This sermon is from the 7th Sunday after Pentecost, from Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.
‘Have you understood all these things?” Jesus asks his
disciples. Too overwhelmed to process any more parables they answered simply,
“Yes.” But I doubt they understood any of these five parables with much depth.
We all know the Sunday School version of the Mustard seed.
This idea that there is something small, it is the smallest of all seeds. And
when it grows up it becomes a shrub and then a tree, and it’s this message that
big things come in small packages and how small things can yield to become big
things.
That’s the Sunday school answer. But let’s push it a little
bit.
Imagine that you’re in High School and you’re going to write
a paper on it. And you do a little bit of research- not a lot- to get by. Is
the mustard seed the smallest of all seeds? No. Does it grow up to be a tree?
Never! A shrub never grows into a tree. Never.
And then you get to college and your dust off that old paper
and you’re going to write it again. And you dig a little bit deeper and you
realize that there are all of these laws. There are 613 laws in the Torah- the
law- which are the first five books of the Old Testament. And those laws
suggest that mustard is actually a weed not a plant. Which means that you would
never ever plant it in a field because it is considered unclean. The laws of
Leviticus 19:19 say that you would never plant more than one crop in your field
at a time, and you would never plant a weed as your one crop. So why- oh why-
would Jesus tell his disciples that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a weed?
In your college research you go to the next parable. And
hear a story about a woman who takes yeast that when added to three measures of
flour, and makes leaven, which makes bread.
But you dig deeper and you realize that that yeast is really
mold. And it too is ritually unclean. It is something that you would stay away
from in the Hebrew world because it would make you unclean. And if you touched
it you would not be able to do anything for the whole rest of the day until
sundown because you were unclean.
Why- oh why-would Jesus of Nazareth speak about the kingdom
of heaven like it was weeds and mold?
And then you would go to seminary. And you would take that
same paper that you wrote in college and now you can dig even deeper. Now you
know Greek, now you know biblical criticism, and you can really study it.
And you realize that Jesus isn’t really just talking about
weeds and mold. He’s talking about subverting the power structures that
be. He’s talking about looking at those
613 laws and say, ‘something has gone wrong here’ See the Hebrew people started
these laws for good reason- they were all very practical when you kill a calf
you needed to eat the meat within three days. Why? Because if you didn’t, you
would get sick. If you’re plowing a field, you can sow crops for six years but
on the seventh year you need to let it lay fallow- why? Because it cannot yield
year after year. These are the laws- these are the things that made sense to
them. If you have two different types of clothing don’t sew them together into
one garment because it will pull apart. If you have mold on the side of your
house you need to clean it for seven days- all of these were practical rules to
live by. The problem arose when they made these laws. And once they made them
laws, they became Judge, jury and executioner over anyone who broke them.
Insert into that a revolutionary, a counter-cultural crazy rabbi who breaks
every one of these laws- virtually. Who heals people on the Sabbath, who tells
parables about how a man is lying in a ditch and two priests pass by on the
other side and one man defiles himself to help him. This rabbi heals a woman
who has been bleeding which was definitely unclean, a man who goes around
eating with tax-collectors and sinners; a man who is so counter-cultural that
everything he says makes them want to kill him.
My wife Ashley and I were working in our yard yesterday to
sort of try to keep up with the neighbors just a little bit. And we were
working to pull weeds and she asked me to pull up a weed near me. I looked
around but didn’t see one. “I don’t see it” I said. She told me to look again
and finally came over and pulled on one of the sprouts of the weed and said,
“this, this is the weed” I said, “you mean this huge plant here?” “Yes,” she
said, “that’s a weed.” To which I said, “who gets to decide what is a weed and
what is a plant?” So I looked it up, and apparently there is no difference. A
weed is simply an unwanted plant. In fact, one person’s weed could be another
person’s plant. We are arbitrators over
what makes a plant and what makes a weed. We judge for ourselves what is clean
and good and what is unclean and bad. And when we give ourselves too much
authority to decide not just about plants and things, but when some people are
clean and some people are unclean, we go against the kingdom of God. That is
what Jesus is talking about when he compares the kingdom of heaven to weeds and
mold.
We have lived in our house for a little over a year now, and
before we moved in, we noticed that the house had beautiful- looking ivy
growing up the side of it. Now we realize that we kind of hate ivy. Because
every time we met a neighbor at an adjoining yard they would tell us that Mrs.
Barbara who had the house before us planted that ivy and that it had spread to
their yard. And every time we met someone we were the people in the house that
brought ivy to the neighborhood. And we thought this ivy that looks beautiful
doesn’t just stay there. Ivy grows everywhere and you can’t fight it. One day I
was out in the back yard, cursing under my breath, hacking at the ivy with my
axe for chopping firewood, and my neighbor came out and said to me, “you
fighting that ivy?” “Yeah” I said. “He said you want to know how to beat the
ivy? “Yes, please, I asked.” “You move” he said.
You know the thing about weeds is, even when you try to keep
them down, they come back. And that’s a good lesson for us to hear that we are
simply not in control of our lives. And the sooner we realize that, the sooner
we embrace the fact that we are not in control of our own garden of our lives,
the better and happier we will be. As a parent I find myself constantly trying
to “stay on top of things” whatever that means. Trying to make sure that my
kids are perfect, that everything goes right, that they are not lacking in any
school subject, that they are riding their bike on time, that they never wear
the same socks two days in a row, that they go to bed on time, get up early,
have brain food and vitamins, and that everything would be perfect. But by the
time our third child came along we realized that this was not a good plan for
success. So we have decided to admit that we are not always in control and we
could give our lives up to God. And it is so much better. Rather than trying to
control all the weeds in the garden why don’t we spend time enjoying the fruits
that we have? Rather than trying to be in control of everything why don’t we
let go and let God?
The reading from Romans 8 flows perfectly from the Gospel.
Paul reminds us that we are convinced that neither death nor life, nor angles
nor rulers, no height nor depth, nor things present nor things to come- NOTHING
can ever separate us from the love of God. You want to know why the kingdom of
God is like weeds? It’s because nothing stops it, nothing gets in the way of
it, and nobody else can tell God how to rule God’s garden.
We are not in control. We have not been tasked with judging
who is in and who is out. Paul continues, “It is God who Justifies. Who is to
condemn?” It is not our job to judge
others, period.
The power afforded those who were judging who was clean and
who was unclean came to a head when this man who was walking around talking
against their laws- and they looked at him and it didn’t take long for them to
say, ‘that’s a weed and he needs to be plucked up.’ So they took him, put him
on a cross, and killed him.
But
three days later,
that ‘weed’ came back. Amen.
