July 23, 2023
Pentecost 8
Lectionary 16
Epiphany, Winnipeg
Genesis 28:10-19a; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
A few months ago Val and I went away for some vacation and study time together, and after two and a half weeks I came home and Val stayed away for two more weeks. I arrived home in the second week of May and there’d been some rain and some warmth while we were gone so things were starting to come to life in the garden. Now in our home Val does most of the gardening, and I’m reluctant to do any real gardening without adult supervision. But when I came home from our holiday I saw how things were starting to grow, and I knew that the weeds would be coming, and I knew that if I just left it for two more weeks the weeds would be all over the place. So I decided to weed. On day two I pulled up a couple of green somethings and I looked at them lying there on the dirt and I looked at the things growing right next to them that looked an awful lot like them and I realized that I didn’t really know which was a weed and which was not.
So I stood up, and backed away slowly. And I thought that maybe it would be best if I just left it for now. And then I went for a walk and calmed down.
Jesus tells a story about the eager keen hard working workers who just want to please their master and pull up all the weeds to save the wheat. And their master says, “Oh no, don’t do that. You might just wreck it all.”
Calm down. You don’t need to pull up the weeds.
We heard a story about Jacob and a dream today. Now if you know the story of Jacob you’ll recall that he has a twin brother named Esau. Esau is he older of the two so he has the right to inherit everything once their parents have died. But two times Isaac and their mother trick their dad into turning over the inheritance to Jacob. Jacob takes everything. Esau loses everything, and so he vows to kill Jacob...to uproot that weed.
I can’t help but think that if someone was in charge of cleaning up the fields and getting rid of all the weeds, Jacob would be one of those weeds, and someone would pull him up by the roots. Who needs person like that, who steals what belongs to someone else and divides the whole family? Who needs a weed like that growing among the honest hard working and proper wheat?
But God doesn’t seem to be in the business of uprooting the weeds.
Instead, today we find Jacob running away from Esau; running for his life from that land that he had thought would be his home. At the end of a long day of travel when he’s been looking over his shoulder the whole time, Jacob finally stops and lays down, and falls asleep. While he sleeps he dreams that angels are coming and going all around him, and it seems like he’s in God’s own house so he names the place Bethel, which actually means “house of God.” In that dream in that house of God God speaks and says: “Jacob (you sneaky younger brother): I’ll be with you wherever you go, and I’ll bring you back to this land and I won’t leave you until I’ve done everything that I promised.” And Jacob will go from there and live his life, sometimes acting like wheat that will grow and nourish and feed, sometimes acting more like a weed that chokes what is good and steals the nutrients from the soil. But he’ll always travel with this promise: that he will go home one day...in God’s own good time. Whenever God’s time is right.
is he older of the two so he has the right to inherit everything once their parents have died. But two times Isaac and their mother trick their dad into turning over the inheritance to Jacob. Jacob takes everything. Esau loses everything, and so he vows to kill Jacob...to uproot that weed.
And so Jacob lives. And do you know what happens when he meets his angry brother again years later? It’s a tearful reunion, and nobody’s a weed any more. It’s just two brothers who discover that they are at peace.
Thankfully, no one pulled up the weed.
We heard from the apostle Paul today too, just like we did last week. Now it’s good to remember when we hear from Paul that there was a time when he wasn’t writing letters to encourage Christians in far away places. There was a time when he angrily and happily had Christians gathered up and chained up and and sent off to stand trial and often to be killed because they said they followed Jesus.
I can’t help but think that if we had been in charge of weeding the field and cleaning it up, we might have wanted to get rid of olden-days Paul and anyone like him. Paul would have hunted down people like us and had us locked up. He and his friends seemed to be opposed to everything we hold dear today about religious cooperation or pluralism and all those good things. If it was someone’s job to pull up the weeds for the good of the whole field, we might have wanted to uproot Paul.
But God doesn’t seem to be in the business of uprooting the weeds. Instead, Paul’s roots stay strong, and today Paul speaks aloud about a Spirit that we’re all given: a Spirit of life and peace that turns us toward the world to live in paths of life and peace. Not a spirit of fear but a spirit of belonging and a spirit of being at home in God’s presence and at homewith each other. And that Spirit assures us that we are loved without end, and that Spirit fills us with hope that someday our own dying bodies will be healed, and our own it-seems-to-be-dying creation will be healed too. Until that time comes, we wait, and all creation waits, for that promise of God to come true. Even creation – the land that burns up and the land that floods; the bees and the monarchs who they say can’t find enough pollen; the squirrels and bunnies who are doing quite well, thank you very much; the air filled with smoke and the air fresh and clean, even all of creation waits eagerly with all of us for that time when it will all be healed.
Enthusiastic and devout farmhands might have uprooted Jacob and his mom Rebekah, and pulled up Paul by the roots and thrown them all into the fire. And we would never have heard from them and their lives about promises and healing and waiting in hope.
Thankfully, in the realm of heaven all of the uprooting and weeding and sorting the bad ones from the good ones is put on hold. It’s not our job. We’re set free from that. The farmer who oversees the whole operation has all the time in the world to work with the wheat and the weeds that we are. And maybe there’s something about the mystery of faith that we proclaim - “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again” - that remakes the field and the world into a place where it’s not wheat and weeds but just a creation that is loved and made new. Sorting weeds from wheat will all get figured out in God’s right time. Maybe tomorrow, or next week, or in a hundred and seven years or...never? Who knows?
And we just live our days in the field that Jesus calls the world. We tend the soil. We plant seeds of justice or we water it all with peace, we dig in some compost that smells richly of laughter and parties, and we plant fruit trees that look and taste suspiciously like love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness. We work the soil with free bikes for neighbourhood kids, with coffee and whatever goodies have shown up here after church, with spaghetti for the Urban and muffins for a neighbourhood school. We dig around in the earth so that simple acts of care and support for one another can spread their roots and grow more freely. And we act like soil ourselves, and try to be open to the gifts that our neighbours around us might have that make the field richer with their own wisdom and ways and joys and hopes and struggles and lives. And as we tend the soil together we trust the God who is giving life to it all. And yes, we wait. In hope.
We live our lives and do what we need to do and we wait with Jacob - whose name gets changed to Israel along the way – we wait with Jacob and Esau and Rebekah and Isaac and all of those people of God who still wait for their home to live in peace and for their neighbours to live in peace. We wait with Paul and Junia and Phoebe and Timothy and all those other people in churches in places like Rome back then and all over the place right now....Doing what we need to do, and waiting. We wait with the whole creation, with creation that nurtures us and gives us a home and that we are called to care for and to honour...we wait with the whole creation for that time when God’s healing work will be done...in God’s good time. AMEN.