Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 "A Patient Shining" Scott Hoezee

One of Stanley Wiersma's more indelible portraits in his book Purpaleanie and other Permutations is the one titled "Excommunication." In this poem we meet Benny Ploegster, an alcoholic who regularly attended church. For three years Benny had been under discipline: first a silent censure, then a more public censure that initially left his name out of the matter. Later it was announced publicly that it was indeed Benny who was under scrutiny. Three years is a long time to work with someone, and so finally Benny's persistent struggle with the bottle led the church (and God, too, apparently) to run out of patience. So a deadline was set, and when Benny was unable to meet that deadline by cleaning up his act and repenting of his wicked boozy ways, a date was set for the public excommunication.

Benny attended his excommunication. He even stood in the midst of the congregation while the dominie solemnly read the standard form that designated Benny a "Gentile and a publican" with whom the church was to have no further association. Benny stood there and heard it all. As Wiersma put it, "It was not in protest although the dominie thought so and it was not in stupidity although the congregation thought so that Benny stood up for excommunication and until he died of cirrhosis he attended as regularly as before. He did not partake of communion. Like Jacob wrestling with God and saying, 'I will not let you go until you bless me,' our Benny was wrestling with us and with God. Though he lacked Jacob's talent for articulation, his standing said as explicitly as its verbal equivalent: I will not be cut off as though I do not exist. I am God's child, all right, God's naughty child, but still God's child: Benny. And what of us who attended church regularly out of custom and superstition and without much desire and without any questioning that we had a right to be there? What of us who had never wrestled like Benny? Though he did not intend it, by standing up to be excommunicated, was Benny excommunicating us? The church is gone now, the lumber used for a cattle shed, but in memory the place where Benny stood is forever holy ground. Was Benny excommunicating me?"⁽¹⁾

When the attempt to do the right thing goes wrong, sometimes the results can be worse than when someone sets out to do a wrong thing in the first place. Dealing with Benny in that way looked righteous and pious and ever-so-holy. The church needs to do such unpleasant things, after all. One cannot be patient forever. One must not tolerate certain things. Having zeal for the things of God demands that action be taken, and sometimes that action needs to be fierce. And so sometimes the church excommunicates the Bennys of this world. History is chock-full of other, bigger examples of similar such things. The Inquisition, the Crusades, the Salem Witch Trials: like their secular counterpart of McCarthyism, these were all ecclesiastical attempts to look for the impure within the church's ranks and then root them out. But each time in history when this has been done, the innocent have been hurt, the unsuspecting have been accused, and not a few of the faithful have fallen away because they no longer wanted to be part of a church that could do such terrible things.

We've known from the beginning about the Parable of the Weeds, but we've had a very hard time taking it to heart. True, because this is not the New Testament's only word as to how to deal with sin in our midst, this parable does not necessarily mean that all church discipline is wrong-headed. Matthew 13 does not mean that we may never confront one another in an attempt to spur one another on to greater godliness. But Matthew 13 sets a tone that the church has not always followed. Matthew 13 signals a warning we have not always heeded. But just what might that be? Let's think about this together for the next little while. What is Jesus' point in this most surprising parable?

The so-called "Parable of the Weeds" is part of a cluster of parables that has to do with God's kingdom. It is also one of several that has to do with seeds and agriculture. Over and again Jesus' point is that the kingdom of God is never quite what you might expect. The Parable of the Sower made clear that although the "seed" of God's Word is powerful enough to change the world, it is at the same time oddly vulnerable, too. It can be snatched away by birds, burned up by the sun, choked by thorns. The parables of the Mustard Seed and Yeast indicate that the kingdom is far smaller and more subtle than you might guess. The kingdom is the single most powerful and important reality in the world, but it does not have the flash, glitz, or razzle-dazzle you ordinarily associate with mighty movements of history.

Much of that is shocking. Apparently God would rather work behind the scenes. Apparently changing people's hearts is a quiet and gracious business more than a noisy and forceful affair. What's more, the growth and spread of this kingdom is going to extend throughout the world but it may never exist in a pure state. To make that point Jesus tells a parable. A farmer carefully plants an entire field of wheat. His furrows were pin-straight, his wheat seed was of the finest quality. He did it all right and went to bed that night content that he had done everything he could to ensure a bumper crop some months down the road.

But while he took his well-earned rest, an enemy came in and, with equal care, planted weed seed in the same furrows. Worse, the weeds he planted were something called "darnel," which looks almost identical to wheat. But if you don't separate the darnel from the wheat before grinding, the resulting wheat flour will be inedible. So once the wheat starts to grow, the farmer's hired hands notice the presence of the weeds, and what's more, they see it growing almost as uniformly as the wheat itself. This was no accident, no stray spores that drifted in on the breeze one day. This was an act of agricultural terrorism!

In a huff the servants ask the master farmer if he wants them to go and start plucking out these dastardly weeds. It was the logical thing to do. The last thing you wanted was for the darnel to go to seed because then even next season you'd still have a field full of weed seeds. But contrary to all agrarian good sense, the farmer tells the hired hands to leave it be. They'd sort it all out later at the harvest. If Jesus' listeners knew anything about farming (and presumably a lot of Jesus' audience did know about such things), then the shock of this story is the idea that any farmer would do nothing about such a situation.

But that's probably a clue that this story is not about agriculture but instead it's about theology (though still surprising at that!). Overall, it is not too difficult to figure that out. Nevertheless, the disciples later come to Jesus to ask, "Could you spell things out for us a wee bit more?" Jesus obliges, but you can almost detect a little weariness in the rather dry way that Jesus connects all the dots for them in verses 37-43. Have you ever told someone a joke that this other person just didn't get? If so, then you know that your then trying to explain the joke pretty much takes all the fun out of it! Indeed, have you ever seen someone burst out laughing once you finished explaining a joke? Generally what happens is the other person responds to your explanation not with a laugh but by saying, "Oh, now I get it."

Yes, but that was not the reaction you were looking for when you told your joke in the first place! So also in Matthew 13: there's something a little dry about Jesus' having to spell things out so simply for the disciples. The punch of the original story gets lost a bit. In fact, if you read only the parable, then in the end you are left wondering just what it might mean to let the wheat and the weeds co-exist and grow together for now. You ponder how and why pulling up the weeds would threaten also the wheat. And if you see that the wheat stands for the true members of the kingdom and the weeds for imposters, you end up wondering how you should behave when forced to grow right alongside of nettlesome folks.

That's what happens if you read just the parable. But once you get finished reading the explanation, you are tempted to forget some of that and instead start rubbing your hands together because you feel so satisfied to know that all those annoying, "weedy" folks will get their comeuppance in the end. Suddenly you start to wonder less what it means to be wheat in the midst of weeds and start to focus more on that coming day when the roll is called up yonder and the weeds get burned at long last. After all, Jesus' closing image of the righteous shining like the sun is stirring (all the more so when set to music in that well-known piece from the oratorio Elijah). It turns your thoughts away from the field and to the future.

But I want to suggest this morning that although we accept and must understand our Lord's explanation for his own parable, we need to be cautious about not missing the punch of the parable itself. Because the parable is not so much about all wrongs getting righted by and by but is more about our lives right now. At bottom this parable is about patience. This parable is not first of all about what will happen to the weeds at the last day but about how the wheat has to react during all the time that leads up to that final sorting out.

The farmer in the parable seems to believe that the weeds themselves won't threaten the wheat--the two are capable of growing together. The weeds do not threaten the wheat but instead the threat comes from how we react to the weeds. The danger is not being in the presence of sin but trying to root out all the sin we see. But that means that the real challenge presented to the church by Matthew 13 is finding the strength to resist the temptation to take matters into our own hands and start yanking up every sinful thing we see every time we see it. As Robert Farrar Capon points out, when in verse 30 the master tells the servants just to "let" things be, the Greek word used there is the same word used in the Lord's Prayer and elsewhere for "forgiveness."

Bearing with the imperfect, putting up with what is annoying and sinful, and just generally trying to deal with life's less pleasant realities in a gracious, gospel-like way is tough. It even seems at times to be counter-intuitive, the very opposite of what you think you should do. If we are holy folks, then whenever we see something we think is less-than-holy, shouldn't we attack it? Isn't total purity the goal, and so if we see something that sullies purity, doesn't being a child of the kingdom require you to hack away at it, to pour some theological Ortho Weed-B-Gone on it?

Apparently not. As I said earlier, there are other words of Jesus, other verses in the Bible, that let us know that confronting one another in love surely has its place in the life of the church. But Matthew 13 reminds us that even so, patience sets the tone. And the fact that the word for "let it be" is related to the word for "forgive" may also hint that this is finally about grace. But if so, it's about the way grace both forms and informs our patience.

You see, sometimes we think that patience is a passive thing--it's what you do when you cannot do anything else, like waiting for an hour in the doctor's waiting room or being stuck in a traffic jam. These things try our patience, but if we manage to be patient in such situations, it is in no small part because we have no choice. If we could do something to hurry the Doc along or clear the roadway, we would, but lacking such abilities, we try to be patient. And so sometimes we see patience as that virtue to which we turn when we cannot, as a matter of fact, do anything else but wait anyway. At other times we think that being patient is an excuse to avoid dealing with the unpleasant. If you say to someone, "Are you ever going to confront so-and-so?" only to hear the other person reply, "I'm just waiting for the right moment," you might conclude that this apparent patience is actually a dodge, a sign of weakness not strength; of cowardice not courage.

But patience as a kingdom virtue, patience as a fruit of the Spirit, is not passive but in its own way active. It's not weak but strong. Patience is the power of God's Holy Spirit to help us stick with God's program and with God's gospel way of doing things.

Why is it, after all, that rooting out the weeds may well damage also the wheat? Because when anger, a desire for vengeance, or an insensitive lobbing about of accusations starts to happen in the church, grace gets eclipsed. Compassion dries up. Gentleness is shouldered aside to make way for the strict and stern hand of the disciplinarian. When the Bennys of this world get spiritually exiled, it may well haunt the faithful, as it haunted our dear friend Stanley. When it seems we are more interested in purity than we are in compassionate forgiveness, forbearance, and understanding, then it feels as though our own roots are getting tugged at dangerously. Eventually the attack on the weeds ends up so confusing the wheat that you start to wonder things like who is excommunicating whom? As soon as we begin to turn the life of the church into an ongoing sorting-out enterprise, we risk losing the very compassion that ought properly to define us as God's children in Christ.

You see, the Spirit-given fruit of patience is what helps us to strike that delicate but needed balance between anger and despair. Without patience, we are tempted to lash out at sin and sinners. We get angry, frustrated, upset. We start saying things like, "Oh, such things ought not be in our midst!" and then we take steps to ensure that, indeed, such things will no longer be. We don't want weeds in life and so we start hacking away.

That's wrong, but so is the other extreme of despair. If it's wrong to lash out in anger at the weeds of life, it's equally wrong merely to wring our hands, hang our heads, and start to believe that all of life is nothing but weeds, that the weeds are stronger, and maybe also a sign that there is no hope. That's wrong, too, because true patience has its own kind of roots, and those roots are sunk into the soil of faith. Patience is strong and focused precisely because it grows out of the strength of our convictions and faith. As such, patience makes us strong enough to hold back, to follow God's way of grace and forgiveness instead of the world's quick and easy solutions of vengeance, punishment, and violence.

And patience never forgets that there is an ultimate difference between wheat and weeds. Patience is not interested in pretending there is no truth, no right or wrong. Patience never forgets those core truths but nevertheless finds the Christ-like ability to put up in love with weeds of all kinds. How the truth of Jesus shows itself in our lives is itself an extension of that same truth by being consistent with the Jesus who repeatedly demonstrated his own ability to be open and kind toward sinners, toward strugglers and stragglers.

In short, patience is not being passive because we cannot actively do anything else anyway. Patience is its own kind of gospel action--the action of grace. And patience is also not a coy dodge that conveniently lets us off the hook from confronting something we're actually too cowardly to confront. Patience is not a dodge but the gospel at work, giving room for God's Spirit to change lives even as it seeks to nurture and protect the faithful from accidentally getting damaged or even uprooted themselves.

When one day the righteous shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father, the light we exude will be the light of God's grace. As the moon in the night sky shines with the reflected light of the sun, so we will shine only because the glorious light of our God will be bouncing off us. One day we will be bathed in that merciful light. As we try to get ready for that great and glorious reality, we would do well, already now, steadily to illumine the church and the world with that same patient sunshine of grace. Amen.

1. Sietze Bunning, Purpaleanie and other Permutations. Middleburg, Iowa: The Middleburg Press, 1978, pp. 55-57.