Sermon July 20, 2008

Pentecost Proper 11, Year A

The Rev. M. Fletcher Davis

They say it wasn’t the apple on the tree that caused all the trouble in the Garden of Eden. It was the pair on the ground.

The story of Adam and Eve tells us that whatever the first human beings looked like, whatever their cranial capacity, they were the first ones who had to deal with questions of right and wrong, good and evil, just and unjust. That seems to be pretty basic to our being. We humans just can’t escape moral choices.

We all have instincts – innate dispositions to behave in ways we don’t learn, like the newborn colt that can run with adults within an hour of birth. Biologist Richard Dawkins says two basic instincts drive all living creatures – survival and reproduction. But most human behavior goes far beyond those urges. God gave us freedom to make real choices - and that’s where ethical challenges enter the picture.

Psychiatrist Victor Fankl was a prisoner in the Nazi death-camp, Auschwitz. Prisoners never had enough food – just a small cup of watery soup and a scrap of bread per person per day. In that ghastly laboratory where almost every variable was removed, Frankl noticed that some ate the bread at once, some hoarded it to consume later, and some gave it away. Choices. Ethical choices.

Have you ever been paralyzed with too many choices? What will I do tonight? Which kind of ice cream? Silly examples, but all of us have such experiences. So we try to simplify our choice-making with guidelines that lump choices into categories. Culture and language help us do that.

For example, when I enter a room, it doesn’t usually occur to me to sit on the floor or the door, like a monkey. American culture suggests that I sit on a chair. The English language groups all sorts of furniture under the category chair. When I enter this room, a pew is similar enough. I don’t have to waste any emotional energy making a choice about what to sit on.

We do something like that with people too. With whom will I visit with at the coffee hour? Maybe people I already know, or my age, or people who aren’t engaged in conversation with someone else. The most common category we establish for other people is whether they are like us. We tend to label people like us as OK but those who are different as inferior – “not our kind.” There. That simplifies a lot.

Yet Jesus told me to love my neighbor. What if they are different from me? Do I still have to love them? Remember the lawyer who asked Jesus, Who is my neighbor? Jesus answered with a story, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, then asked, Who was neighbor to the man who was beaten and left for dead on the roadside, the ones who passed by on the other side, or the one who stopped to help?

Another yardstick we use to guide our choices is the continuum from rigid rules to generous inclusion. Scribes and Pharisees went strictly by the book, for example, but Jesus emphasized the spirit behind the rules. The pendulum swings from one side to the other over time. It was probably that yardstick that prompted another of Jesus’ parables, today’s Gospel reading, the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds.

A weed is any plant the speaker considers undesirable. The weed in Jesus’ story was probably darnel. It’s sometimes called ‘false wheat’ since they look so much alike - until the ears appear. Ears of wheat are so heavy they make the whole plant droop, but ears of darnel are so light the stalks remain upright, and if consumed cause nausea and headaches. In the parable, the weed seed is said to have been sown on the wheat seed by “an enemy.” Then the question arises, What shall we do with the evil, with the weeds that grow mixed in with the wheat? Should they be pulled up now so they won’t steal nutrients from the wheat, or allowed to mature with it?

That’s a moral question the Church has faced many times through history. In the Middle Ages, for example, darnel was a symbol for heresy, thoughts or practices that might look Christian but threaten to starve the life out of true faith.

The Church of England in the Middle Ages sometimes tried to rid its fields of darnel – heresies like sermons criticizing the Crusades, or Scriptures written in English. In 1391, a weedy heretic named Walter Brute even proposed that a woman could celebrate the Eucharist!

Today the Church of England is the mother church of the 44 national or regional churches that make up the Anglican Communion. And this very day Anglican bishops representing 160 countries and almost 80 million members are assembling in England for the Lambeth Conference. They’ll read and study Scripture, listen to each other, safeguard creation, engage a multi-faith world, and discern Christ’s calling in 2008.

And as you know, the elephant in their room is ordination. Some think women should not be ordained. Some, who think gays should not be ordained, have refused to attend because they think that’s heresy – darnel - that must be weeded now.

Yet Jesus’ counsel in the parable seems clear: don’t rush to judgment. Let the wheat and the darnel ripen together. The time for harvest – judgment - is surely coming, but if we weed too soon we will damage the entire crop.

It’s the same for us personally. Jesus counsels us against rushing to judgment. The other day a friend told me a story about his Quaker wife who opposes violence in all its forms. As she got out of her car in the Payless parking lot, a Hummer pulled up and she started thinking judgmental thoughts about its driver, another woman. Why would anyone drive one of those gas-guzzlers that reminds everyone of the military vehicles that are so often blown up in Iraq?

The driver was in the checkout line with her, so she asked - very politely - why she drove a Hummer. The woman answered with tears. Her son was serving in Iraq and often had to drive a Hummer through hazardous areas. She said she drove what she called “one of those awful things” in order to feel more intimately her son’s fears.

Quite a difference between what my friend assumed in the parking lot and what she learned in the check out line! Who knows the heart of another, or what changes repentance and forgiveness might stimulate? Our task is not to judge each other. Our task is to love each other.

If we show hatred because we think we see evil, hatred will grow. If we push away people who frighten us, how will they ever grasp God’s love? If we stop watering because the weeds never go away, the good seed will wither. But if we nurture the whole field with the God’s love, the good seed just might overtake the weeds.

So for heaven’s sake don’t weed the field. If you don’t like someone, don’t weed the field. If you don’t like the words that come out of someone’s mouth, don’t weed the field. If you’re worried about the effect someone’s behavior might have on the community, don’t weed the field. The good seed is the love God sows in each of us. Who knows what it might bear - even among the weeds?! So keep on loving. Amen.