Seeds and Weeds
Speaker: Rev. Matt Henry
Location: Whitney United Methodist Church
Date: March 15, 2009
An author by the name of W. Waldo Beach writes in his book “The Christian Life” Jesus called the crowd with his disciples and said to them ‘If any want to become my followers let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ The symbol of the New Testament and the Christian Church is a cross which stands for a love faithful despite physical agony and rejection by the world. No amount of air conditioning and pew cushioning in a suburban church can cover over the hard truth that the Christian life is a narrow way of suffering, that discipleship is costly that, for the faithful, there is always a cross to be carried. No one can understand Christianity to its depth who comes to it to enjoy it as a pleasant weekend diversion. Boy, I wish I could write like that.
In the Middle Ages, the tale goes; a traveler asked three hard-at-work stone masons what they were doing. The first stone mason said, “I am sanding down this block of marble.” The second one said, “I am preparing a foundation.” The third one said, “I am building a cathedral.” Is this tale really about stone? Is it? What’s it about? What is this tale about? Oh, that’s a good one…attitude. Anything else? Perception, very good. Good. Anything else? Focus, excellent answer. All these, excellent answers. Maybe here’s another one…maybe it’s also about relationships. The first builder says, “I’m sanding down this block of stone.” He’s talking about a relationship only to self. The second one says, “Oh, I am laying a foundation.” Perhaps he’s talking about a relationship to the community. The third one says, “I’m building a cathedral.” Now he’s talking about our relationship to the community of the future, those who will one day and who are even now filling these chairs. Those whose church this will be long after all of us are gone.
Are we building a cathedral? Are we setting the stones for our ancestors to come? Are we building a cathedral for the community of our future? It’s just like people making church coffee. Do you all like the fact that we have coffee in the morning? Lord have mercy. I’ll tell you what, I yearn for it so bad that I talked my bass player into bringing in an early pot and share it with us before the regular meeting even gets going. Now, let’s use the coffee making thing for an example in the same way. Who made the coffee this morning? Linda Slupe, okay. Several people made the coffee this morning. We thank you. Were you making coffee? One person might say, “I’m making coffee.” Another person in your group might say, “I’m providing hospitality for others.” Another person in your group might say,” I’m building a kingdom here of disciples by making coffee.”
In other words all this, my friends, is semiotics. We’ve just been engaged in semiotics. Now, fancy word….what it means is this; you can look it up in your dictionary. The word semiotics means, it is the science of the study of use of signs, both visual and verbal, to communicate abstract qualities underlying reality. This is what Jesus is doing with this parable. Now, we engage in semiotics all the time on a daily basis. What do you see as you drive down a main thoroughfare? What are those electric things hanging up in the air? Stop…oh interesting. See, I’m thinking traffic signal, she’s thinking stop light. Boom…there’s a perfect example, right? We know what sticks with her and we know what sticks with me.
Okay, so let’s hang with this for a second. A traffic signal is the use of a semiotic. We’ve got red, yellow and green. Do you ever wonder why they picked those colors? On your mark, get set, go. What if the color’s off? Why don’t they just have big words that say stop, slow down and go? I mean, that wouldn’t work here in Boise because on the red light there’s like five people that go through it anyway, so it could be, you know, stop…this means you right now, slow down brother or you’re gonna get it and go. But no, we’ve got red, yellow, green. Why is that? Now is everybody…..ooooh…..but everybody can relate to that little stick figure that has a dress or no dress on the loo. It’s a good point, right? But why red and yellow and green? Maybe red represents fire…stop…danger. Yellow represents getting to danger, for some, certainly. And then green is like what? Green is like life. Green is like…aaah…green represents movement, water. Some places water is green.
These are all semiotics, friends, and Jesus is engaging us in semiotics all the time. He calls them parables, like this morning’s parable that I referred to as the Seeds and Weeds. He put before them another parable. He said the kingdom of heaven may be compared as someone who sowed good seed in his field but while everybody was asleep, just like Dorothy and her friends in the opium lawns leading up to the city of Oz, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So, when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the household came and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in this field? Where then did these weeds come from?” And he answered, “An enemy as done this.” The slaves said to him then, “Do you want us to go and gather them?” But he replied, “No.” You see, Jesus is talking to agricultural people who know land. “For gathering the weeds you would then uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers ‘Collect them weeds, man’ first and bind them up in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into the barn.”
Brothers and sisters, every week as I start entering into the exegetical process of the sermon I always read the passage in its original Greek first because I’m looking for things that stick out. And sure enough, this week something stuck out to me and it was the word that is being translated here in English as “weed.” Now, there are a few Greek words for weeds. There are some of them that are basically just generic but the word that Jesus is using this morning is a very particular type of weed that basically grows only in Palestine and it is called zizania. In Greek it is zizanuim . It’s plural. Otherwise in English it’s known as darnell and in Palestine they call it, in English, spurious wheat. It’s found only in Palestine and here’s the deal. It resembles wheat, both in its stalk and in its grain but it is absolutely worthless.
Is Jesus talking here about seed and weed? Probably not. I’d say no, definitely he is not talking about seed and weed. Who is he talking about? People. What people? Oh, people in the church, believers and non-believers. You guys are getting the point here. This is how semiotics works. Those of us who garden, by the way, like myself, may understand the deeper meaning carefully hidden in this imagery better than urban concrete types. I don’t know about you, but in my garden pretty soon out here in spring, this is what it looks like. There are all kinds of dinky little two or three leaved green things coming up. Some of them I know are wild. They have been sown by the previous year’s good crop that I had. Others are eventually things that I will uproot, carefully, but I can’t do that now because they all look alike and I don’t want to take the chance of ripping out my good tomato starts because of some nasty little weed.
How many of you have seen the movie “Dogma” raise your hand. Let me tell you friends, if you haven’t seen the movie “Dogma” you should rent it. It’s a very thought provoking and funny, darkly funny movie some times. But in the film “Dogma” there’s a failing Catholic church in the inner city. It’s going down the tube, just about ready to close, and they’re getting desperate, and the priest is played by no other than George Carlin. Now, you can imagine that. Now, George Carlin is the priest and it’s his job to save this church. What’s he going to do? So he’s throwing off this huge fund raiser and he decides that the image of the Catholic Church is too dour and stolid and stoic, so he creates a statue of Jesus to replace the crucifix, a statue that he calls “Good Buddy Jesus.” And the statue, for those of you who have seen the movie know exactly what this looks like. Jesus is standing out in front of the church and he looks something like this and Carlin refers to him as the good buddy Jesus.
Friends, I want to tell you right now if we’re reading the Bible very carefully we are going to get rid of the good buddy Jesus. We’re going to get absolutely rid, in our heads, of any notion and idea of a sweet, cozy, nice guy Jesus. It really does not do us any good. Last week the Bible showed us that Jesus, in fact, can be a very angry, a somewhat violent, whipping people with a bull whip; it says it…John 2….throwing tables over and scattering stuff on the ground. He can be an angry, violent, bi-polar with a Messianic complex and suicidal tendencies. How would Jesus be psychotherapeutically, you know, diagnosed today? This means we see Jesus as a very apocalyptic judge and, make no bones about it, he is as exclusive as it gets. He is always talking about division and separation. He’s always talking about it. Sheep and goats. Those present at the banquet and those absent from the banquet. Lazarus and the rich man. The prodigal younger and the outcast elder. Those on the right hand and those on the left hand. Those with full lamps of oil, those whose lamps are empty. Those who are free and those where a camel stands a better chance of threading the needle. Are you getting this?
The harvest for Jesus is the final Day of Judgment for all of you. At this point, my friends, the zizania among us will meet their fate. We all will answer to Christ. All of us will be harvested. That would be the end of mortality. But only a legitimate seed will be kept for further planting. Illegitimate look-alikes will be burned in the trash pile. The Kingdom of Heaven can only be populated by good seed. It can’t be any other way. And this Kingdom Jesus talks about, it’s starkly strange. He isn’t describing Buckingham Palace here, folks. He’s not even talking about the Vatican. He mentions absolutely nothing about crown jewels or the Swiss Guard or even the Secret Service and an oval office. No, Jesus describes this Kingdom of God in very bizarre terms much like he will say it to Pilate later. My kingdom is not of this world, man. Jesus never says, ever, this kingdom is like failing stock options or invading foreign countries or even front row season tickets on the first base line of Shea Stadium. For some of us the Kingdom of Heaven would look a lot like that.
But Jesus doesn’t talk about it in those terms. Oddly enough, no, he returns to the semiotic image of weeds but this time he’s not talking about simple wheat but mustard and mustard has an appearance very different than zizania. Now, I asked a botanist once, this was kind of cool, I asked a botanist once what was the definition, what was the technical definition of an herb and this was what I was told….that an herb is a weed that’s useful. Any of you have mint growing in your yard? An herb is a weed that has some use, like dill. For Jesus the Kingdom of Heaven, friends, is other-worldly because it starts off so very tiny, like a pot of coffee, like a cookie on a plate, but it will grow into something huge and wild and uncontrollable as we do. It will take over, in fact, if given the chance, but it will produce useful herb seed, amen? And then Jesus kicks it even smaller. He says the Kingdom of God is so powerful in its infiniteness and so volatile in its behavior that, ultimately, it’s like yeast spores, just the tiniest of plants, and a little dab’ll do ya. The Kingdom of Heaven is like an atom bomb. The plutonium core that vaporized Hiroshima was the size of just a large marble. Seeds and weeds.
Lutheran theologian and writer, Martin Marty, when he’s talking about semiotics and parables he says this. When you’re reading your Bible, think about this. Texts do their disclosing best when they are capable of upsetting the reader’s world. That is why it is limiting to think of them as merely being relevant to our worlds as we already think of them. These texts that are full of reversals and that most surprise, admit an approach that impels one to look for the world that was in front of them the entire time. For that reason, many scholars like to restudy and revisit the parables of Jesus. They are upsetting, they are reversing, and they are surprising. In them, the smallest becomes largest, the last becomes first, the outsider turns insider, the humblest is exalted at the expense of the proud, the remote gets seated at the head table. This, the reader says, is not how things naturally are. Fathers of prodigal sons keep score on their wanderings, even if in the end they yield to the emotions that welcome their sons home. The parable discloses because it is different from our contemporary experience.
These words I give you this morning I speak to you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.