I was in elementary school when the book Where’s Waldo came out. Anyone remember him? I can remember kids in my classes spending hours searching the page to see if they could find that time-traveling aficionado, named Waldo, dressed in red and white stripes. It was hard to pick him out of the crowd. He blended in well with his surroundings, wherever in the world he was; and there were often others dressed similarly to throw you off. There was even an evil ODLAW (waldo spelled backwards) who dressed in black and yellow stripes. Have you found him yet?? I will help you.
Here he is! In the red circled left hand corner.
This is where we find the disciples this week, looking to sift out and determine who is desirable and who is not, who is in the kingdom of God and who is out. Looking for saintly waldos and the evil odlaws. Jesus continues his teaching of parables with the agricultural imagery. Weeds and wheat!
The disciples and the crowds are still gathered around listening and taking in the wisdom of Jesus and asking questions and seeking clarity. Those in the crowd, like the slaves who sought to weed the fields understand that a contaminated field could be the difference between a family fed and family hungry. These were not idle and philosophical tales. Any landowners in the crowd, understood the loss of profit and potential downfall. Weeds are a problem to be taken care of!
All in the crowds understood that Jesus was acknowledging that good and evil often co-exist in one person’s life. It is not as if you come to know Jesus and you no longer experience tragedy and pain. It is not as if those who experience evil do not also know good. This is the very crux of the part that makes most of us uncomfortable. We live lives in which we are not always sure who is what and which is what. We listen to the news of the Middle East conflicts and hear of Israeli and Palestinian conflicts wondering how to judge the wheat and weeds when both are terrorized and both are inflicting harm. We listen to the news of the MH17 plan down and wondering how to understand the wheat and weeds, the Russians and the Ukrainians. As we look at the corn and the wheat growing together, we must acknowledge this is a reality we know, but often not one we like. We would rather measure the weeds of our neighbors and complain about their offending behaviors to the other neighbors as in … When was the last time he mowed the grass?
Let’s look a little closer at the weeds that Jesus describes as sown with the wheat by the enemy. Our translation describes the offending plant as weeds – giving our imagination permission to remember all of the undesirable plants we have removed from our own gardens – thistles and dandelions, crabgrass and ragweed. Weed defined as a plant that does more harm than good . But the older manuscripts are more specific, they use the word tare – which is a specific plant, the darnel. As you can see, the similarities between the wheat and the darnel in the earliest stages make it difficult to identify. And its roots intertwine with wheat and grains attach to the stem. With such an infestation, there is not a simple solution for eradication — pull up the shoots and you pull up the wheat; wait until the harvest and you poison the grain and contaminate next year’s crop with falling seeds. Tares, darnel that look like wheat are, in the end, poisonous. The seeds can cause blindness or death if eaten. Certainly, we would say, a good reason to weed them right out!
To those of us who find satisfaction in weeding and satisfaction in conveniently putting our neighbors and co-workers into understandable boxes, this parable makes us more than a bit uncomfortable. This parable urges us to stop our human nature judgments of good versus bad, leaving that work to God, alone. And calls us to live alongside all of God’s people. Even those whom we might place in a category of causing more harm than good – just like the weeds in our parable.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was not only a civil rights leader, but first and foremost a Baptist preacher, said, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” The broader concerns of humanity remind us that Jesus came for all people, not just those whom we like.
Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested that weeds were “plants whose virtues have yet to be discovered yet.” There was a recent interview with a dandelion farmer, yes, someone who intentionally cultivated what others might disregard as weeds. The farmer grows dandelions for wine and for greens. When asked the hardest part of dandelion farming , he answered grass…keeping grass out of the dandelions. It seems just like Jesus to add layers and layers to parables, such that you and I keep studying and seeking across years and decades. Perhaps, the difference between grass and dandelion isn’t one good and one bad…but the difference is in use, the purpose, and the end product.
The church over centuries has understood and examined the church in different ways.
– Noah’s ark
– Reformed and reforming
– Hospital for the sick
– Saved community
Who can be in the church? What kind of leadership are they allowed to have? You and I begin to weed, when we suggest that one person is worthy of spending time with and another is not. Now, I realize this flies in the face of the advice that many of our parents gave us about not spending time with troublemakers . But the words of Jesus and the words of the world are not always the same.
This kind of faith calls us to something different. A seedy faith, I call it. Seedy is one of the words that conjures up colorful images. We tend to use it in front of words like: seedy bar, seedy part of town, seedy man. We usually say it with a slight whisper to our voices and looking around with our eyes. It is rarely meant as a good thing. It originates from plants that “go to seed” and are no longer good for what they were intended.
Maybe, instead of searching for the waldos and the odlaws among us, you and I are called to live as beacons of light and love. To live knowing that there is wheat and there are tares. And yet, the job of judging is not ours to do. That is for God alone. Our seedy faith is one that calls us to live out the life of faith in the midst of all of the places that we find ourselves. For as our children learned this week at VBS, even when you are left out, different, don’t understand, do wrong or afraid – Jesus loves you.
This is the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ, thanks be to God, Amen.
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United States Department of Agriculture
Taylor, Barbara Brown. Seeds of Heaven, The: Sermons on the Gospel of Matthew. (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2004), 34.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Miscellanies. (London: Adament Media Corp, 2006), 396.
From West Grove 2014 VBS, Weird Animals by Group.