Pastor Keith Coker

Central Presbyterian Church, Russellville, Arkansas

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Let us start with a word of prayer. Blessed Lord who caused all scripture to be written for our learning, grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that we may then respond to your gracious promises with faithful and obedient lives. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.

Today’s scripture is from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus is teaching to a large crowd on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in northern Palestine. He is using parables. Now before today’s selection, (you can read the whole section), we’ve heard the other Parable of the Sower, the one you’ve probably gotten familiar with, about seeds going here and seeds going there, and birds coming to eat seeds, and some growing and some not. And we have, in between the selections, today, the Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Parable of the Leaven.

So we are in a large section of parables here in Matthew. Now here, after teaching with the crowd, first on the shore and then from a boat (picture a double length party barge) he pauses and talks to the disciples on the boat for a little while, in between our scriptures today; and then goes into the house and we have the explanation of today’s parable. It is during this time that he tells the second Parable of the Sower, also known as The Wheat and Tares, or Wheat and Weeds, tares being the local word for the weeds.

If Jesus were teaching on earth today, here in America, what would his teaching sound like? Would it go something like, “There was this guy who had two sons”…or, “There was this little old lady who had ten dimes”…or maybe, “There was a man who owned a large farm” (of course around here it would be a large chicken farm)…or, “There was a man who sold cars”…or perhaps, “There was this woman who worked at Walmart”. I don’t know what his parables would be like today, but I’m pretty sure it would not start out with, “This guy walked into a bar.” But, you never know; it might depend on the crowd. He might use jokes or comedy. He probably would use whatever worked best for the crowd he was in front of at the time. At the time and place where he was, it was parables.

Now there have been several attempts to translate the Bible into more modern, more conversational language. But sometimes that ends up like when a director tries to update Shakespeare or set it in a different time and place. Sometimes it works, and sometimes if really, really doesn’t work. So I don’t think the parable of the lost chicken, for instance would have the same impact as that of the lost sheep. Parables are a wonderful way to make a point. It’s hard to imagine Jesus teaching then or now without them. But, in the sentence before today’s scripture, the disciples have asked him, “Why do you teach in parables?” And Jesus tries to tell them that parables are a way of teaching those who want to hear, because those who want to hear will understand; and those who have not really opened their ears or their minds will not learn at all.

Now a professor, a teacher of preachers, named Thomas Long, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Ferncliff a few years ago, said that Matthew places the parables all together in his gospel to emphasize this teaching to the disciples, as opposed to the teaching of the crowd. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches directly to a large crowd, saying simple things like, “Blessed are the peacemakers”, very straightforward teaching, very easy to digest and learn. But then as he teaches more and more to the disciples, he switches into more of a parable mode. At this point in Matthew where we are today, and you can look back at verses 10 through 17, there are some of the crowd who have stopped listening to Jesus’ words, because he’s not telling them what they want to hear. He’s presented the coming of the Kingdom of God, but not in the way they expect, not in the way they want, so they close their ears and they no longer listen.

Now with this parable, they’ve stopped listening, and as he goes more and more into parables, they don’t listen because to people who don’t want to hear these things, they are just word puzzles. If you want to hear them, they make sense to you. This parable, agricultural, was something most of the crowd could relate to. Let’s make an attempt to bring it up to date. There was a man who planted a lawn and he used good sod; but his rival neighbor who was always envious of his lawn, snuck in and put some wildflower and weed seeds into. But, it was a special kind of weed. It looked just like St. Augustine until it got six inches high and then it spread out like crabgrass. And his lawn man, his assistant, said, “Shall we root up all of the weed?” The man says, “No, it will also destroy all of the lawn. We’ll let them grow until we can mow it all to the same height.” Did that work? No, don’t tell me; I don’t want to know, because I don’t think it did. It just doesn’t have the same punch.

Now this second sower parable seems like a retelling of the first sower parable. And it may be a different telling of a very short parable that’s in this same position in Mark. So, there’s a lot of debate about this parable. Is it really original, or did Matthew, or the early Church kind of dress it up a little bit—take the one from Mark, which is probably accurate and probably original and reliable, and did they kind of dress this one up for their own message? Well, we’ll leave that debate to the academics. We’ll just take it as it is at the moment. It is still a very good and interesting parable. Now the emphasis in this parable seems to be on the farmer, and his patience about letting the wheat and the weeds grow together, undisturbed, but in the interpretation, it seems like the emphasis is more on the decision of which is which and what happens to them, the one going to the barn, and the other to the furnace.

As usual, it is our friend William Barkley who comes up with a much better explanation of what’s going on. Tares, or the weeds, are a plant known as Lolium Temulentum or Bearded Darnell. In the early stages the tares so closely resemble the wheat that it’s impossible to tell one from the other. You don’t know what you’ve got until it gets bigger. When both headed out, it’s easy to tell them apart, but by that time their roots are so entangled that you could not pull the weeds out without tearing out the wheat. The wheat and the tares could not be safely separated while they were growing. They had to be separated when they were ready for harvesting. The grain of the Bearded Darnell is slightly poisonous, it has a bad taste, it can cause dizziness and sickness, and have a slightly narcotic effect; and even a small amount would ruin the wheat. And in the end, it had to be separated by hand; women had to be hired to pick the bad grain out of the good before it could go to the mill. As a rule, the separating was done after threshing. They spread it out on a large tray and picked it out; they could do that because the Darnell, the tares, while the same size and shape as the weeds, was a different color; it was a slight gray. This sounds to me like an awfully expensive way to sort your grain.

So in the early stages, you can’t tell it apart. In later stages you can, but it had to be laboriously and probably expensively pulled out. If it was not pulled out, you’d ruin your wheat and your flour. And, as part of this picture we have a man who deliberately goes into someone else’s field and sows bad seed. And, that’s not just imagination, that was a written crime in Roman law. There was a specific written crime for putting bad seed in somebody else’s field. Even in India today, because of the problems it can cause, one of the worst threats a neighbor can make is to say, “I will sow bad seed in your field.”

So we have this series of pictures that all the people listening would be familiar with. We have this grain, we have the weeds, which we know that they knew were going to be a problem to get rid of; and we have the idea of someone sowing the bad seed, something, I’m sure, they were certainly familiar with. And in searching for meaning in this passage, we can compare it easily to Jesus’ teaching and the teachings of the Church, both then and now. Jesus was the sower, sowing the good word to the Kingdom, and the enemy, the evil in this world, was following behind scattering the weed seed among the good. The good and the bad then grow together until they are separated at the harvest, when the good wheat is gathered up in the barn, and the bad tares are cast into the furnace.

Now, another little interesting point is that throwing the weeds into the furnace was not the usual practice. That’s a change, a little twist, and maybe what the farmer was doing there was taking the bad weeds and putting them to good use by using them for heat. There are always little nuances, everywhere in a parable. I wonder if you could make ethanol with them now?

We too are sowers, the Church is a sower. We sow what we hope are good seeds. Perhaps there are bad seeds following behind. We may not know the outcome of the growth of these seeds until we get to harvest, or maybe not at all. Now, if you are anything like me, when you read a parable, you think to yourself, “Who am I in the parable? Am I the mustard seed? Am I the leaven? Which servant?” Sadly, it always turns out that I’m not the character I want to be. I’m never the right coin or the right sheep or the right pearl; and in the parable of the tares, we always want to be the wheat.

But who are we really! Well, when we’re evangelizing as part of the Church by using whatever means, we’re the sower. We sow when we tell of the Good News, we sow when we show others the Good News, we sow when we live the Good News—when we are being the Christians we are meant to be—then we are the wheat. That includes evangelism, but also whenever we give of ourselves and expect nothing in return, whenever we pay it forward, whenever we empty ourselves and allow Christ to live through us and our actions, then we are the wheat. But when we are not at our best, when we are selfish or petty or mean, or just indifferent, then we are the weeds. When we care more about protecting the Church and less about keeping it honest, we’re weeds. When we judge others harshly, but let ourselves off lightly, we are weeds. When we gather up for ourselves treasures on earth instead of treasures in heaven, then we are weeds. You see, it’s even worse for us to be weeds than for non Christians, because, we, like the tares; cannot be distinguished from the true wheat as we make ourselves up to look like wheat. The one thing we know we are not, in this parable, is the farmer. We don’t decide what is reaped because it is not our field. We sow for the farmer, for God, for we are at best, the servant, sowing in the Master’s field. So aside from striving to be wheat, and not tares or weeds sown in the garden, how should this direct our lives?

It’s all about distinguishing between wheat and weeds, especially this part of it, but we have to know we can’t tell the wheat from the weeds; we’re not capable of doing it. We can’t even tell the wheat from the weeds in this room! And we surely cannot tell the weeds from the wheat out in the streets.

What then should we do about discipline in our own ranks? There are times when that is necessary, but we should always err on the side of mercy and toward those who are in the doc. We must forgive when forgiveness is sought. We must also act with grace and mercy when we are in the street and the community. If we take seriously, the idea that we are all sinners, sinners under grace nevertheless, we must continually remind ourselves when we cut ourselves slack because of our mistakes, it’s that same slack that we have to cut to those people who have wronged us, and especially those who are outside the walls of the Church. We must never build a fence around a church that doesn’t have a gate. We must always have open gates and open doors, and as the ads for some of our brethren say, open arms. And we must be careful when we hold outsiders to harsher standards than those to which we hold ourselves.

Us and them—that’s a hard line for us to draw. But us and them and wheat and weeds, and logs and motes, sheep and goats, these are the stuff of parables; and they are the stuff of parables because they are the stuff of life. We will fail in our mission if we start believing that we, whatever we define “we” as, are wheat; and they, whatever we define “they” as, are weeds. We have to let the wheat and the weeds grow together because we can’t tell them apart. It will be up to others to sort the grain. If we can’t tell the difference between wheat and weeds in others, and we can’t tell the difference between wheat and weeds in ourselves, do we then live in fear of the oven? No! We live in the hope of the barn.

And “sow” it goes. Go now into the world, being the sower and being the wheat, even if that means going against the “grain”. Amen.

Join with me now in saying a portion of those things we believe, using the words of the Apostle’s Creed:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,

and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.

He descended into Hell. The third day He rose again from the dead

He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty,

from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen