Imperfections, Weeds, & Truth
THE EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Genesis 28:10-19a • Psalm 139: 1-11, 22-23 • Romans 8:12-25 • Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
Whether it’s Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, Godly Play, or another curriculum, the lessons we teach our children are based on stories from our Holy Scripture. We like the Montessori-based curriculums that draw heavily upon creativity and imagination. “I wonder…” questions are common, inviting participation into the stories, separating the distance between what our ancestors learned in their relationship with God and what we are experiencing and learning today. The whole Bible consists of stories about who we as humans really are in relationship with God and one another and ourselves. The capital-T Truth of these stories is not always comfortable for us to hear or to reckon with.
Take Jacob, for instance. Today’s lesson from Genesis reminds us of Jacob’s dream, of Jacob’s having an encounter with God worth commemorating. Any time we experience the presence of God in our sleeping or in our waking, it is indeed awesome! And Jacob received words of blessing and assurance from the LORD—what more could he ask for? He’s highly favored and not just by his mother. We may recall from last week’s lesson the descriptions of Esau and Jacob and how Jacob swapped his older brother’s birthright for a bowl of stew. But that’s not all. He's really been horrible to his brother, taking not only the birthright but also tricking their father into giving him the blessing meant for the older son. Jacob has gone away at his mother’s insistence because his brother Esau now wants to kill him. Fortunately, there’s more to their story, but for today, we recognize and remember that Jacob is not perfect and has an incredible experience of God. He continues in blessing with new vision into how God works—or might work—in his life and the world around him.
It’s generally easier to navigate life by setting up a dichotomy where good is on one side and bad on the other, and this is often how we categorize characters in our holy stories. Like the internal bias tests that give you a button for what is good and one for what is bad and then show you a picture that you’re supposed to click the corresponding button, consider how we might automatically classify Adam…Eve; Cain…Abel; Judas…Jesus; flesh…Spirit; heaven…hell…earth.… It’s easier to say something or someone is good or bad in relation to something else, but when that relationship is not so easily defined or when the classification does not seem to merit the reward for which it should be assigned, things get murky. If Jacob isn’t all good, then why does he get God’s blessing? If he has done wrong, shouldn’t he get bad consequences like the pox or poverty or something? While Jacob was away from home in the land of Gerar, he is said to have yielded a hundredfold, the upper end of a harvest. Last week in the parable of the sower, the hope is to have or be good soil in which the seed of the Word of God can land, germinate, take root, and flourish. Apparently even in and through Jacob, fruit blossomed.
This week, we get another parable about seeds and another explanation. Remember, our scriptures teach us about our relationship with God, each other, and ourselves. In this parable, good seeds of wheat have been sown, and then seeds of weeds are also sown when everyone is asleep. This is not good and needs to be addressed immediately, it would seem, but that’s not what happens. The weed that was planted in the parable is presumed to be a variety that looked similar to wheat, nearly indistinguishable from the good crop. To pull up the weed would have been disruptive to the crop, even if carefully discerning between the two. Better to let them grow and let those appointed by the master to be the judge, not those who are eager and willing to judge now.
But wouldn’t it be easier and more expeditious to remove what has obviously been erroneously planted or planted with ill intent? Why on earth would God let us carry on with bad influences all around us? Why would God let us be infiltrated with that which further binds us to the flesh, leads us toward death, and draws us further away from union with God?
Because God allows us to grow and love in our own time, in our own way. Wheat can choose to be content among the weeds or a weed to grow happily among the wheat. One of my house plants I set outside last summer and again this spring. When we moved, I brought it inside. It’s doing well and growing, and so is a sprig of poison ivy. I’ll find my latex dish gloves and carefully pull it out because the poison ivy obviously does not belong in my house nor in my peace lily. It’s easy to tell the plants apart.
It’s not always easy, however, to identify the wheat or the weed, the poison or the peace in our lives, be it in our environment or in our own heart and mind. Jesus goes right on out there in his explanation of the parable and names the sower of the weeds as the evil one, the devil. As much as we seem to avoid it in The Episcopal Church, our Holy Scripture does name Satan, the devil, the tempter, the Adversary. These are all names for that which does not work to promote love and unity with God, and as a church, we’re foolish not to acknowledge the work of the Adversary. It’s not a gift we want to open, a book we want to read, a parable we want to understand because, perhaps, it requires us to look a little too close at ourselves, our desires and intentions.
In our parish-wide book this summer, Steven Charleston uses the image of the Native American kiva. The ladder rungs take us step by step from the womb-like darkness of the room within the earth to emerge transformed into reality, bathed with light of clarity and more mature spirituality. The rungs along the way invite us to recognize and only move forward when we reckon with where we stand in our faith and blessing of spiritual encounters, what we hope for and how we unite in community around that hope, how we act based on what we’ve learned, and how we grow the light around us in truth, being honest in what we say and do and leading ultimately to renewal and transformation.
In Jacob’s dream, it was the angels that ascended and descended on the ladder between heaven and earth. On the kiva ladder, it is the faithful who venture to descend into prayer and emerge transformed by a simple practice–most kivas are sacred spaces for intentional prayers. We appeal to these images of the ladder and to the seeds in the field to illustrate what we have going on in our hearts, minds, and souls.
We are seeking for heaven to be on earth: we want sorrow and pain to be no more, for justice to roll down like a mighty river, for the lion to lay beside the lamb, and for peace to reign on earth as in heaven. We say and believe with the psalmist that darkness is not dark to God, that night is as bright as the day. Whatever our innermost thoughts, deepest desires, and greatest confession, God is already there, already knows. But it is still easier for us to separate and create distinctions between what we think is acceptable and what we “deserve,” easier for us to wear masks that guarantee approval than move through life in truth and authenticity. We have alongside us always the temptation to deny our belovedness and our blessedness. What is True is that the seeds are sown, and the wheat and the weeds are vying for attention within us, seeking the light of our acknowledgement, waiting to see what fruit we will see through to harvest.
The benefit of looking around with new eyes, of listening to the truth, is discovering that God is here, that God has been with us, whether we realized it or not. Likewise, even through the end of time, the light of Christ will be shining, bright as day, even in night, to welcome us all who, with God’s help and blessing, grow in the light, even with our imperfections and despite the weeds.
© 2023 The Rev. Sara Milford
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas