Standing in His Presence

When a firefighter prepares to enter a burning building, they put on Heavy bulky suits, a mask, an air tank, and cover every exposed part of their body.  This special equipment allows them to work in an environment that contains toxic gases from the items that are burning.  In short, it allows them to work in an environment that is hostile to human life.  As they proceed through the fire searching through the smoke for survivors, the soot and toxic chemicals in the smoke collect on their equipment and begin to accumulate.  When the fire is out and everyone returns to the fire station, the standard operating procedures call for cleaning all of the equipment to remove the soot and toxic chemicals from all of the equipment that was used, including the firefighter protective clothing.  The reason for cleaning the protective clothing is that long term exposure to these smoky deposits has been shown to cause long term lung disease.  You see even when they are in an environment that is not hostile to life, they are still effected in a bad way by the chemicals that accumulated on their clothing while they were in the hostile environment.

The same is true for Christians living in a world where both good and bad exist.   Even for those who start every day by putting on the full Armor of God as we are told in Ephesians 6:13 have the effects of living in a sinful world deposited on them every day as they live and work in that world.  Like the firefighter, these deposits cause some long term spiritual decay when left unchecked.   Just take a look at US history over time and you will clearly see it.  Churches that slowly change their social policies little by little and then next thing you know they are accepting things that were once deadly sins.  In the same way the firefighter much clean their protective clothing, we too must clean our spirituality each and every night.  This is done through prayer.  We pray to God every day to remove from us the effects of the world that we were exposed to that day.
So why not just ask God to remove the evil from the world?  That answer is in Matthew Chapter 13.

Jesus uses the parable of the wheat and the weeds to demonstrate that evil is Here to stay long term in the world.  The Christian must prepare to use patience to tolerate the life in an evil world, knowing that in the end, God promises to sort out the details and make sure everyone gets their just reward.  You don’t have to look very far to see that evil certainly exists and sometimes seems to actually get the upper hand.  When we see things like the London subway bombings, Sept. 11, or a murder, we quickly form an opinion and it usually includes words like hang them or execute them.  But lets take a minute to look at what Jesus tells us in Matthew chapter 13 regarding our reaction to these events.

Any gardener or farmer will quickly tell you that the decision to leave the weeds along with the wheat is certainly not the way we humans would choose to deal with this.  After all, weeds take away nutrients from the wheat and they also block sunlight.  Both of which will have an effect on the growth of the wheat.  However Jesus points out that by killing the weeds, we will also kill some of the wheat.  Weeds that grow alongside of the wheat looks very much like the wheat.  Also as they both germinate in the ground and begin to grow, the root systems intertwine with each other.  In this case, there really is no way to pull up the weeds, without pulling up some of the wheat also.  Instead in this case, the logical solution is to wait until harvest time and to lay them all out together and at this stage of growth, the weeds will be a different color than the wheat and easily spotted and separated.   We look around and we see lots of weeds growing today.  When we see the pain and suffering that the evil in the world has caused, it is only natural for us to want the evil removed, sometimes in a very vindictive way.  We quickly call for an execution to rid the world of evil, bomb them into oblivion.   Or perhaps we are more peaceful in our reaction to the evil.  Perhaps we begin to question God.  How can you let this happen?  Why don’t you do something to stop it?  Are you even paying attention to us?

In the parable, Jesus doesn’t deny that evil exists in the world.  Jesus tells us that He is fully aware of the evil in our world and He is also fully aware of where it came from.  For us it seems that the world is a terribly broken place, being Held hostage by weeds.  We think of the world as a piece of land that was intended to be a wheat field that has been overrun by weeds.  In some cases, it is hard to find any wheat in all of the weeds.

So what is Jesus’ response to all of this?  What does He tell us, the workers of the field, to do?  Like the landowner in the parable, He tells us that we should not try to rid the world of evil but rather allow the good people and the evil people to grow together.  Now that causes us some trouble.  Obviously Jesus does not understand.  These people are evil and they cause pain.  They need to be removed for the good of all.      Doesn’t He see this?

Let them grow together.  What a strange way to run a farm, or is it?  What exactly does He mean by this?  When I looked up the word let in the dictionary I was rather surprised by how many meanings it had.  Consider the word in the forms of let down, let on, let out, let up, let alone, let go, let off, let one’s hair down, let someone have it, let someone in on, and let up on.  This is certainly a lot of possibilities.   According to author Robert Farrar, “let both of them grow together until the harvest,” carries in the original language a sense of forgiveness toward the malicious enemy.  Now that is starting to sound a lot like the Lord’s Prayer, forgive us or trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

If this is the case, then Jesus is calling us into a form of discipleship that is much more costly than we had first anticipated.  The evil that is done in the world is not to be answered by plucking them from the world like a weed, but rather with forgiveness and patience, patience to wait for the final judgment of God.  For Jesus tells us that in the final days, the weeds will be separated from the wheat and burned in the eternal fire.

God exercised patience and forgiveness giving all of the weeds an opportunity to change and become wheat before the final judgment day.  Jesus tells us here that we too should take the same approach to dealing with the weeds of life.  Look around and you will clearly see that this is God’s approach to dealing with weeds in our world today.

Even look at ourselves, we can go from being a weed one day to being wheat the next.  It is even very easy to return to being a week with no effort at all.  When commenting about this parable, St. Augustine said, “There is this difference between people and real grain and real weeds, for what was grain in the field is grain and what were weeds are weeds. But in the Lord’s field, which is the church, at times what was grain turns into weeds and at times what were weeds turns into grain; and no one knows what they will be tomorrow.”  God has given us all free will to make a decision regarding our own life, a decision to be wheat or weeds.  We are even free to do wrong to the point of inflicting pain and suffering on others. Much to our disappointment, God does not pluck these people from the world for their evil deeds.  Instead God practices forgiveness and love.  We find this to be a very strange way to run a farm, but a review of history shows that it is definitely the way God works.

Sometimes we read through the Old Testament and see times when people lived a righteous life and God rewarded them.  Those same people then turned away from God and we read about how their good life turned around quickly.  After reading these Old Testament stories, we expect God to deal with people that way in our lives.  When God does not punish them, we begin to question things.  But a review of the New Testament will reveal that Jesus never even suggests that we will be punished in this life for our evil deeds.  He makes it a point to preach about forgiveness and patience.  This is mostly done through parables but it is certainly not restricted to parables.  When he is nailed to the cross, He forgives them.  When He rises from the dead, He forgives those apostles who skipped out on him when he needed them most.  And then He does the most interesting thing.  He sets those who abandoned Him in the business of spreading His love and forgiveness to a broken world, to all sinners, to everyone.

In the end times, when the harvest is gathered before the Lord, the weeds will clearly be seen for what they are and thrown into the fire.  Yes, God does have mercy but God is also just.  God welcomes with open arms all who want His forgiveness, but we must first ask for it.  There are so many of us who will want to keep that distance from God and will sadly never have the opportunity for his forgiveness and love.  This is something better than justice, this is divine forgiveness, the divine willingness to allow the wheat and the weeds to grow together because it is impossible to separate them without killing some of the wheat.  This is the recognition that revenge creates more problems that it solves. So we look at this and we clearly see that forgiveness and love are God’s way of dealing with a broken world.  This still makes us uncomfortable but this love and forgiveness not one of us stands a chance of making it to Heaven.

We must be careful that our preoccupation with the weeds of life does not get in our way of understanding the end of this message, that is how the harvest happens.  An abundant harvest is brought before the Lord, large enough to cause the landowner (God) and the farm hands (the angels) to rejoice together.  The weeds in the field have no power to prevent this bountiful harvest in the end.   The seed is good and it will bear wheat through all adversity that is presented by the weeds.  We find that this parable ends in triumph, good over evil, through a bountiful harvest.

But make no mistake, evil is real just not ultimate.

In the past century, the most graphic example of a failed attempt to eradicate weeds from the human garden is the Holocaust — Hitler’s massive program to eliminate the Jews, the insane, criminals, and other people deemed “misfits.”  His idea — that society would be greatly improved it we could get rid of those who cause problems and drag us down — is hardly novel.  Hitler was different from many of us only in his willingness to commit monstrous evils in pursuit of his goal.  In truth, he was not even novel in that way.  The phrase, “ethnic cleansing,” has been used to describe any number of Holocaust-like genocides in the past century.

There has never been a shortage of Hitler-like tyrants.  Hitler simply wielded his sword with more force and skill than most.

In the Parable of the Weeds, Jesus predicted the problem with Hitler’s program.  When Hitler tried to weed Germany’s garden, he yanked more wheat than weeds — destroyed more good than bad.  In the end, he committed suicide to avoid judgment for his evil deeds — and he forced Germany to struggle until it, too, collapsed in ruins around him.

At the end, the allies could have responded in a Hitler-like way — executing ferocious judgment on the German people for the millions that Hitler had killed.  Instead, they responded with restraint, bringing to justice only a few leaders who were clearly responsible for Germany’s evil deeds.  The Marshall Plan sought to rebuild West Germany, and provided enormous resources to help America’s fallen enemy.  As a result, Germany and its former enemies became allies in the efforts to maintain peace in a world threatened by the Soviet Union and others.

Evil never gets that last word.  Greater by far are those who shine in their Father’s kingdom, those who mirror the bright light of divine compassion.

Wheat and weeds, who’s one and who’s another? We all know that it is impossible to know for sure which is which but St. Augustine reminds us that no one knows today which they will be tomorrow.

Filed under: Past Sermons