July 17, 2011
Wisdom 12: 13, 16-19 + Psalm 86 + Romans 8: 26-27 + Matthew 13: 24-33
The good people of Matthew’s Gospel have a problem. Gentiles are infiltrating their communities with their strange ideas and ways that these loyal and faithful first followers of Christ have suffered to maintain. These converts do not want to keep the rules and respect the customs carried over from Judaism. They are like that weed: “Mustard” that spreads so invasively and uncontrollably into the neat and pristine wheat fields of those old farmers who fed that nation. The temptation to take matters into their own hands and clean things up is very great. With what can only be described as divine wisdom, Matthew reflects upon the words of Jesus in light of what happened to Jesus, and Matthew he says: “Wait just a minute. I don’t think this is how things are supposed to go.” The Scribes and the Pharisees took matters into their own hands with that man from Nazareth who disrupted the Temple, cured on the Sabbath, touched lepers and other sick people, talked to Samaritans, ate and drank with tax collectors and known sinners! He had to go, so they killed him and cleaned things up. But God didn’t buy their judgment. What they thought was a weed was really the wheat God had sown to feed us, so it fell to the ground and died, but there sprang up a rich harvest.
We gather in this church week after week, sinners and saints. It’s hard to tell the difference isn’t it? Sometimes we feel like one and the next week the other. Maybe we’re both. I hear confessions here, and I can’t tell the difference. A lot of the so-called “sinners” who come to pray with me I think are the real saints because of the faith and the hope they have in the face of their failures and their confidence in the prayer of the church. Some of the so-called “saints” who say all their prayers and never miss an “Amen” never do anything else either and never sincerely recognize their need to say: “Bless me Father, I have sinned.”
So we can look around and admit that we might not know what is wheat and what is weed, who are sinners and who are saints. The honest among us know that they don’t even know that for sure about themselves. Sometimes we feel one way and act it, and then turn right around and feel and act the other way as well. The good news is, it is not time for the harvest, and as long as we can keep from taking charge and assuming that we know weed from wheat, we’ll have a chance here to get it right.
The trouble is, times change, but they always remain the same. The good people of Matthew’s Gospel had a problem and so do we. The problem was not the weeds and the wheat, the problem they had and we have is that there is a temptation to take charge and assume the power, the authority, or the right to clean things up, straighten up this place, this church, or this world. The temptation is always lurking there (that is the work of the evildoer) to judge and name the sinner, to refuse them a place in a community because their ideas or lifestyle or behavior or politics do not agree with what we expect. So then having been cut off, they are then denied the chance to grow, mature, or change. Where would any of us be if at some arbitrary moment in time someone looked at us, assumed the role of the judge and said: “I saw what you did. I heard what you said. Get out of here.” Matthew is saying to us again today: “Wait a minute. This is not how things are supposed to be.”
My friends, failing to learn a lesson from the Scribes and Pharisees by repeating their behavior as we clean things up and straighten up this place runs the risk of destroying again God’s finest gift, and we might end up destroying ourselves. Hear again and listen carefully to those ancient words from the Book of Wisdom just proclaimed in this place: “leniency, clemency, and kindness” are the best we can hope for as sinners and saints. The book says: “Those who are just must be kind” which gives us all hope for our own repentance.