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“Are you sure I shouldn’t just get rid of these weeds?”

The Reverend Elizabeth C. Knowlton
Proper 11 A
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
Delivered at St. Benedict’s Episcopal Church
July 20, 2008

I’ll never forget my first meeting with my supervisor at Northside Hospital.  I had arrived for my summer of chaplaincy work and was eagerly awaiting my floor assignment.  These assignments were anything but random.  My supervisor said, “I have decided to assign you to the cardiac floor.  After reading your file, it seems to me that it might be helpful for you to be with Type A people like yourself, who suddenly find themselves side-lined.” 

It was a masterful assignment in many ways.  I could indeed relate to the frustration of the patients.  As they struggled with things they could not do, I struggled with not being able to fix it for them. When they realized that major life changes were needed for a long and healthy life, I struggled with the fact that my background as a public policy analyst did not yield a translatable spreadsheet to offer. 

Often it was not the actual physical pain of their conditions that was the most challenging.  It was the loss of control that accompanied hospitalization.  They did not know when the doctor would come to see them.  They would not have the final word about when they would get to go home.  They had to lie in bed for hours at a time without anything to “do.”  Their notions about productivity and efficiency had been turned on their heads and often this was a time of immense vulnerability.   Decisions they had made about career were put into a different light as they realized anew the importance of their family relationships. 

It was certainly a time of vulnerability for those of us trying to be chaplains as well. I found myself encountering people with the primary purpose of being present with them.  I had to learn that sometimes saying nothing was the greatest gift I could give to someone.  While there were things to “do” there were often no easy fixes.  The fixes were handled by the medical staff.  The chaplains were called into the more ambiguous spaces.  Places of waiting rather than action.

It seems that we are invited into similar space in the Gospel of Matthew today.  We hear another parable of sowing.  But rather than worrying about whether we’re seeds on the rock or in the rich soil, we have a very different image this morning.  Here we are invited into a situation where the good seeds have already been abundantly planted.  But during the night things have changed.  We have awoken to find ourselves in the midst of wheat and weeds.  It is not the field we were expecting, and frankly we don’t like it.

We naturally relate to the workers whose first reaction is to get to the business of weeding.  There is a problem, it threatens the harvest, and we’d better set ourselves to solving it.  Buy the Round-up, don the gloves, and let’s go.

There is a wonderful tangibility to seeing the task before us and doing what is necessary to move it along.  We do it in our families, our vocations, and in our communities.  We buy self-help books that help us identify the weeds and then follow the steps to rout them from our spiritual gardens.  When we go about the task of creating communities, it is tempting to try and recruit only the wheat and banish the weeds to the outside world, or at least other denominations.  Don’t we want the healthiest, weed free communities we can find?  Isn’t the church called to be the primary botanists?  Giving us the field book so we can tell if we are surrounded by poison ivy?  If we are meant to be a witness to the world, we should be the model community.  The one that is able to manifest a weed free harvest.

We long for the same thing in our personal lives.  Shouldn’t the goal of our spiritual development be to identify the things that are choking our growth and yank them out? If we find people who challenge us, aren’t they weeds that we’d be much better without?  Shouldn’t we take the most up to date agricultural, psychological, business, and educational knowledge and use it to free the world of all pesky weeds?

Except, if we are trying to follow today’s gospel, we have to set that aside.  We are cautioned that to constantly find ourselves in the role of chief weeder is to ever so gradually shift ourselves into the role of God.  It is God who will separate the wheat from the chaff.  And, if all we can do is direct our energy to banishing the weeds, we’re going to uproot a lot of the harvest in the process.  We will insert our wisdom for the wisdom of God and we are not likely to not see the field with the same eyes.

Before our group from the Cathedral left for Tanzania, we were told over and over again that the primary purpose of the visit was to develop relationships. That we were going to meet our fellow Anglicans in the Diocese and worship with them and that we should not feel the need to make quick or hasty decisions about what our long term partnership should look like.  And before we went, I think we thought that was a wonderful goal.  I think each person on the trip was open to that.  But deep down, there was a sense that this was not just about that.  I mean to travel all the way over there and just sit and have chai with them?  That is a nice beginning, but surely we were there to serve.  We needed to share anything we could that might lead to a better life for the people there.  We needed to complete our needs assessment so we could come back to the Cathedral and the Diocese and let everyone know just what gardening tools would be the most helpful to get rid of their weeds.

But the problem with assuming that the relationship building is not an end in itself is the subtle temptation to drift into a “fixing mode.”  During our week there as we heard need after need after need, each of us would get hooked.  We’d start talking about how to get more books to one school, what medical contacts could we make for a particular hospital, and how to collect more vestments for their clergy.  The challenge however was of course, no matter how many weeds we saw, there were more.  There was no way our one, small group, could identify all the weeds.  Frankly, there were some things we saw as weeds that in all reality were probably wheat.  Like the plants from the parable growing together with one another, telling the weeds from the wheat is not all that easy.  It is also easy to fall in to the trap of thinking that our partners in Tanzania somehow don’t know which weeds are causing the most problems.

And lest we forget, the parable does not tell us to go out and start pulling.  In fact it cautions us to do exactly the opposite.  When the workers offer to go and remove the weeds they are told, “No, in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.  Let them grow together until the harvest.”
In some ways this is a much more difficult thing to do.  We have to live with the discomfort that comes from the scratchy proximity of our own weaknesses.  Rather than getting rid of them, we have to learn to continue to grow when they are all together too evident.  We have to be open to the fact that someone we experience as a weed, might be so entwined with us that we actually need them for the harvest.  To remove them is to actually put ourselves and our community at risk.

One of the most powerful moments for me on the trip was towards the end during the Bishop’s roundtable discussion.  He said, very kindly, “It is important for me to say that I am not anyone’s project.  We are here to work together to do God’s mission.”  It was a good reminder of who the gardener is.  It is God.  It is not to say that we should not tend the soil.  There are indeed deep commitments that we make as Christians that need to be carried out.  But while we are always striving to be better, we need to be a little cautious about our own wisdom.  We may not know which parts of us are the weeds and which are the wheat.  Things we see as weakness to be cut out, may in fact be what God sees as most necessary for the harvest. 

If you look at the many people called forth to serve in scripture, they are not a group of perfect people.  They are called to serve before they have it all together. God does not even demand that they achieve perfection after they are called.  Nor does God demand that of us.  What is demanded is our trust and faithfulness.  We are asked to continue to grow where we are planted and to not lose hope.  We are asked to tolerate the difficulty of life among the weeds and wheat.  The parable in its judgment is not meant to scare us, but to invite us to deeper hope.  All those weeds in the world and in ourselves are not the final word.  They will indeed be burned away so that we can shine like the sun.

Amen

Comments? Contact Beth Knowlton at: BKnowlton@stphilipscathedral.org

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