Wilderness

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

July 19, 2020

11 Proper A

          When I was a child, our grandparents spent their summers living in a real log-cabin in the mountains of North Carolina.  We could see daylight between the logs and the house had a damp mildew musty smell even with the doors and windows wide open.  Shabby chic would not even begin to describe the house, which was probably built in the 1930’s and not much had been done since then.  The house had a huge porch off to one side which served as the dining room. The tiny kitchen was barely functional.  In terms of creature comforts, there was nothing much beyond basic indoor plumbing.  And yet, the cabin was holy ground for my brother, sister, and myself when we were growing up and we loved going there.  What made the cabin holy was not the appeal of the house itself, or the furnishings, or anything else about the structure, I assure you.  What made the house holy ground were the experiences we had there, the family gatherings and time with our grandparents, the love we experienced there, and the freedom to explore the woods around the house.  All three of us hold those memories near and dear to our hearts.

          This morning, Jacob is on the run from his brother Esau, having cheated Esau out of his birthright as we heard last week.  Night is falling and Jacob is tired, so he stops for the night in the wilderness, takes a stone for a pillow, and falls asleep.  While he is asleep, he has a powerful dream in which he hears God repeat God’s promise to Abraham except this time God promises Jacob that God will give Jacob the land on which he sleeps and descendants like the dust of the earth.  God then says “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”  If there was ever any doubt that Jacob would be the heir of the promise to Abraham, that doubt has been removed.  When Jacob wakes up, he realizes that he is in a holy place, a place made holy, I would suggest, by a powerful experience of the presence of God. 

          We also hear the parable of the wheat and the weeds this morning.  In this parable, the servants want to tear the weeds out of the field so the wheat can grow, which makes good sense.  But the householder will not allow them to do so for fear that the servants will tear out the wheat along with the weeds.  Jesus explains that the good seed are the children of the Kingdom, and the weeds are the children of the evil one.  At the end of the age, the wheat and the weeds will be sorted out, and, because this is Matthew’s gospel, the weeds will be thrown into the furnace of fire and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.   Matthew’s gospel is the gospel most concerned with the separation of the righteous and the unrighteous and is the gospel most taken with the furnace of fire and the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

          In our lectionary readings this summer, we are reading sequentially from Genesis and soon Exodus, and from Matthew’s gospel.  So, in one sense it is utter coincidence that we hear the parable of the wheat and the weeds on the same Sunday we hear God confer the promise to Abraham onto Abraham’s grandson Jacob, who has already proven himself to be more weed than wheat.  Jacob perhaps becomes Exhibit A for not judging for ourselves who is wheat and who is weed, who will shine like the sun and who will experience weeping and gnashing of teeth in the furnace of fire. 

          But here is the question these readings raise for me: Can the wilderness of Covid-19, like Jacob’s wilderness, be made holy?

          These days, we can all too easily slip into labeling people as wheat or weeds in the midst of our disagreements over how to curb the spread of Covid-19, how to strengthen the economy, how to talk about race, and on and on.  The list of ways we are divided only grows by the day.  And we so easily move from “I disagree with you” or even “Your view is wrong” to “off to the furnace of fire with you!” labeling some people wheat and other people weeds.

          Jesus reminds us this morning that we cannot always tell the wheat from the weeds, and that if we seek to eliminate the weeds we may well kill off the wheat.  The reading from Genesis reminds us that 1) what may look for all the world like a weed, in this case Jacob, can actually be transformed by God into wheat and 2) that places are made holy by what happens in them.  If a place can be made holy by what happens there, and if wheat and weeds are to live together because a) they cannot always be told apart and b) if the weeds are uprooted, the wheat may be damaged and the whole crop lost, then perhaps humankind is called to be a community rooted in something other than judgement and division.  Perhaps humankind is being called to be a community rooted in love.  What does this look like?  For us as Episcopalians who renew our baptismal covenant every time we have a baptism, this looks like seeking and serving Christ in all people, respecting the dignity of every human being, working for justice and peace, and loving our neighbor as ourselves.  In other words, being a community rooted in love means treating every human being as precious wheat despite our differences.  Is the easy?  Absolutely not, which is why we answer every question in the baptismal covenant with “I will, with God’s help.”  But if, with God’s help, we can live as people rooted in love, then perhaps, just perhaps this wilderness we find ourselves in can be make holy.  Perhaps this wilderness called Covid-19 can be transformed by love into a place where we experience God’s presence in new ways through our love for each other.  We will still be in the wilderness.  But a wilderness in which we are transformed by the experience of God and practicing God’s abundant and inclusive love loses the power to destroy us.

                                                                             Amen.