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.

A Bible Verse on a Stick

A number of years ago, we had a ministry fair at the start of our program year (sometimes called Rally Day), where all of the groups set up booths or tables, advertising their specialties.  The prayer shawl ministry had shawls; the quilters had sample quilts; the Sunday School had registration tables; the Adult Choir had a tape of their music; the book club showed some of the titles we had read and a free bookmark showing some of the upcoming books.  The social justice group had what I thought was a particularly clever idea:  Free "Bible Verses on a Stick" to take home.  Our local state fair advertises nearly everything on-a-stick, so why not Bible verses?

The verse they chose?  Micah 6:8, or course.  "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"

It is the kind of verse you might want on a placque, or a stick, especially if you were a peace-and-justice-loving type.  It is easy to understand.  It is easy to remember.  It could be the kind of verse that might animate and inspire your imagination for your whole life.

Do justice.  Love Kindness.  Walk Humbly.

Seems simple, doesn't it?  How can you argue with a verse like this?

I will confess that I have loved this verse, but not often preached on it.  I mean (I thought), what can you say?  Do justice.  Love Kindness.  Walk Humbly.  Just do it.

A friend of mine, who pays more attention to verbs than I do, apparently, once remarked that though this verse instructs us to "Do justice and Love Kindness," we more often have it backwards.  We love justice, but do random acts of kindness, which is much easier than creating justice.  It is much easier to go to the soup kitchen and ladle soup than it is to address the causes of hunger.  It is much easier pay for the hamburger of the person who is coming after you in the drive through or chip in a few dollars when the person in front of you at the grocery store can't quite pay her bill.

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

But maybe we pay too much attention to the different verbs.  Maybe we are meant to both do and love both justice and kindness, and there are other questions to ask about this Bible verse, which is so easy to put on a stick, so easy to understand and remember, but perhaps not so easy in other ways.

When I read the seven verses before the famous one, I notice that there is a conversation going on, a conversation between God and Israel.  Well, actually it is more like an argument, with God sounding a little like a jilted lover.  After all God has done for Israel,  what has happened to their relationship?  Israel seems to be tired of God, tired of being the chosen people.  They are not paying attention.  They have put their fingers in their ears and they are saying, "la la la".  What happened?  God wants to know.

When the people reply, they seem to have heard God's plea.  They are asking, "What do you want from us?"  And they have some examples:  exaggerated, over the top.

"What do you want from us, God?"  do you want thousands of rams?  rivers of oil?  my first born-child?  would that satisfy you?

And it seems like such an odd reply, really.  Not just because of the exaggeration, but because of the assumptions:  what would God want with thousands of rams?  how would all of that oil satisfy God?  Can God be satisfied?  It sounds like they are trying to get God off their backs, buy God off with ridiculous sums.

But here's another thing I wondered, almost wistfully:

Do we even ask that question any more?

"What do you want from us, God?"  I wonder.  Have we stopped asking God, "What do you want?"  I have been thinking about that.  Because if we ask, here is what God wants, something so simple, but not easy.  You can understand it.  You can memorize it.  You can put it on a stick.

Do justice.  Love kindness.  Walk humbly with God.

So simple.  But if you think it is easy, you have never tried it.  One thing is:  it's never done.  You can't be kind once, and then you have met your kindness obligation.  You can't shovel one person's driveway and then you can check mercy off your list.  And doing justice:  well, all you can do is make progress, fail, step back, go forward, fail again.  Sometimes you think you have done justice, and later you realize that you just made things a worse mess.  But you get up and try again.  I suppose that is where humility comes in.

Do justice.  Love kindness.  Walk humbly with God.

"What do you want from us God?"

And the true and terrifying answer, the true and only answer, the true and life-giving answer is this:

I don't want anything from you.  I just want you.

Lord, Have Mercy

The summer has brought some changes, big and small, to the congregation where I am a pastor.  Of course, the big one is a new senior pastor.  But there have been a few little ones, including some ways that our worship services have changed.  We're trying a few things in worship, without doing anything major yet:  we want the congregation to be the ones who figure out what our worship identity is, and what our worship should look like.

In the meantime, we have been doing a couple of things differently:  1)  we have moved the announcements to near the end of the service.  We decided to do this right after our "Rally Day" worship, when the beginning of the service was delayed several minutes because people were still coming in the front door.  2)  we begun worship with the "Kyrie."

I have a couple of observations regarding these changes.  One is this:  I should not criticize anyone for finding change difficult, because I'm sort of finding it difficult myself.  Doing the announcements at the end of the service does not come naturally for me, much as I like the idea.  And I'm used to beginning worship either with a song, or with confession and forgiveness, so the flow of worship seems a little odd to me, still.

But I do find myself dwelling on those three word, that most ancient prayer, "Kyrie Eleison."  "Lord, have mercy."  It is a confession and it is an intercession.  It is the cry of a disciple, "Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner."  It reminds me that prayer is not a transaction, but a gift.

This morning I had one of those bad headaches I get every once in awhile.  I haven't had one for a long time, and I forget how they feel until one of them comes along again.  I caught myself praying a sort-of prayer, "God, if you will take away this headache, I promise I will do more of the things you want me to do.  I promise I'll write, I'll use my time wisely, I won't procrastinate...."  I was in the middle of this kind of prayer when I remembered the Kyrie, "Lord, have mercy....."

There's no bargaining, no reminding God that I'm an essentially Good Person, no promising that I will be better.  The only chip I have is the mercy of God.   That's it.  And that is enough.

One of my high school friends, one of a different denominational persuasion, visited a Lutheran worship service one time and reported on her experience.  "First you ask God to forgive you," she reported.  "Then all of a sudden, you are saying, 'Lord, have mercy' again.  What's up with that?  Why don't you just believe you are forgiven and be done with it?"

At the time, I didn't know exactly how to answer her.  Maybe it was true; maybe we did wallow a bit too much in our sinfulness.  But now I am beginning to see a little more clearly:  "Lord Have mercy," is the constant refrain of our lives, of our prayers.  It's not that we are wallowing in our sinfulness, but that the foundation of our life is mercy.

The foundation of our life is mercy.

God is merciful.  That alone is enough to transform our lives.