"Wheat and Weeds" Given July 23

       I wonder how many of us have ever been really disappointed in someone? Oh, I'm not talking about the more than just feelings of disgust that many of us feel towards the latest politician or S & L executive oror trigger-happy fanatic,, or wall street mogul or even preacher who got caught doin' what they ought not to be a'doin'. I'm talking about something more severe than what some might feel about the latest set of broken promises coming out of Springfield, or Washington.

       I'm talking about how you or I might feel if someone we looked up to, someone we liked and trusted and admired suddenly "showed their true colors" and let us down. I'm speaking of the genuine feeling of betrayal we would experience if someone we know, someone you and I actually placed some store in, someone who was perhaps even our hero, suddenly failed to come up to the standards we expected of them in a profound way.

      If any of you ever watch the re-runs of the TV show MASH, you may have seen an episode that deals with a case of mild hero worship that Radar, the naive young company clerk, develops in regard to Hawkeye. Hawkeye is depressed and sickened by all the waste of war he sees around him. Along with the others, he is bored, frustrated, homesick, repelled, lonely in the face of the terrible hell of war in Korea. As a result, Hawkeye takes occasional refuge in the bottle.

       In the episode I'm speaking of, out of boredom in a slack time, Hawkeye has gotten drunk. Suddenly, totally unexpectedly, the choppers come in, bearing wounded. But Hawkeye is not capable of operating. The other doctors must cover for him. Radar is shocked. He has always looked up to Hawkeye. Radar feels betrayed by his hero's lapse.

        Radar later self-righteously confronts Hawkeye. This leads to an argument, alienation between the two men, and eventual reconciliation. The upshot of the episode was that Radar came to a more realistic view of Hawkeye as a person. As a result, a new relationship evolved between them. It was a more realistic, a more adult, a more equitable relationship.

The two men were able to leave behind the old unequal relationship that had been based on the idealized view of one person by the other.

        Now their relationship could be based on honest acceptance of one other, with more realistic recognition of the other as a real, live flesh and blood person, with all the strengths and weaknesses that make us human.

       There are a lot of people in this world who aren't as wise as the fictional Iowa farm boy Radar O'Reilly. Radar had learned that his hero had all-too-human feelings and failings. His hero admitted those, and assumed responsibility for his lapse and demanded respect for himself as a person-- respect based on reality. And as a result, Radar and Hawkeye eventually were able to come to like and respect one another as friends.

       There aren't many people in this world who are able to do that. There are so many people who sit alone and frustrated, disappointed, and wounded. They are locked into their own disappointment with others, disillusioned with the world, angry with life itself. As a result, they are unable to respond to any sort of legitimate needs or possibilities. As a result, they are unable to struggle for a better life, a better world, a better humanity.

       As they see it, everything is rotten, all actions are suspect, everything good is suspicious, all love flows out of self-interest, all motives are mixed, all spirit is dubious. These are people who would solemnly agree with the humorous novelist Dan Jenkins, who whimsically writes, "there ain't nothing in this world that's dead solid perfect."

      To be fair, I know we all feel that way at times. We all occasionally yield to the temptation to "throw the baby out with the bath water". A lot of us have been disappointed--hurt by life, by partners, by friends, by family, by other people. A lot of people have been hurt by the church.

I heard the story of the Pastor of a tiny congregation saddled with a big old building in Manhattan. His congregation was so small he didn't have a lot to do, so he placed a tiny ad in the classified section of the New York Times.

"Anyone who's been wounded by the church drop by on Tuesday night and we'll talk about it." He expected maybe twelve, fifteen people to show up. Come Tuesday night, four thousand people were lined up outside his door.

        Those people were telling that flabbergasted pastor that in one way or another, the church had let them down. But at least they were willing to give the church another chance by showing up that Tuesday night.

     Many folks aren't even able to do that much--and with less excuse. They can tell you everything that's wrong with the church--and nothing about what's right. They are shocked when church people get angry, or act in a petty manner, or act bossy, or gossip, or show their feelings or their failings in any way.

      They call us "hypocrites" if we're less than perfect. They tell us of their disappointment by walking away and never looking back. And they end up in effect, saying to devil with the church, to heck with this Christianity business. They maintain there's nothing to this religion business.

      Why? Maybe they had a pastor they didn't like, or they were in a church fight, or someone said something, or someone did something that offended them. It might have been minor, or it might have been deeply traumatic. Or maybe it's because they feel the church is too liberal, or too conservative, or too catholic, or too evangelical, or too integrated, or too segregated, or to homophobic or too acceptingto suit them.

      Sometimes those of us who stay in the church, who even work in the church feel that way too. Sometimes we feel that way about other people. A lot of times, in point of fact. People just don't seem to come up to our private and personal standards. Perhaps we may even start to come to feel that way about working for the coming of Christ's Kingdom.

        There seems at times to be almost much wrong in the church as in the world around us. And there is so much pettiness in our own midst. And there seems to be so much focus on the petty, that true never seems to get addressed. And that's when, I think, this morning's Gospel reading has a special relevance for us.

        The Gospel this morning is about the field--the same field as last week we assume. It's the field in which God's good seed is growing. Seed planted by the Divine Sower--through us.             

       But, says Jesus, all throughout the field of God's world, there's other seed as well. All throughout the field of wheat seed, also lie weeds or tares. Zinzania is the Greek word used here. It refers to a kind of annual grass that looks very much like wheat and can grow wild among the rows wheat. And that's the heart of the parable's deep-rooted dilemma.

       "An enemy has sown weeds among the wheat" the farmhands report. Their instinct, like ours is to weed out these intruders.

        Many think that the parable is about the Judgment Day. Others think Jersus is pointing to all us individual good sheaves of wheat having to put up with all those people who are nasty weeds living among and around us. Others believe the parable tells us that the church of Jesus Christ as the field and the weeds are this wicked world that surrounds us. But I wonderr if the parable isn't also--on it's most basic level--about none of us being perfect. Perhaps Jesus also meant that we aren't the individual sheaves of wheat--we're each of us-- the whole bloomin' field.

       In our deepest selves-- good and bad, justice and injustice, love and hate, blessing and curse are so radically intertwined that we are unable to root them out on our own. Just like the field, just like this world, you and I are each of us, a mixture. We all have good and bad in us.

     Wheat and weeds, life and death, sin and saintliness, original sin and original blessing lie mixed together in all of us. And on the surface, at first glance, the wrong, the broken-ness, the imperfection, the evil in us, can often look so much like the good. The enemy who sows the weeds you see, is really us.

      "Should we go pull out the weeds from the field?" The farmer sees a potential for harm that the farmhands in their zeal have overlooked.

      "No, for in gathering them, you might accidentally uproot the wheat among them." The farmer was smart enough to know that good can also in it's zeal to weed out evil, unwittingly achieve great things on evil's behalf.

      Holy wars, crusades, inquisitions, witch-hunts, scapegoating, racism, fanaticism, fascism, homophobia, age-ism, sexism, and just plain every-day church fights are all examples. "He meant well" and "she thought she was doing the right thing" are among the saddest excuses in the church's vocabulary. (And in humanity's vocabulary as well.)

     None of us is perfect. And though we can expect the effort for good, though we ought to be striving after perfection in our own selves, we none of us, have any right to expect perfection from any one else. A wife, a husband, a child, a pastor, a friend, none of us are all wheat and no weeds. We are all imperfect, unfinished, incomplete, but hopefully still growing.

"Please be patient with me, God isn't done with me yet" reads a popular "T" shirt.

      And if none of us is perfect, how can any human institution-- governmental, financial, psychological, cultural or societal--be perfect? How can even the church, which despite the seeds of the Divine within her is still made up of human beings be perfect? To place ultimate faith in the goodness of anything less that the wisdom of the Divine Sower and Lord of the Harvest is to inevitability court disappointment and heartache.

        That's the spirit of the parable. That's an inherent part of who we are as human beings. That's inherent in the nature of the world. After all, why do you think pencils come with erasers? Why did God invent white- out?

       Jesus understood. The wheat and the weeds are often intertwined-- sometimes radically so, in their very roots. Jesus did not however, say that things would always remain that way. He spoke of growth, of final victory, of the good wheat that would come in at the Final Harvest--wheat fit to be eaten by all. Jesus spoke of the time when the wise farmer would confound the adversary by harvesting both the wheat to eat and the weeds to use as kindling.

In this way, Jesus reminds us that change is always possible. Jesus suggests that the wheat will one day come to over-grow the weeds. The crop is, after all, not yet ripe. Indeed, some of what we thought were weeds might even turn out in reality to be a different hybrid of wheat. And Jesus suggests that even the weeds too, may have an as yet undefined purpose in God's plan.

         The power to change, the power to overcome is in the Divinely sown seed. An alcoholic willing to yield to the Higher Power can stop drinking. A miser who turns his or her life over to God, can become generous. Someone lost can find their way--with the help of a guide.          

       Someone caught in the depths of depression and desolation can find meaning and purpose--in Christ. A smoker can find within themselves the willpower to quit--with the help of God. A lost sinner can be redeemed, and start growing toward sainthood—through the Spirit's touch..

     You and I can conquer our baser impulses eventually. Granted, usually only one fault at at a time. And not on our own and not necessarily without both human help and Divine strength to draw upon. But in the meantime, we can learn to live with them victoriously. We can change the direction of our lives--if we're sufficiently tired of the direction in they've been going under our own guidance.

      The narrow mind can expand. The bigot can learn to love. Even a grump can learn to smile. The future--our future as believers is open.

        All possibility, all opportunity for growth of the good seed lies in the power of the Lord of the Harvest. We can turn to our Redeemer for healing and growth, wholeness and hope. For it is true that in Him, and in His service, lies the power to transform our lives, our selves, and eventually our world.

       So while we perceive the wheat and the weeds growing alongside one another, we are by no means to be passive about evil. We are to nurture the good within our own selves and within our world--that it might prevail. We are to keep growing, keep striving, through our actions and attitudes to overcome, to literally over-grow the weeds arouns as well as within us. We are to leave behind, our disappointment, disillusionment and fanaticism.

       That's hard for us at times--we're so quick to judge, so quick to take offense, so quick to want to weed the field. But God reminds us after all, it's not our farm. The final disposition of evil is in the hands of the Lord of the Harvest.

     Evil's most formidable opponents in this world are not holy crusaders, not selkf-apppointed moraality police, not would-be Inquisitors who hack about at the weeds, uprooting tender young sprouts of wheat in their zeal to clean out the field. Those who do most to promote the cause of Christ's coming Realm in this world are too busy simply being good wheat--too trying to beco me exactly what God created us to be--the best person--the best field of God's good wheat that we can be. Amen.