more about that entangled wheat these days.  Maybe it's COVID 19 and our attempts to quarantine and protect ourselves from the virus.  Maybe it's the fact that there are many gated communities around me, or the fact that we seem to live in bubbles defined by our race or class or even our politics.  We surround ourselves with people who think like us, whether or not they look like us.

But the truth is, we are all tangled up in each other, and our fates are intertwined.  Even if we live in gated communities.  Even at our most segregated.  I remember that some people would say:  why should I care about the public schools?  My kids are grown up now.  And someone else would say:  I care, because the children who go to those schools will be the teachers and police officers, and custodians and politicians in my community, and I want them all to be well educated.  We touch each other's lives, whether we want to or not.

Our fates are intertwined.  We belong to each other.   That's God's honest truth, although some days it may make us weep and gnash our teeth.

But someday, when all of the weeds inside us are burned, perhaps we will rejoice in this.  Perhaps we'll see the beauty in the dandelion and stop trying to dig up the Augustine grass, and notice that the wheat is springing up and bearing fruit, to share.

Loving a weed

My love affair with milkweed began late:  just last summer, to be specific.  I had always sort of known about milkweed, the way that I know about cattails and dandelions and even the leaves of the mighty oak trees.  But I haven't been much of a gardener in my life, so I didn't really know about milkweed until last summer.

We were getting some landscaping work done in our backyard.  The peonies were all overgrown and had to go.  I wanted something that would bloom more often than just that one glorious week in June, too.  So we got some advice, and planted a few things, and tried to nurse a couple of other sad plants back to health.  While our friend, the landscaper, was over one afternoon, giving us some advice, he looked over at the fence line between our house and our neighbor's, and said, "Oh!  You have milkweed."

I do? I thought, but did not say.  (how could I not have noticed?)  I took a good look, and tried not to look too excited.  I had heard that milkweed was good for butterflies, particularly the monarch butterfly.    And here it was, just growing in our yard, for free.

Before I could alert him, my husband mowed down the milkweed.  It didn't look like it belonged in our yard.  It looked like a weed.  A tall, impressive weed, but still a weed.  After that, I looked around for milkweed everywhere:  on our block, on the prairies of southwestern Minnesota, in the ditches, in the city.  And I hoped that it would come back this year, anyway.  It is a wild plant, after all, and it can do what it wants.

For a long time, though, it looked like the milkweed would not re-appear after all.  It was a hard winter, and other people reported that they hadn't seen any sign of their milkweed either.  But finally, one day, late in June when I had given up hope, there it was:  one lonely milkweed plant.  It came back.

I realize that milkweed is not the weed of this week's parable, not the weed that goes hiding among the wheat:  similar, but not the same.  No, the weeds this week are tares, not milkweed.   Long ago, when I expressed surprise about the parable's farmer and his methods in a Bible study populated by farmer's wives, they told me they were not surprised at all.  Back before there were chemicals, that's the way it was with wheat.  Wheat is not a row crop, and you couldn't get between the rows and get the weeds.  You had to wait until the harvest.  Only at the harvest would everything finally get sorted out.

So the parable is not about milkweed.  It's also not about the persistence of evil in the world, not at the basic, foundational level.  At least, I don't think so.  It's about sorting things out, or not sorting things out until the end.  It's about not knowing for sure always, if something is a weed or not, not knowing what to pull up and what to fertilize and rejoice over.  It's about not cutting down the good by mistake, because it looks like a weed.

When I got a little curious about "milkweed" lately, I was trying to figure out the name.  Not the "milk" part, but the "weed" part.  I knew that milkweed was beneficial to monarch butterflies, among other things.  But when I went on the internet to find out more about it, I was surprised to find out there are also places that it is listed as a noxious weed, an invasive species.  There are places where milkweed is actively rooted out and destroyed according to law.  To be fair, I have also discovered that in some of those places they are now changing those laws, now allowing milkweed to be protected.  Milkweed:  a noxious, invasive weed that is also a place of transformation for butterflies.  I like it.

It's not so much to hope for, perhaps: that a noxious sinner like me  could also, in God's plan, be a place of transformation for someone else.

A cross says it is possible, and even true.