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"Weeds in the Field"
I have been trying to garden for 30 years. Trying is the operative word here. I began gardening when I had my first baby. While she was napping, I would garden outside the open window to her bedroom. When she woke up and gave a little cry, gardening was over for the day.
In that first garden, I planted begonias and impatiens in full sun, and they fried. I planted marigolds and petunias in the shade, and they failed to bloom. I never amended the soil or fertilized my plants. I didn’t know you were supposed to, and the plants starved. ( I did a better job with my baby, although there was some trial and error in that endeavor too.)
Sometimes in my garden, I would learn my lesson in one year, and sometimes it took me 2 or 3 years making the same mistake before I got the message about sun and shade and fertilizer. After many years, I finally figured out how much shade I had, and what kind of plants would grow there. I became a fairly competent and confident shade gardener. Then one afternoon in late August about 10 years ago, a big thunderstorm came through and blew down three old water oaks, one pine tree and 3 dogwoods. That made a garden in full sun, and I had to start learning all over again. Now we are in a drought and that brings on another set of problems. I am a self-taught gardener, and learning is a slow process, especially when Mother Nature keeps changing the rules in my backyard.
A hundred years ago, gardening was something most people knew how to do, something they learned as kids. Everyone depended on a gardener or farmer so they could eat. There was no asparagus in the middle of July shipped in from an unknown grower in Peru. There were no Rainier cherries from Washington shipped to North Carolina. If you wanted a Georgia peach, you had best get yourself to Georgia. People knew about growing crops, what the land needed, when to let the land lie fallow, when to fertilize, when to plant, when to harvest. Such knowledge was not a hobby. Knowing how to grow crops was essential to human life.
In recent months, we have begun to have a deeper appreciation for wheat and corn as floods have destroyed crops in the mid-west and food prices have soared. We don’t take wheat and corn for granted the way we used to. And we see pictures of people who are starving in poor countries because some corn has been turned from food into biofuel so the developed world can keep driving cars, tractors and trucks.
When Jesus told the story about the farmer who sowed a wheat field, Jesus was talking about something that everyone understood was important. And they probably knew half a dozen ways that a crop could be destroyed—by drought or flood, by someone setting fire to the field or by animals trampling through it. Perhaps folks even knew of an incident when an enemy came into a field and sowed weeds to destroy the crop. The problem here, of course, is that you can’t see what has happened until it is too late. The weeds and the wheat look alike as young plants and by the time they show what they really are, you can’t pull out those weeds without uprooting the wheat too.
Imagine how you would feel when it first dawned on you that every other plant in the field was a weed--weeds that suck up precious water when it rains and pull nutrients from the soil that otherwise would go to the wheat. The farmer must have felt horror and then fury as he understood that this was deliberate sabotage of his crop. And he might have felt panic when he thought that people were going to go hungry, maybe his own children would not have enough to eat. The farmer’s servants wanted to know if they should go and pull the weeds, but the farmer said that they had to be patient if they were to save any of the crop.
Weed control and critter control are major preoccupations for farmers and gardeners. I have friends in Oregon who are grape growers. Keeping the bugs and the birds off the fruit is vital to their livelihood so they put up nets over the grapevines. Other friends in North Carolina have a large vegetable garden. They also have a large herd of deer that wander through their property. These gardeners put up a tall fence with an electric wire to protect the garden from the deer and raccoons. Farming is hard work, and people go to great lengths to protect what they have planted. They will spend back-breaking hours in the hot sun in order to protect the crop from being overrun with weeds. So it was only natural that the servants in the parable should assume that the farmer would want to pull all those weeds from his field. Wheat is good, and weeds are bad so lets get rid of them.
There is a great temptation to make clear distinctions between what is good and what is evil. Usually we think of ourselves as the people who wear the white hats and some other person or community or political party or nation that wears the black hat. But we really know better, don’t we? Good and evil are usually not pure. Like the farmer’s field, good and evil are often co-mingled. And that makes it so much harder to judge. How do you pull out a weed when its roots are intertwined with the roots of the wheat? What if you cannot even truly identify what is weed and what is wheat?
As we have become an increasingly global community, our lives are intertwined with the lives of others in ways that are very hard to sort out. Should we buy the asparagus from Peru that was flown in by plane using up the world’s limited oil supplies? If we don’t buy the asparagus, what happens to the Peruvian peasant who makes a living picking asparagus? And what happens in our own country if we build tall fences and don’t allow illegal immigrants to pick our crops at low wages? Will food prices go even higher if we have to pay higher wages to American pickers? Even the experts argue about what is right or wrong, ethical or unethical, good or bad.
Many people have begun to wonder if the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is the best way to pull out the evil of terrorism. Terrorists are hard to identify because their lives are intertwined with innocent people. We watch with horror as suicide bombers mix with ordinary shoppers in the markets and then kill themselves and many others. On the other hand, we have watched American firepower destroy the homes of innocent poor people and the infrastructure of two nations in an effort to rout out terrorism. And we wonder if there might have been another way.
Long before the attack on our own homeland, a young American named Greg Mortensen, began to build schools in the remote mountains villages of Pakistan. He believes with all his heart that providing non-sectarian education for boys and girls is the way to end extreme poverty and loosen the hold of radical Islam on people’s lives. But, building schools takes time. Greg Mortensen must befriend the villagers first, understand their customs and values, work with tribal leaders. Then he returns to the United States to raise the funds and goes back to Pakistan and Afghanistan to buy the building materials, transports those materials up into the mountains and builds the schools with the villagers. Greg Mortensen’s amazing story is told in the book Three Cups of Tea. It is a story of heroism, conscience and incredible patience.
If it is difficult to clearly understand what is good and what is evil when it is half a world away, can we at least begin to look at the weeds and wheat in our own lives? What are the weeds that might choke out the wheat in your spiritual life--religious prejudices, racism, sexism, envy, pride, addiction? We all have weeds that sprout from our fears and insecurities, and sometimes our weeds are so high, we can’t see over them. Sometimes the weeds are planted by another person. Maybe someone has entered your field and scattered a rumor, sown a little deceit, planted a suspicion, dug in an untruth. These weeds are very hard to pull out by the roots, and all too often you just have to live with these weeds for a long time, maybe a life time.
So we, like the farmer, must be patient. We cannot rid ourselves of all the weeds in our lives. But, we can become astute observers who learn to distinguish between weeds and wheat. We can learn to distinguish between good and evil even at the early stages when they look a lot alike. We can get to know how to walk on by those weeds that promise happiness and grow nothing but trouble. Ultimately, we can learn patience, learn when to trust God, learn when to surrender to God’s greater wisdom, learn to accept that God alone can cleanse the field on the last day.
Amen.
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