Sermon Tone Analysis

| *It Just Doesn't Work That Way* \\ Sermon by Johnny Dean | \\ Pentecost 9 - Matthew 13 : 24-30 (36-43) |

 

| I have to admit that I didn’t exactly look forward with eager anticipation to the prospect of planting a garden this year.

It’s the first garden we’ve planted in several years, and my track record with gardens is not what anyone would rate as successful.

Oh, I can usually manage to grow tomatoes and okra, the low maintenance vegetables.

You just dig some holes, plant the seed or set out the young plants, pour a little Miracle Grow around them, and wait for them to grow.

It you didn’t have the foresight to put tomato cages around the plants when you set them out, sooner or later you’ll have to figure out some way to keep the tomatoes off the ground.

That usually means driving stakes into the ground beside the plant and tying the plant to the stakes.

Other than that, there’s not a lot of work involved, unless you just don’t like for grass to grow between the tomato plants.

You just have to wait until the tomatoes are ripe enough to pick and harvest them.

Not so with the other stuff.

\\ \\ Like peas, for example.

You have to keep the weeds from growing with your pea vines or the weeds will choke the pea vines until they die.

But what if the weed looks a little bit like the pea vine?

Now, those of you who are experienced gardeners probably have no trouble at all differentiating between a pea vine and a morning glory.

But for the casual gardener, especially one who is "not from around here" and therefore not accustomed to finding morning glories growing wild everywhere, as if someone sneaked in and planted them when you weren’t looking, it can be a problem.

Did you know that people back in West Tennessee actually TRY to get morning glories to grow?

You consider morning glories weeds.

Back home in Tennessee people call them flowers!

\\ \\ Something like that is at work in the parable Jesus tells his followers in our gospel text for today.

"There was this farmer," Jesus says, "who sowed good seed in his field.

Later that day, after darkness had fallen and everyone was asleep, one of the farmer’s enemies came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.

When the plants grew large enough to begin producing grain, the field hands spotted the weeds growing with the wheat.

And they went to the farmer and said, ‘What’s up with the weeds?

We thought you were just growing wheat here.’

The farmer replied, ‘Do you think I’m foolish enough to PLANT weeds in my wheat field?

Obviously someone planted these weeds here to ruin my crop, probably at night when everyone was asleep.’

‘So what do you want us to do about it?’

asked the field hands.

‘Should we pull up all the weeds?’ ‘No, no, we don’t want to do that,’ said the farmer.

‘The roots of the weeds are probably tangled with the roots of the wheat, and you would pull up too many stalks of wheat to get rid of a few weeds.

Let’s just wait until harvest time to separate them.’"

\\ \\ You see, these weren’t just any old weeds growing with the wheat.

The original Greek manuscripts identified them as darnel, a weed that looks very much like a stalk of wheat as it’s growing.

The only difference is the darnel doesn’t produce anything.

So the only safe time to separate the weeds from the wheat would be at the harvest.

At least, that’s what the farmer said.

\\ \\ But what kind of farmer is this?

Is this the same farmer we talked about last week, the one who recklessly wasted his seed, throwing it in all directions?

There was a lot of waste – remember?

- a lot of failure as seed fell among thorns and rocks and got eaten by hungry birds.

Now there seems to be failure again as weeds grow with his wheat.

\\ \\ "Somebody must have sneaked in and planted all these weeds?"

I don’t think so! \\ \\ And then, when one of his hired hands suggests pulling up the weeds, the farmer protests, "No, no! Can’t do that!

Wouldn’t be prudent, you know.

Just let them grow together.

We’ll sort it all out come harvest time."

\\ \\ And Jesus says the Kingdom of God is like that? \\ \\ This, then, is a parable about the church.

Now, there are two predominant reasons modern people give for not being Christian, not associating with the church.

Excuse number one: people in the church are just as rotten as everybody else in the world, a statement which is usually followed by the citation of some sin which they feel fairly certain they have not committed themselves, like racism or that age-old favorite hypocrisy, and everyone KNOWS the church is just full of those kind of sinners.

Excuse number 2: With so much suffering and evil in the world, who could possibly believe in a righteous God? Walter Brueggemann has written that this is the most powerful argument against the church today.

In his commentary, The Message of the Psalms, Dr. Brueggemann writes, "If God is powerful AND good, how can there be evil in the world?

If the question is posed in this way, religion can offer no adequate logical response.

Logically one must compromise either God’s power or God’s love, either saying that evil exists because God is not powerful enough to overrule it, or because God is not loving enough to use God’s power in this way."

If God or God’s church could just clean up the act, think of all the morally sensitive people that we could get to come to church!

\\ \\ But you know what they would find here?

Things are in just as big a mess in the church as they are in the farmer’s wheat field!

Saints and sinners share the same pew, and how can you tell just by looking at them which is which?

It doesn’t work that way, does it?

\\ \\ And Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is sort of like that? \\ There is so much messiness in the church!

Jesus told us to make disciples of all nations, and look who showed up asking Philip for baptism in the middle of the desert!

The invitation to the table was issued and look who came to the party!

When God goes sowing, or sending out party invitations, or blessing, or calling, it looks like God doesn’t know where to stop! \\ But separation of the weeds from the wheat is God’s job, not ours.

And it appears that God has a pretty high tolerance for waste and messiness in the church.

God is willing to allow a good many bad seeds to sprout among the good.

And sometimes, especially if we have difficulty telling the difference between a morning glory and a pea vine, we are the last ones to know the good from the bad.

\\ \\ Now, I’m not saying this parable is ONLY about the church.

I think it applies also to the world we live in, the mixed quality of life in God’s garden.

God created the world and said, "Hey now!

That’s good!

That’s real good, even if I do say so myself!"

So what’s up with all these weeds?

Why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people?

Why do the wicked seem to flourish and prosper and the righteous struggle to make it from payday to payday?

What are these weeds doing in here amongst the wheat?

Did God plant them, or did the Devil sneak in when God was asleep?

\\ \\ We can laugh at the farmer’s claim that an enemy planted weeds in his field, but it’s not funny when the weeds spring up in OUR garden, is it?

When cancer cells spread and good cells starve in the body, when defenseless students are gunned down by classmates in a place where they were supposed to be safe from harm, we want to know, "What’s up with these weeds, Lord?

We thought you planted good seed here."

\\ \\ In his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Gulag Archipelago, the great author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, says, "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.

But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."

\\ \\ She was the church organist, the mother of two beautiful children.

Her father called me and gave me the news.

"We’ve had to have her committed to the mental ward at Baptist Hospital.

She was okay as long as she was taking her medicine.

But she didn’t think she needed it any more, so she stopped taking it last week.

Please go up and see her.

We told them it was okay to let you in."

I was just a seminary student, a minister in training, not a psychiatrist.

I didn’t want to go.

I didn’t know what I could say that would make any difference.

But I was her pastor.

As I entered the room, I saw her huddled over in the corner, gazing off into space, her eyes hauntingly empty.

I called her name softly, not wanting to startle her, but got no response.

I walked over and knelt in front of her, placing my hand gently on her shoulder.

She looked at me then, but gave no sign of recognition for a moment.

Then she whispered, in a shaky voice, "Preacher, the bad people are winning, and there’s nothing I can do."

I managed to make it all the way back to my car before I broke down in tears.

And the next day the chairman of the elders said, "You need to tell her to find another church.

We’ve got enough problems as it is."

In other words, weed the garden, preacher.