I grew up in Pennsylvania. Outside of church, football was just about the most important thing there. Joe Paterno faithfully led the Nittany Lions year after year, clad in their uniforms that still to this day look a bit too much like pajamas. I think one of the reasons fall is my favorite season is that the smells, sounds, and weather all remind me of weekends spent at the football field.
My school was pretty basic. We were the only school in the area that didn’t have lights on our field — no Friday Night Lights for us. Our team played on Saturdays. Even when I was in elementary school, I fondly recall going to every home game, treating the trusses under the bleachers like monkey bars, and having just enough change in my pocket to get some popcorn or some other treat for the game.
We did get lights when I was in high school, which was great fun. They fundraised, and I can remember the first time they lit up the field just like I can remember watching the first night game at Wrigley Field on TV. But, in typical fashion for my school, a couple of years later the bleachers were condemned, so fans got to stand around the field under the lights for a couple of years. I told you my school was pretty basic.
Going to football games was where I first encountered the marching band. Clad in black and gold, the Marching Braves would play throughout the game, getting the crowd hyped up. At halftime, the band would assemble and play their show. They were as much a part of the experience as the football team.
My school was actually a junior/senior high school. Seventh and eighth grades were in the same building as the seniors. As a seventh grader, I looked at seniors with their letter jackets and patchy facial hair, and in my mind, they might as well have been forty years old. They were huge and intimidating.
Because seventh through twelfth grades were in the same building, our marching band recruited eighth graders. Sure, they used the concert bands as a pipeline but every year they did a special trip as enticement for new students to sign up. I was a soccer player, so I knew that I wasn’t going out for the football team. When the band director announced that the trip was going to Washington D.C., I couldn’t wait to sign up. I had no idea that this one brief trip would lead to five years of drill, new routines, parades, halftime shows, and competitions. I just wanted a few days on the road with friends.
Off we went. Our first stop was in Baltimore. We marched in the Preakness Parade, connected with the horse race. It was my first parade, and all I remember from it was that it was long. But the payoff was several days in D.C., seeing the sites, and more importantly for me, spending quality time with friends.
Because the band had a five grade span, it was a seriously mixed group of people. The older students felt dangerous to me. I remember that they searched through our bags before we went, and several seniors had packed things they weren’t supposed to have as a joke on the chaperones, who found themselves emptying contraband from these bags and then not really sure what they should do with it. Now, I think it was a pretty funny gag, but I also remember how mad the adults got about it.
I’m guessing many of you have traveled in a mixed group before. Perhaps it was on a school trip. Maybe it’s like that when you gather with extended family. Maybe you did a cruise or a tour where you’re simply stuck with the same people on the same boat or bus. This band trip was definitely like that for me.
Sure, I loved spending time with my friends. We got close. Sometimes little romantic relationships even blossomed for a while before withering away. But there were others who looked up to the older kids and their older kid behavior and wanted to be like them. Sometimes, when the seniors got too close, we found ourselves trying to get away in case they wanted to pick on one of us innocent young ones. And, of course, in any group like this, there are always people who simply are annoying. You don’t want to be around them. As I have aged, I’ve come to realize that those “annoying” kids probably had zero desire to be around me. Perhaps to them I was the annoying kid.
In a perfect world, my marching band would have just been made up of the people who looked and acted like me. I bet we would have all gotten along so well, and if all the people who bothered me weren’t there, well, surely everything would have been better, right? Wrong.
That’s a bit of what’s at stake in today’s parable. Like last week, Jesus is speaking about agriculture, but this parable is wholly different than the Parable of the Sower. That one invited one-to-one interpretation. This soil is like this. That soil is like that. Today’s doesn’t work that way.
The parable of the weeds of the field (as Jesus later calls it) appears to be a parable describing the muddiness of life now, urging Christians to have both faith and patience. They live in a mixed group, sort of like what I experienced in joining the marching band. Except this clearly goes further because it’s about following Jesus. The wheat are the “children of the kingdom,” as Jesus later reveals in verse 37. The bad seed are the “children of the evil one,” again using Jesus’ words.
This is where making too many literal connections in this parable doesn’t work. Clearly, Jesus expects that people encounter the gospel, the joys of life where God breaks in, and he knows that people change. Weeds don’t change. They’re weeds. So, in this parable, the enemy runs through trying to ruin this field by planting seeds that aren’t good for the harvest. If I plant a bean seed, it would be strange for me to hope that they might turn into sunflowers, right? That’s not in their nature.
As I let this parable take up residence in my life this week, I dwelled on how it’s really about three things — maturing, tolerance, and waiting.
In this parable, both types of seed need time to grow up. It’s not like these are Jack’s magic beans that will sprout into a heavenly beanstalk overnight. No, the farmer knows that the work of sowing is over, and now it’s time to sleep. It’s time to nurture through water and fertilizer so that good growth and maturity will happen over time.
But, let’s face it. Waiting to mature is hard. It’s hard for those who are maturing, isn’t it? Who among us didn’t push boundaries with our parents? Why is curfew still 10? My friends can stay out until midnight! We have all experienced wanting something now that we couldn’t have until a certain age or until we had finished a program or course. Who among us as parents never looked at the behavior of our kids and thought they’re not ready for this thing they want?
Waiting for full maturity is even harder when you look around you and see a mess that you’d like someone to fix. That’s part of this parable here. Jesus is surrounded by people who want God’s kingdom to come in its fullness right away. It’s a good desire. It’s something we still pray for today — your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
All of us have felt it in our own personal ways, but Jesus is preaching patience here. In God’s wisdom, things are still not ripe for the harvest, and an early harvest will not accomplish the good we want to see. As usual, N. T. Wright gets to the core of this issue.
“Would people really like it if God were to rule the world directly and immediately, so that our every thought and action were weighed, and instantly judged and if necessary punished, in the scales of his absolute holiness? If the price of God stepping in and stopping a campaign of genocide were that he would also have to rebuke and restrain every other evil impulse, including those we all still know and cherish within ourselves, would we be prepared to pray that price? If we ask God to act on special occasions, do we really suppose that he could do that simply when we want him to, and then back off again for the rest of the time?”
It reminds me of what happens in the movie Bruce Almighty where God gives his powers and responsibilities Jim Carrey’s character, Bruce. He quickly grows weary of managing the complexities of everything, and in his meager wisdom decides to answer everyone’s prayers with “yes,” which immediately creates havoc all over the world because what people want isn’t necessarily good for them and is often in conflict with the desires of others.
This parable is also a call for tolerance. Guess what? Until God decides otherwise, we’re sharing the same field! The wheat and the weeds share the same soil. Their roots are intermingled. Trying to pull out the weeds will harm the wheat. Jesus says to leave the field alone until harvest comes. The harvest is a biblical symbol for God’s judgment. Until then, the good and the bad seed share the same earth.
This also goes back to my point that the role of Christians goes beyond simply waiting for God to fix things. No, we are to live in such a way that others see Jesus living in us. Even the weeds have the opportunity to change, but if we don’t live wisely and lovingly alongside others who are not like us, then we will not have the opportunity to share life and the good news with others.
At the end of the service I often close by saying something like this, “Go into the world to love everyone in the name of Jesus.” It’s a strikingly bold charge because we all have people we struggle to love in our lives. Some people are hard. Others do things that make us sad or angry. Some people hurt and even destroy things that we care about it. The call of the gospel is always about living alongside even the difficult people so that they too might hear, receive, and know the good news of Jesus. This September I’m planning to preach on the Way of Love, focusing on how we learn to love those who are hard to love. Stay tuned.
So, what do we do while we wait? I’d like to close us with three things that we can do while we live in a weedy world. The first is this: Mature. I asked last week about what God is trying to grow in you. I return to that now, but I want to push us a step further. What are you doing to encourage spiritual maturity in your life?
One of the greatest joys I have as a pastor is when people awaken to how being involved in a church offers the opportunity to grow their faith deeper through prayer, study, and action. One of my greatest sadnesses as a pastor has been how few people do this. While we wait, God gives us the opportunity to mature. Do we want to be weak and anemic, or do we want to be robust and strong, growing because we trust God’s goodness is at work in us when we study and pray together?
Second, we need to live wisely among our neighbors. I think our yard signs for Kind Haven offer an opportunity to do just that. Our neighbors have a visible sign that you are seeking to be kind. I hope it goes beyond the sign into action, though. Do you seek to engage with those who are different than you? Do you really want to know them and what motivates them? Do you desire to love them with God’s love?
The world is always a mixed field. It was in Jesus’ day. It was in Paul’s too, so his words to the small churches in Colossae still ring true. He urges, “Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone.”
In our parable, the word for “weeds” (which you may have heard called “tares” before) is for a plant called darnel. This plant looks an awful lot like wheat until it’s time for harvest. In other words, the wheat and the weeds are hard to tell apart. God’s given all of us this field to share. Let’s learn how to live with tolerance toward others. We don’t know the wheat from the weeds, and it’s God’s job to tell the difference anyway.
Finally, celebrate that God will make all things new. What God has done in Jesus is final and sure. We now live between his resurrection and the promised day when God will bring things to completion. So, “We wait with patience, not like people in a dark room wondering if anyone will ever come with a lighted candle, but like people in the early morning who know that the sun has arisen and are now waiting for the full brightness of midday.”
There is time for us to grow up. It is also time for us to grow up.