8th Sunday after Pentecost Sermon

“They will be thrown into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth,” that hellish vision that has tormented us through the centuries, tapping into our greatest fear that, in the end, God wants to send us to hell.

So let me start with this: Yes, Jesus threatens hell more than any other source in the Bible. But when he does, it’s almost always the religious leaders he threatens – the scribes, pharisees, and priests – because they’re the ones whose job it is to represent God accurately to the people. And when God is being misrepresented, this becomes a real problem for Jesus. It’s never the poor, the outcast, the prostitutes that Jesus threatens with hell. It’s the “very religious.”

But the long legacy of the church has been to reverse that formula, for the religious insiders to threaten the outsiders with damnation: “If you don’t say the salvation prayer, or participate in our sacraments and rituals, or do the right morality, then you’re going to hell.” And so evangelism has become this bleak and threatening activity that looks nothing like the good news Jesus proclaimed, a kingdom filled with compassion for those who are hurting.

At the end of the day, I cannot tell you what hell is or is not. But what I can say, is the ones who should tremble are people like me, whose reputation and livelihood depend on how comfortable a gospel we proclaim.

But that gets beyond the substance of today’s parable. Let’s move on.

In this parable Jesus imagines a field that a farmer has sown with wheat. But some enemy came along and sowed weeds into it as well so that, when the plants come up, it’s full of both wheat and weeds.

And as for this enemy, let me just say what delight he’s provided in my marriage. Almost every time Cynthia asks some question that points to my guilt, like, “Who left these dishes beside the sink without putting them in the dishwasher?” my standard response begins with, “Well, some enemy came into the kitchen…”

But I regress.

Some enemy has sown weeds into the wheat field, and now it’s a mess. The servants ask if they should pull them out, but the master says, “Don’t try and take them out now, you’ll just ruin the wheat. Wait ‘til the harvest and we’ll deal with separating them then.”

That’s the gist of the parable. And later when he explains it, Jesus says: the field is the world, Jesus is the farmer, and the wheat seeds are the children of the kingdom. “Children” here could just mean literal human disciples (both the apostles then and us today), but I suspect it’s an anthropomorphized term in which “the children” are anything that is holy and true. They’re every manifestation of the Kingdom of God in this world – every act of love and compassion; every moment of reconciliation. And likewise, the weeds are everything contrary to the Kingdom of God – everything that leads to enmity and division and brokenness. And the harvest is the end of the age – whatever that ultimate end will be – when God’s angels will separate the weeds from the wheat and destroy everything that is not holy and true.

And you know what? Even though parables like this, that threaten hell, always make us a bit squirmy, I actually think it’s really valuable for us in this age in which we’re living. Everywhere we turn, people (including myself!) are behaving just like the servants in the parable, ready to rush into the field and yank out all the weeds. You know what I mean! Everyone’s outraged at all those other people who are so wrong – so wrong about climate change, so wrong about abortion, so wrong about patriotism and politics and the Supreme Court, so wrong about race and racism. We’re all so certain, on all these issues we’re dealing with, that we’re the wheat and they’re the weeds and, by God, they need to be yanked up. So get your hoe! Grab the Roundup! Our survival is at stake and they need to go.

But along comes the farmer, along comes Jesus. “Nah. Don’t do that. You’re just gonna make a mess of everything. Let ‘em grow together. It’s my job to deal with it at the end.”

And I’ve got to tell you, as I think on these things, it does my soul no end of good to be freed to say, “Great. This one’s on you, God. I can’t solve all their problems. And I don’t want to live in a perpetual state of outrage. There’s so much I fear and so much I don’t understand. So, God, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to work on loving the person in front of me and let you handle all these weeds when the time comes. And, please God, let me not be a weed.”

And this isn’t a copout. I do need to stay engaged in this world; I do need to pursue justice and compassion and to pay what costs come along the way. But I want to work on lighting many candles, rather than getting drunk on my anger and shouting at the darkness.

So let me tell you a story.

In Bryan Stevenson’s book, Just Mercy, he tells the story of his pro-bono work defending a special-needs black guy who’d gotten in trouble and imprisoned years before when he was still just a kid. And the first time he goes to meet him in the prison he has to get through this horrible, racist, red-neck guard. He’s just awful, using his authority to humiliate the lawyer, strip-searching him and mocking him, making him jump through unnecessary hoops. It’s outrageous. But the lawyer, who just wants to get through the hazing so he can help this prisoner, bites his tongue and endures it all. Finally, he’s able to meet his client and the story goes on. Time passes. Then a new hearing date is set. The client needs to be transported to the courtroom and guess who’s assigned the role of transporting him? That same racist guard. You can imagine what torment took place in those unmonitored hours on the road.

And for a few days during the hearing the lawyer is defending his client and showing what a screwed-up world he was raised in: in and out of foster homes, physically abused, molested, and on and on – this totally soul-crushing world.

Time passes. And after a while the lawyer returns to the prison. And that same bigoted guard is there to process him. But this time, it was a totally different experience. And I quote now from the book:

“Hello, Mr. Stevenson. How are you?” the guard asked. He sounded earnest and sincere. I was skeptical.

“Well, I’m fine. How are you?” He was looking at me differently from how he had before; he wasn’t glaring and seemed genuinely to want to interact. I decided to play along.

“Look, I’ll step into the bathroom to get ready for your search.”

“Oh, Mr. Stevenson, you don’t have to worry about that… I know you’re okay.” Everything about his tone and demeanor was different.

“Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate that. I’ll go back and sign the book, then.”

“Mr. Stevenson, you don’t have to do that. I saw you coming and signed your name in for you. I’ve taken care of it.” I realized that he actually looked nervous.

I was confused by the shift in his attitude. I thanked him and walked to the visitation room door with the officer following behind me. He turned to unlock the padlock so that I could go inside. As I started to walk past him to enter, he placed his hand on my shoulder.

“Hey, um, I’d like to tell you something.”

I wasn’t sure where he was going with this.

“You know I took ole Avery to court for his hearing and was down there with y’all for those three days. And I uh, well, I want you to know that I was listening.” He removed his hand from my shoulder and looked past me, as if staring at something behind me. “You know, I – uh, well, I appreciate what you’re doing, I really do. It was kind of difficult for me to be in that courtroom to hear what y’all was talking about. I came up in foster care, you know. I came up in foster care, too.” His face softened. “Man, I didn’t think anybody had it as bad as me. They moved me around like I wasn’t wanted nowhere. I had it pretty rough. But listening to what you was saying about Avery made me realize that there were other people who had it as bad as I did. I guess even worse. I mean, it brought back a lot of memories, sitting in that courtroom.”

“You know, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think it’s good what you’re doing. I got so angry coming up that there were plenty of times when I really wanted to hurt somebody, just because I was angry. I made it to eighteen, joined the military, and you know, I’ve been okay. But sitting in that courtroom brought back memories, and I think I realized how I’m still kind of angry.”

I smiled. He continued: “That expert doctor you put up said that some of the damage that’s done to kids in these abusive homes is permanent; that kind of made me worry. You think that’s true?”

“Oh, I think we can always do better,” I told him. “The bad things that happen to us don’t define us. It’s just important sometimes that people understand where we’re coming from.”[1]

And the story goes on from there.

And the reason I share this story with you is because, if it were all left up to me and my outrage at the weeds, I would have yanked that racist guard out of the soil as fast as I could. But the farmer let him stay, to grow alongside the wheat. Until one day when that weed – that guard – beheld the wheat: in this case, an African-American man living out his vocation as a pro-bono lawyer, pursuing justice for the most overlooked, vulnerable people in American society. He saw him proclaim and restore the dignity of that poor, forgotten black kid, and in so doing, proclaimed the Kingdom of God to the soul of that poor, racist, white kid.

And please, God, when the farmer comes to harvest the wheat may he discover that guard also to be the wheat.

He wasn’t the weed.

I thought he was. He thought he was. He lived like he was. But because Bryan Stevenson was pursuing the Kingdom of God head-on, restoring justice to this world, along the way this guard, this witness to righteousness, was himself changed.

This field is yours, God. This world is yours. And we are your children. We want to join you in your compassion and to trust you to do with it as you will, in this age, and in the age to come. Amen.

[1] Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy, 2014.