Beautiful Weeds

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

July 23, 2017

11 Proper A

          My grandmother’s favorite flower was Queen Anne’s Lace.   Whenever we were out and about and saw a field of Queen Anne’s Lace, we had to stop, no matter where we were, so she could pick the flowers.  She might spot the plants in a cemetery, a park, or even someone’s yard.  Regardless of the location, she thought nothing of hopping out of the car, scissors in hand, to score a beautiful bunch of her favorite flower.  When she got home, she pressed the flowers between the pages of an ancient, enormous encyclopedia.  From what I could tell, flowers only went into the pages of the book.  Nothing ever came out.  But the joy my grandmother had in finding and saving the most perfect specimens of Queen Anne’s lace was perfect and complete.

          So, imagine my surprise when I found out that Queen Anne’s lace is actually a weed!  No wonder we never got arrested for trespassing and cutting other people’s flowers.  What my grandmother saw as utterly beautiful and worthy of preserving was actually something most people pull from their gardens.  If beautiful Queen Anne’s lace is actually a weed, how on earth are we supposed to tell weeds from flowers?  Gardening is so complicated!

          Jesus poses a similar dilemma this morning, but of course Jesus is not talking about actual weeds.  Jesus is comparing the Kingdom of Heaven with someone who sowed good seed in his field, expecting good wheat to grow, but got weeds as well.  When the slaves want to destroy the weeds so that the wheat can grow, Jesus says “no.”  In pulling the weeds, the wheat would be uprooted and die as well.  The slaves want to make sure that the weeds are destroyed.  Jesus wants to make sure the wheat will flourish.

          Any good gardener knows that for the good plants to flourish, the weeds must go.  Otherwise, the good plants will not get enough sunshine or enough nutrients from the soil to grow.  So, the slaves are right in their desire to pull the weeds.  But Jesus is not at all concerned with good gardening practices.  Jesus is concerned with the gospel. 

          But what is the gospel message that Jesus is trying to convey?  After explaining the parable to the disciples, Jesus says “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!”   

Matthew is the only gospel writer to be quite so concerned about the end of the world, the final judgement, and weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.  All of the great weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth stories are in Matthew’s gospel.  Matthew is the one who tells us about the wise and foolish virgins, and the separation of sheep from the goats.  The Christians to whom Matthew wrote were quite concerned to divide the world into insiders and outsiders, the righteous and the unrighteous, the clean and the unclean, those who will survive the fiery judgement and those who will not.  Sometimes our world seems a lot like Matthew’s, with much press being given to who is in and who is out, whose behavior is acceptable and whose is not, who is righteous and who is not, who is saved, and who is not.  Some things never change.  Is the gospel message simply that at the end of time, those of us who are weed, whoever we are, will burn and those of us who are wheat, whoever we are, will shine like the sun?

          The problem with that version of the gospel is that it does not fit with the rest of Jesus’ ministry and teachings. Jesus spent most of his time eating with sinners, curing lepers, inviting the outcasts, and otherwise engaging people considered by the religious authorities to be weeds.  Jesus spent much of the rest of his time challenging those religious authorities and confronting the people who were considered righteous, or the wheat.  So, in the same Kingdom of Heaven where the outsiders are insiders and the last are first, might it be the case that those who appear to be weeds are actually wheat and those who appear to be wheat might actually be weeds?  And how are we to tell which is which?

          I believe that this is Jesus’ point.  We humans cannot always tell the weeds from the wheat, so we are not to be about the business of pronouncing final judgement about who is in the Kingdom of God and who is not.  Weeding is not our job.  This does not mean that we are to ignore violence, condone evil, or endorse oppression.  It simply means that ultimate judgement about who is in the Kingdom of God and who is not, is God’s call not ours.   The reading from Genesis and the reading from Romans remind us of this fact.  In Genesis, we hear God say to Jacob in a dream “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac.”  God, in effect, says to Jacob “I am the one who chose the chosen people.”  Paul reminds the Christians in Rome, and all Christians, that we are chosen by God as God’s adopted children.  Then, the Psalmist describes the trust he has in the God who makes these choices with these words: “Lord, you have searched me out and known me; you know my sitting down and my rising up; you discern my thoughts from afar....Search me out, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my restless thoughts.”  This is the God who will separate the wheat from the weeds on the last day.  

          When the slaves ask the master if he would like them to gather the weeds from the fields, the householder replies “No, for in gathering the weeds, you would uproot the wheat along with them.”  The workers want to make their calling the destruction of the weeds.  Ironically, in destroying the weeds, the wheat will be destroyed also, and the mission of the weeds will be fulfilled.  Only God can separate the weeds from the wheat without damage.  The gospel calls us to let go of our need to weed, and live our lives sowing the good seed of the Kingdom of Heaven. 

                                                                   Amen.  

         

          

Bound

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

July 2, 2017

8 Proper A

          Last summer, I was looking for an audiobook to listen to in my car on a long drive.  One of the audiobooks available for download from the Hudson library was “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the first of the seven books in the Harry Potter series.  I read the first Harry Potter book with our son when the book came out in 1997, and read through the series as each new book was released, finishing the last book in 2007.  So, almost a decade later, I was ready to engage the story again.

          After having read the entire series once, I know how the story ends.  Despite that knowledge, I find myself just as caught up in the drama of the story as the first time I read the books.  I am just as tense at the tense parts, concerned about the characters, surprised by the twists and turns of the plot as I was the first time.  How could I possibly lose sleep over the fate of a fictional character in a story I have already read?  Part of the power of a great story is the ability of that story to be experienced as new after being told time and time again. 

          The story of Abraham and Isaac is just such a story.  No matter how many times I hear the story, and no matter how well I know the ending, I am always gripped with both horror and suspense as I hear God tell Abraham to take his son, his only son, who he loves, and offer him as a burnt offering.  What kind of God would even ask that?  And what about Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Hagar?  Isn’t he also Abraham’s beloved son? And why on earth would Abraham comply with God’s request?  Where is Sarah, Isaac’s mother?  Does she not have a say in this matter? There is no evidence that Abraham and Sarah ever speak again after this episode, and Sarah dies shortly thereafter.  And what about God’s promise that God will make a great nation of Abraham?  How is that going to happen if Abraham sacrifices Isaac?  What about Abraham’s relationship with his son, his only son, who he loves?  Abraham, we are told a few verses after our reading concludes, comes down from the mountain alone and I can only imagine the lasting damage that has been done to this father-son relationship.  And how can this story possibly be relevant in our own faith lives?

          While I don’t have the answer to any of these questions, perhaps setting the story in the context of the larger story of Abraham will be helpful.  Sometimes looking at what we do know is helpful in figuring out what we do not know.

          What we know that Abraham has a long and deep relationship with God by the time we get to our story this morning.  When Abram was a mere 75 years old, God called Abram to leave the country of his father and go to a land that God would show him.  Abram trusts God and leaves for an unknown land, and that works out pretty well, despite a few set-backs.  When Abraham is 99 years old, and Abraham and Sarah are childless and obviously way too old to bear children, God promises Abraham descendants that will number the stars in the sky.  As unlikely as that seems, Sarah does give birth to Isaac, at the tender age of 100.  Abraham's trust in God has been amply tested thus far in the story, and God has consistently been worthy of Abraham's trust.

Abraham's long relationship with God has also given Abraham evidence that God knows what God is doing.  When Isaac says to his father "The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" Abraham replies "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering."  God has given Isaac to Abraham and Sarah in fulfillment of a promise that Abraham trusts God will keep, some way, some how.  Abraham's trust in God is confirmed when, ultimately, the sacrifice of Isaac is not required.  Abraham is not a person of blind obedience, but a person with a long and deep relationship with God that has taught Abraham that God can be trusted. 

          So that's Abraham's story.  But what do we know about Isaac?  On the one hand, Isaac may be a child in this story, since the story follows closely after we are told that Isaac was weaned at the age of three.  But on the other hand, the next significant thing to happen following the binding of Isaac is the death of Sarah at age 127.  Since she was 100 when Isaac was born, Isaac could be almost 27 years old in our story this morning, and many commentaries find this to be the more plausible option.  Either way, though, Isaac is bound without protest and put on the altar for sacrifice.  He must be terrified.  At this point, Isaac is utterly dependent on God's intervention to release him from bondage because Abraham has the knife raised. And God is faithful and delivers Isaac from that bondage by preventing Abraham from making a human sacrifice. 

Our Jewish brothers and sisters call this story “The Binding of Isaac”  rather than “The Sacrifice of Isaac” since Isaac was bound but he was not sacrificed.  On Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, our Jewish brothers and sisters read this story and ask the question “By what are we bound?" What has us bound in such a way that we are prevented from living faithfully and being the people God calls us to be?  Pride?  Greed?  Fear? Addiction?  Unhealthy relationships? Can we trust God's intervention to release us or does our bondage give us the illusion of security? On the Rosh Hashana, the faithful are called to examine their lives for what binds them and separates them from God.  As Christians, we hear the apostle Paul say this very thing in the letter to the Romans this morning "When you were slaves to sin (bound to sin), you were free in regard to righteousness.....But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved (bound) to God, you are made holy."  To what are we bound that keeps us from living fully as the people God calls us to be?

          Sometimes life is horrifying.  Sometimes life is merely challenging. Sometimes those challenges are of our own making. Other times they are not. But when we are willing to listen closely to the terrifying story of the binding of Isaac, we hear a story about faithfulness, not blind obedience, rooted in a deep relationship with God, and God's power to release us from bondage and set us free to live as the people God created us to be. The "Binding of Isaac" is no less horrifying, and raises no fewer questions, but perhaps the good news in this story is that we can trust God to act, some way, some how, in the hardest stories of our lives.  

                                                                                                 Amen.