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Mystic
Congregational Church, UCC This year marked the thirtieth anniversary of my graduation from high school. Now, to those of you who have seen forty or fifty or maybe even sixty, it may not seem like a big deal. But I am still trying to figure out how it’s happened. I look at others who have shared parts of the journey—in fact, most of us went all twelve years through high school together—and I wonder why they all look so old. My graduating class of summer’s junior-senior high school was the largest in the history of the school at that time: 73 students. We didn’t have a reunion this year but one of my
friends sent an update on some of what she’s heard was going on with my
classmates. There was the
predictable Jennifer who was the brainiac of the class.
She went right on to college, then went to Harvard Law and is now a
partner at some hotshot law firm. We
all pretty much saw that coming. Then
there was Kevin who drank his body weight in alcohol before every school
function and spent more time suspended than present in school.
He’s now, she reports, clean and sober and a substance-abuse counselor
for adolescents. There was
Wendell—quiet, smart, very ambitious; now a financial wizard for a computer
company, and currently a resident at some country-club correctional facility for
crunching a few numbers into his offshore bank account.
There was Carol who was always a bit shy.
Some called her dorky, a wallflower type, who went on to college and
medical school, and is now a pediatric oncologist specializing in brain tumors. What a crew! Who
could have imagined what change and chance would launch us into such different
and unpredictable directions. Yours
truly, at our twentieth class reunion, received in absentia—I wasn’t able to
be there—the Most Unlikely Career Choice Award.
I won’t tell you how I am described by my classmates because I would
like to preserve some shred of credibility as I prepare to make my exit.
The most common comment at my ordination was, “We never thought you’d
make it.” The point is that a lot
of us end up in some other place than where we thought we might.
An accommodation of choice and chance and change offers more than a few
surprises as our days unfold. To
put it in a button-size thought that you can wear on your lapel:
PBPGIFWMY—Please Be Patient. God
Isn’t Finished With Me Yet. That’s part of the message from Matthew’s gospel
today. Life unfolds along a
trajectory that goes beyond our limited vision.
God sees the big picture. Maybe,
the best we can hope for is that, from time to time, we will get a glimpse of it
through God’s eyes. The setting
that Matthew writes for is not the local school and its launching of yet another
group of young people into an unsuspecting world but the church.
Perhaps, more than any other gospel, Matthew deals with practical human
problems, the kind confronted everyday by individual Christians and by the
Church—matters like anger, divorce, hypocrisy, taxes, church discipline, the
power in place of possessions, all things that figure prominently in Matthew’s
narrative. Readers might not like
what he says, but they can’t argue that Matthew was abstract or that the
gospel avoids those routine down-to-earth issues that we all struggle with from
time to time. So here’s practical Matthew continuing his
botanical discourse in the thirteenth chapter talking about wheat and weeds.
He’s not just giving gardening advice.
He’s talking about the church and the people who are part of it in any
given point in time. His
observation is based on truth. Middle
Eastern wheat is, in fact, particularly subject to a noxious weed called the
bearded darnel or, in Latin, the lolium
temulentum. (That
would be your useless biblical factoid for this week.)
The problem with this weed is that it is virtually indistinguishable from
the wheat until the heads appear and it cannot be removed from the field without
damaging the wheat because the weeds and the wheat have roots that become very
tightly intertwined as they grow. Matthew leaves it to us to figure out, at least in
part, what the church-people connection to all of that is.
I want to look at it this morning in two ways.
First, in the individual sense for we’re all a bit of a combination of
wheat and weeds. There’s good and
evil in all of us. None of us comes
from totally pure motives. None of
us are without a conflict in priority or moral uncertainty from time to time.
We are not immune to temptation. We
are all works-in-progress, unfolding along the life journey in ways that God can
see but may not be clear to us or to others.
What one of us wants is to be known as the person we were ten, twenty,
thirty or even forty years ago. There’s
always that possibility that we are growing and changing, becoming something
different than we were before by God’s grace.
Surely, there are times when I have been more weed than wheat in God’s
garden. Perhaps, that’s true for
you, as well. God isn’t finished
with any of us yet. That leads to the second way to look at the test.
If the field is the church and the community and there are weeds and
wheat and it’s not possible to figure out which is which, then we’re left
with a couple of things to ponder. First,
the text makes it clear that it’s God’s business to figure it all out and
not ours to go pruning, ripping and tossing out according to what we
think is a weed. Personally, I
think that that’s good news because if I was having a “weed moment”, I
might have been pruned out by some over-zealous church gardener trying to purify
the field. Second, I think it means
that we are to exist side by side with those who are very different from
us—people who think differently, believe differently, who push our buttons and
make us uncomfortable, who challenge us and make us think, who disagree with our
theology and, perhaps, with a whole lot of other things, as well.
There’s room for everyone here and it’s God’s business to sort it
out. Our task is to be loving and
patient and tolerant and discerning, waiting for the fruit to appear in God’s
good time. It’s easier said than done to be sure.
Who’s to say what’s a weed and what’s wheat?
The point is that it’s not our job to judge.
The church and everyone who’s a part of it will always be a mixture of
motives, a jumble of desires and an inconsistent ally in the goals of God’s
realm. It’s just the way it is.
It’s not our job to pluck out the ones we think don’t fit. The church, throughout its history, has tried to rid
itself of those impure factions and make a truly faithful community.
That notion is, in part, what led to the Salem witch
trials. From June to September of
1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were
carted off to Gallows Hill in Salem, Massachusetts and hanged.
Hundred of others faced accusations of witchcraft.
Dozens languished in jails without representation or trial.
There was a hysteria that swept through puritan Massachusetts. But nothing about this tragedy was inevitable, only an
unfortunate combination of an ongoing war with the Wabenaki Indians, economic
conditions, church conflict, teenage boredom, and personal jealousies can
account for the spiraling accusations that happened during that year. In 1688, John Putnam was one of the most influential
elders of the Salem village. He
invited a man named Samuel Parris to preach at the village church.
A year later, Mr. Parris and his family moved into Salem village.
That consisted of his wife Elizabeth, his six-year old daughter Betty,
his niece Abigail, and his Indian slave, Tituba.
The village that they moved into was in the midst of radical change.
There was a mercantile elite that was beginning to develop. Prominent people were less willing to assume positions of town
leaders and two families, the equivalent of the Hatfields and the McCoys except
they were the Putnams and the Porters, were competing over control for the
village and its church pulpit. Sometime during the winter of 1692, the Parris’
daughter became strangely ill. What
most people didn’t know was that no one could really figure out what was wrong
with this child, but these two feuding families, one of which really liked the
Parrises and one that did not, began to make up stories about what was wrong
with the child. Cotton Mather had
recently published a book called Memorable
Providences that talked about witchcraft, and a movement was born.
Talk of witchcraft increased as Betty’s playmates fell ill.
When Dr. Griggs, the local town physician, couldn’t cure the children,
he suggested that they were some supernatural cause.
The prominent Putnam family supported the girls’ accusations against
Tituba and a few others. Three
people were accused of witchcraft: Tituba,
Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne. Unfortunately,
Tituba was an obvious choice because she was a slave.
Sarah Good was a beggar and a social misfit. Sarah Osborne was old, quarrelsome, crotchety, and hadn’t
been to church in over a year. Surely,
she must be a witch. Well, you know
what happened. It’s a very ugly chapter in our religious history.
It disappeared almost as fast as it started.
It was fueled by a misguided energy, fear, prejudice, and social angst
but it led to the bleakest chapters in American religious history.
It’s an extreme example of what can happen when people are weeded
according to some standard that’s based on fear, misunderstanding, social
prejudice, and hysteria. It’s a
bleak reminder that we are never to be the ones to judge. It’s not up to us to figure out who’s in and who’s out. If we were ever to try and create a perfectly pure
church, the buildings would be completely empty because none of us would
qualify. Therein lies both the
comfort and the challenge. Any
church that would have me for a member is already less than perfect.
Any church that would have me for a member is, at least, willing to take
a chance to see what God’s grace might do.
That’s true for all of us. It’s not about being perfect.
It’s about being faithful in discovering new dimensions to life as it
unfolds. It’s God’s business to
sort it all out, and our business to root ourselves in the field as best we can
while we wait. The new
interpreters’ bible commentary notes, “It chronically comes as a shock to
find that the world, the family we’re born into, or even the church, is not an
entirely trustworthy place. The
church can be inspiring courageous one moment, and petty and faithless the next.
Good mixes in with the bad.” Acknowledging that this is true is not a call to
passivity in the face of evil, not a divine command to ignore injustice in the
world, in society, or to tolerate wrong in the church.
It is, rather, a realistic reminder that we do not finally have the
ability or the insight to get rid of all the weeds, and that, sometimes, to
attempt to pluck them up would do more harm than good.
In this imperfect world, we are like that goofy group of kids thirty
years ago launched into a world that is like we are, a work-in-progress,
standing next to others who are the same. We are,
individually and together, a combination of weed and wheat, and it’s not
exactly clear how it’s going to turn out.
That’s okay because in God’s botany, who’s to say who’s wheat and
who’s weed? Amen. |