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The Ancient Farming Trick Behind One of Jesus' Strangest Parables · Faith at Work

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Two years ago, my wife and I were captivated by an idea.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: We were hearing about companion crops and soil health,
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: conservation,
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: farming,
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: the whole world of what's happening in the ground that you can't really see from
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: a truck window.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And we talked with agricultural specialists and we decided to turn a pasture
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: on our farm to what we are kind of calling a sunflower habitat.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a cash crop,
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: but it's a field for bugs and wildlife,
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: the microorganisms that do their quiet work in the soil and honestly for people too.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: We planted 12 acres of sunflowers just for what they did for the eye and also,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: of course, for the pollinators.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: We planted underneath that what's called an understory of buckwheat and flax
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: and small grains, and we let the volunteers come too.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Grass and thistles and lamb's quarters, whatever wanted to grow there.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we didn't clear any of it.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: We let it all grow together.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: It is, by any conventional standard, a mess.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it is also, by my standard, one of the most beautiful things on our farm.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: People walk that field,
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: they pick flowers,
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: they wander, and nearly every one of them asks some version of the same question.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Why the weeds mixed in with the flowers?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Why aren't there straight rows?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Why are there so many bugs and why do the leaves have holes in them?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I answer the same way to everyone that asks, because that is the way it's supposed to be.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: That is the way the world actually works.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And some people, they smile as if they sort of half knew that.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And others just sort of walk away puzzled,
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: wondering, what in the world is that supposed to mean?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I tell you that,
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: of course, because that I think is exactly what Jesus is doing in this parable.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think that we have been reading what he was meaning
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: the way it was supposed to be read and meant and understood.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the story that we heard part of this morning.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: A man sows good seed in his field and that night an enemy sows weeds, darnel,
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: most scholars think, right into the same ground and then slips away in the night.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And when the plants come up,
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  SPEAKER_00: the servants run to the landowner and they say, sir, didn't you plant good seed?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Where did these weeds come from?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, That opening is not fanciful.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not made up.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because sowing an enemy's field with a ruinous weed was documented village sabotage
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: in the ancient world.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was common enough to show up eventually in Roman law that directly addressed this practice.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the weed itself matters.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Darnal.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Darnal is wheat's near-perfect double.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: In the blade stage, you cannot tell the difference between wheat and the weed.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: You can't tell the difference by feeling it, by looking at it.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Only once the grain head forms,
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  SPEAKER_00: months after it is planted in the growing season,
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: can anyone tell which is the difference.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And by then, the roots.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Darnal is also mildly toxic,
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  SPEAKER_00: a genuine threat to the harvest and to anyone who eats bread made from
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: a contaminated batch.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: But there is a second danger kind of folded into this idea of darnel in the field.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: One that has to do with toxicity and also with the fear of it.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: And Matthew's hearers would have felt that as they heard this parable being told.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Any group would who is fearful of imposters in their midst.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was particularly true for a persecuted church at that time.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: An imposter that cannot be told apart from the real thing
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: until it's nearly too late is not just a farming problem.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: It is one of the oldest fears of a persecuted community.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: The neighbor who might be an informant, the face across the table you can't quite be sure of.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: That fear was not abstract from the tradition that I came from.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: During the Radical Reformation,
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: the Anabaptist forebearers of
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: the peace church tradition I've spent my ministry inside of met in secret
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  SPEAKER_00: because betrayal was real.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was a constant danger.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Michael Sattler helped draft the Sleitheim Confession at a secret gathering in 1527
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  SPEAKER_00: and then was arrested within months.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was tried and he was executed.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Historians estimate several thousand Anabaptists were executed across Europe during
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: the decades that followed.
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  SPEAKER_00: They were drowned,
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  SPEAKER_00: they were burned,
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  SPEAKER_00: they were tortured,
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  SPEAKER_00: and each death authorized by people utterly convinced that they were protecting
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  SPEAKER_00: the true wheat of the church from dangerous imposters growing up among them.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I want to be fair to the other side of that fear because it wasn't only paranoia.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: At that time,
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: there was also a violent,
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  SPEAKER_00: apocalyptic fringe who really did seize the German city of Munster in 1534,
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  SPEAKER_00: descending into forced marriage,
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  SPEAKER_00: mass executions, and a siege that ended in slaughter.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was real proof to the magistrates across Europe that Anabaptism had
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: to be rooted out by force.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: The tragedy is what that fear then did.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: It could not tell the difference between the violent fringe and the peaceful majority.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it just didn't try.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sadler had renounced the sword seven years before Munster and was already dead by
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: the time it happened, killed for the very nonviolence that he confessed.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: But that distinction didn't make any difference.
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  SPEAKER_00: The wheat and the weed looked enough alike for the magistrate's chair to pull out both.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, when the servant asks, do you want us to go and pull up the weeds...
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  SPEAKER_00: They are not overreacting.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is reasonable,
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  SPEAKER_00: urgent questions from people who know what's at stake on the ground and in the room.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the landowner says, no, let them grow together until the harvest.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I used to read that answer as sort of a shrug,
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: as if evil doesn't matter, and oh well, it'll all get worked out in the end.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not what is happening in these verses.
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  SPEAKER_00: The landowner knows exactly what Darnell can do, and he says no for one reason.
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  SPEAKER_00: The roots are tangled.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: The roots are tangled and pulling up the weeds now would tear out the wheat with them.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: That is not permissiveness.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: That is the cost of premature judgment
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  SPEAKER_00: named honestly.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: God is telling us we do not yet have the standing or the vision or
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: the surgical precision to separate what's tangled together without doing more harm
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: and damage than the weeds themselves ever would do.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: We still feel that old fear even now here.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: We look at other denominations and churches and we wonder if they've drifted.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: We look at someone in our own community or maybe even the person to pews from you
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: and wonder quietly whether they're really wheat or darn old wearing wheat's face.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And once that question takes root, it asks a second one right behind it.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: What should we so sure of our own good seed do we do to keep the field safe?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: History has already answered that and the answer, it is not comforting.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Every purification campaign in Christian history And the tradition
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: that I have given my ministry too has really seen the brunt of that,
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: knows that anyone who has tried to purify the church believing
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: that they were protecting the true wheat has damaged people in the process.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Every one of them killed indiscriminately,
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: the true along with the false,
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: and more often times that we want to admit, mostly the true.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: The servant's question wasn't really about whether the danger was real, because it is.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was about whether we could be trusted to sort it.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Friends, we cannot.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: That same tradition eventually named why these kinds of things happen.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: An author named Alan Kreider,
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: an Anabaptist author,
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  SPEAKER_00: in his book on the early church argues that Christianity spread for
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: the first three centuries not through coercion but
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: through what he calls fervent patience.
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  SPEAKER_00: Christians simply living faithfully,
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  SPEAKER_00: trusting the work of separating the wheat from wheat was God's and not theirs.
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  SPEAKER_00: But once the church gained real power under Constantine,
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  SPEAKER_00: patience gave way to compulsion with predictably ugly results.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: The kingdom of God was never supposed to grow that way.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: It grows the way a field grows,
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  SPEAKER_00: slowly, tangled, trusting a harvest it does not control the timing of.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the theological weight sitting underneath.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Let both grow together.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Not because evil is fine, but because we are not the harvesters.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: When Jesus explains the parable, he says the harvest is the end of the age.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think that phrase has done us real harm because the end sounds like a fuse burning
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  SPEAKER_00: to an explosion.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the Greek word there, centelia, doesn't mean termination.
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  SPEAKER_00: It means consummation, completion.
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  SPEAKER_00: Closer to when the world whole thing kind of finally comes to fullness together.
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  SPEAKER_00: Is what Jesus is saying here.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: The harvest isn't God losing patience and swinging an axe.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's the moment growth completes itself and what was tangled becomes clear to see.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not because someone forced it apart early,
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  SPEAKER_00: but because it finally is what it always was becoming.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: We, Jesus says,
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  SPEAKER_00: are the good seed,
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  SPEAKER_00: sown by the Son of Man into the field which is the world,
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  SPEAKER_00: not gathered into a private greenhouse,
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  SPEAKER_00: sown into the same tangled ground where the weeds are also growing
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  SPEAKER_00: with real agency right alongside of us because the field is where
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: the wheat was always going to grow.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: The explanation ends with one more line.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Again, sorry to say,
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  SPEAKER_00: I think we misread that sentence about as badly as we have misread the end of
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: the age.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Seems like we've been misreading things for a long time, right?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Ian Modesby,
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  SPEAKER_00: an Anglican priest and theologian,
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  SPEAKER_00: writes it using the words, theologians have reached since 1970 instead of kingdom.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: The word is kindom.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: You heard me say that at the beginning of the sermon.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Kindom is a word term coined by human American theologian, Ada Maria Izadias.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And she gave the church this idea of reimagining God's reign as a family
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: of equals rather than a hierarchy.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what he says.
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  SPEAKER_00: Those who shine are, sorry,
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Those who shine are not those who have succeeded in separating themselves
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: from everyone else.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: They are those who have allowed themselves to be transformed by
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: the patient merciful love of God.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: They have learned to trust the good sower more than their own judgments.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: So shining isn't the reward of good sorting.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: It is what happens to a person who stops trying to do the harvester's job
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: and lets herself be grown instead,
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: worked on by the patience she did not generate and cannot rush.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: The righteous are not the ones with the sharpest eye for spotting Darnall.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: They are the ones who finally trusted the sower more than their own judgment.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: That sunflower field taught Beth and me something about mess and beauty two years
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: before I understood how much I would need it somewhere far harder than dirt.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: I apologize,
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: but I've been talking over the last few weeks
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: about how my father recently passed away.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it has been harder, as I've told you, than I expected.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: I've told you that I'm not quite well yet, and that is an honest answer.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: But something else has shifted in how I am carrying it because of the things
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: that God has been showing me and speaking to me.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: For most of my life,
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: my instinct with grief was the same instinct Beth and I used to have about
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: that pasture.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Treat it like something to be weeded out.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Get in there,
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: clear the ground,
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: get back to normal, grieve efficiently on a schedule and then move on.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I have stopped trying to pull it out.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: I am letting the grief and the joy grow together in the same ground,
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: the way that sunflower field is tangled every summer now.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: And here is what I did not expect.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: It is making me more of a person, not less.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Henry Nouwen wrote about ministers as wounded healers,
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: about how our own unhealed places held honestly become exactly the ground
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: where we're able to sit with someone else's pain honestly.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: The grief hasn't canceled the joy.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's grown alongside of it.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Root to root, producing a depth of character a cleanly weeded life would never have produced.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think you only get that by refusing to pull.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: That is a strategy that I have chosen to embrace, and I encourage you to do the same.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: So here's where I land today.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: For the farmers and gardeners here who know exactly what I'm describing,
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: for anyone carrying grief along something good,
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: and just since I'm the pastor and get to stand up and tell my stories,
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: The good thing that happened on Saturday morning is my fourth grandson got born.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: All right, yay.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: For the students among us who feel like that they are pressured
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: to understand what is weed and what is weed right now and for the rest of us
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: who have tried at some point to weed something out of ourselves or out
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: of someone else before it is time.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: We are not asked to sort the field.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: We are asked by God to grow in it.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Faithfully,
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: patiently,
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: tangled up with things we didn't plant and don't like,
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: trusting the good sower more than our own judgments." Not sorted now,
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: not separated now, growing together until the growing is complete.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: The sunflowers are blooming out there right now in my field,
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: right alongside the thistle and the grasses that we never once tried to pull.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: And this fall,
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: the field will finish telling the truth about what it actually is and was,
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: not before,
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let both grow together until the harvest.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Jesus says.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: That was never permission to stop caring about the difference between wheat and weed.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was a promise that the difference will finally be told.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: By a harvester who has never once been in a hurry and who has never once gotten it wrong.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: That is the way it is supposed to be.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way the world actually works.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.