Speaker 1: Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2: Now, in the face of these difficult times, we are in a series called the world as it could be. And this series is all about the parables of the kingdom. The stories that Jesus tells not so much really to teach us anything but perhaps more to spark our imagination and get us to believe in a world as in heaven as is possible. Remember that's actually how Jesus teaches us to pray. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
So he frames prayer as a reminder to choose the world that we hope for with our actions. But he teaches us that prayer at the start of his ministry in the Sermon on the Mount. And what's so beautiful about this kingdom Jesus speaks of is that slowly as he teaches, we begin to realize that the kingdom he's talking about is not the kind that will impose itself on us like any other kingdom. In fact, Jesus' kingdom is almost the anti kingdom. Kingdom that rises up within us slowly as we come to see the world the way that Jesus does.
So it's not more rules and more regulations. It's not more barriers and punishment, but instead this imagination of a world of more welcome and grace and possibility. And that's what the kingdom parables are about. Helping us to hope in new ways for a new world. And last week, we talked about the first of these kingdom parables, the parable of the soils.
I often think we hear this story and we say, okay, I get it. There are four different types of soil in the world. There are four different types of people in the world. And the question is, what kind of person am I going to be? And that's definitely a part of what is going on here.
In fact, there are times that is probably precisely what I need to hear from Jesus. But I also want to suggest that that is probably the most obvious and honestly the least interesting part of that story. I mean, that's almost what we would expect a religious leader to say. Right? Like, work hard, listen well, be a good disciple, and all that.
And yet the longer I sit with that story, even as I'm challenged to be better soil, I also I become more and more aware of the wasteful grace of the farmer in the tail, which I think is actually the point. The farmer who discards etiquette and deficiency, A farmer who looks at the cost benefit analysis and then throws it in the trash in order to make sure that every possible square inch of soil he can find gets covered with possibility. Because this is what makes the story so beautiful and so characteristically Jesus. The fact that he is primarily telling us something not about ourselves but about God in this story. That God will always take a chance on you.
God will never imagine that you aren't worth the investment, that God will put just as much into the lost cause as God will into the sure bet, and God will do that because that's who God is. The wasteful love of God that falls upon all of us. That's the story. Now last week, I also mentioned the context for this week's parable because today is all about the weeds that grow up in our fields. And so today, we're gonna cover juxtaposition and riddles and weeds and the big picture.
But first, let's pray. Gracious God of abundant harvest, The one who sows generously, who scatters everywhere, who invites all to come and know you to sit at your table with you. Might we have ears to hear today. Might we be good soil, but might we respond not because we are good, but because you are gracious and have come to find us. As we continue to explore your parables, these images of kingdom that undermine and transform our expectations of what could be.
Would we begin to see you for who you truly are? The good and generous force that sits behind all things. Bringing breath and life to us, inviting each of us to turn from what is broken in our lives and to enter your healing presence. Might we then begin to live with that same openness and grace toward all who cross our paths. Trusting that your way can actually become ours.
In the strong name, the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay. Today is all about the weeds and we're gonna pick up right where we left off last week in Matthew 13 at verse 24. And there we read, Jesus told them another parable and we're gonna stop here for just a minute and I know that's silly because we just got started.
But last week, we didn't get to talk about this word parable. Last week, Jesus kind of jumps straight into his story. This week, the writer of Matthew gives us a label or a genre for these types of stories. Now, parable comes from the Greek parabolae. And at its most basic, that is a compound word made up of the Greek words para and ballo, which mean with or beside and to throw or to push.
So, the basic idea of a parable is to throw two things together. It's a way of creating a juxtaposition. And we see this in Jesus stories all the time. And he takes the idea of a mustard seed and he pushes that together with the kingdom of God to create an unexpected outcome. We're gonna look at that one next week.
He'll take a strained relationship between a father and a son and sibling and push that up against our expectations of God to show us where the cracks in our understanding might be. But there's more to it than just that because by the time parabola becomes a common word in Greek, it has taken on an intransitive quality that means something like to come alongside. So if I were to parable with you, it would mean that I would try to come alongside you and I'd bring my language near to you. I'd speak in ways that close the gap between us. I love that part of a parable too.
And we saw that last week. Jesus says, look, there's a farmer. You know about farming. Let's talk about farming. So he brings his language alongside his audience and he talks in ways that they already inherently understand.
I think it's worth reminding ourselves at times that the most sacred ideas can be communicated in the most secular mundane language. And trust me, however you communicate love and inclusion and welcome and grace to those near you, the fact that you do it will always be far more important than the finesse with which you do. Sacred things can be said in very mundane ways. But there's one last aspect of this idea of parable that we need to talk about. And this one takes us all the way back to the Hebrew language.
Because the Hebrew word that ends up getting translated into Greek with parabola is Mashal. And the Mashal means something pretty similar to what we might mean when we say a proverb like a wise saying. Mashal actually becomes a semi technical term in Hebrew wisdom literature for a wise saying. But what's interesting here for this story is that Mashal can also take on the meaning in Hebrew that approaches something like a riddle. Now my son, who is eight years old right now, has recently discovered riddles.
Unfortunately, he likes his riddles to be very surprising and hard to solve, and his repertoire of riddles is very small, which presents problems because he likes to tell them over again. His favorite one right now is, dad, what table has No legs? And the answer is Vegetable, and it's actually a pretty good joke. I'll give him that except the problem is he will riddle me this about once a day and if I answer correctly, then I am immediately accused of ruining the moment. So that makes it tough.
However, this idea of getting the joke is actually really important for Jesus understanding. If we jump back a couple verses, just to before Jesus gives the explanation for last week's parable. There's this scene where the disciples asked Jesus, why are you telling these stories in the first place? Remember, they haven't really seen him do this before. This is what Jesus says in Matthew chapter 13 verse 11.
Why do I talk in parables? It's because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven have been given to you and not to them. Whoever has will be given more and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have even what little they have will be taken from them. And that's a very strange saying.
Is it not? I mean Jesus claiming that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer does not really feel like it's on brand for him. However, this idea of Mashal as riddle is really important to what he's trying to say here. Because for Jesus, the kingdom of God is in some sense like a riddle or maybe even an inside joke. Once you get it, you get it.
In fact, once you get it, you start seeing it around you everywhere all the time. The way that God is present in a thousand ways you never noticed before. The way that Christ is at play in the world bringing life back to where there was once only death and pain before. And once you know, you know. You know?
But then on the other side what happens is that until you grasp the kingdom of God, until you get the joke that it's upside down from every other kingdom you've ever heard or imagined, until you're in the inside of the joke, then the more you hear about the kingdom, the more Jesus talks about it, the more stories he tells about it, then the less sense it starts to make to you. Does that make sense? Because it shouldn't unless it does, if you know what I mean. But this actually seems to be part of Jesus' strategy here. The kingdom of God is something that can only ever be stumbled upon.
He speaks in parables because he knows he can't explain kingdom to you or force kingdom on you. It's it's not something he can conscript you into or convince you to believe in. He can only ever tease and entice and welcome and invite you to discover a completely new way of thinking for yourself. So parables are much more than stories or even juxtapositions. They're certainly more than just wise sayings to complement our lives.
They are in a sense riddles that are meant to fundamentally transform the way we view the world. I mean after all, once you know that a vegetable has no legs, it's hard to forget that no matter how much your son would prefer you do. So when we read Jesus parable today and for the rest of the series, we're looking for more than just a nice lesson. We're looking for the ways he flips our expectations of the world upside down. So finally, we're back to where we started.
Jesus told them another parable. The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while everyone was sleeping, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads then the weeds also appeared. The owner's servant came to him and said, sir, didn't you sow good seed in your field? Where then did all these weeds come from?
An enemy did this he replied. So the servants asked, you want us to go and pull them up? No, he answered. Because while you're pulling up the weeds you may uproot the wheat with them. Let them both grow together until the harvest at that time, I will tell the harvesters, first collect the weeds and tie them into bundles to be burned.
Then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn. It's Matthew thirteen twenty four to 30. Now, once again this week, we're we're gonna need to do a little bit of work here to gather up some context behind the story. Because the weeds and the wheat in this tale are actually very specific references to very specific plants. Now, the word for wheat here is the word sitos and that means, well, it means wheat.
That one's easy but stick with me here because the word for weeds is the Greek word zazenion. And not only is that a fun word to say, it's actually not a word at all. It's actually a Greek transliteration of a Hebrew word zonin which refers to a very specific type of weed. And that weed was a poisonous form of rye grass that we call darnel. The Latin name is Lolium Temu Lentum.
And by the way, now you can talk about rye grass in English and Latin and Greek and Hebrew. So never say you never learn anything in church. You can mark that one down in your journal. But, what's important here is that zonin was very well known in ancient Palestine. So well known in fact that it actually had its own specific rules.
And the reason was because this particular rye grass was not only poisonous, it also had the temerity to look exactly like wheat in the early stages of its growing cycle. In fact, apparently, the only way to reliably tell the difference between wheat and darnel is to wait until they begin to form ears and then you can tell them apart and separate them. Basically, just have to wait until you produce a crop to know. Add to that, the fact that in Hebrew, the rules forbid any two different plants from ever being planted together in the same field. And if that was to happen, the crop would need to be destroyed and the field would be need to be reseeded from scratch anyway.
So that's basically what we're expecting to happen here. The owner comes out. He hears the bad news. Look. There's zone in in the field and he says, alright.
Let's burn it all up and let's start over again from scratch. However, there was a loophole. See because a lot of small farmers would depend on their crop not just to sell but for food for their family for the year, there was actually a small exemption that revolved around this specific weed zonin. In the Mishnah, which was a Jewish rabbinic commentary on the scriptures, it says that wheat and zonin do not constitute mingled seeds with each other. And so basically, there's this little exemption that said, if you wanna go ahead and wait for those plants to produce and you want to enter into this tedious process of separating them out one by one perhaps because you just really need that crop to survive for the coming year.
Well, you have an exemption to the Levitical law that says mixed fields must be burned. Now the technical reason behind this was that the rabbi saw zonin not as a separate plant, but as a corrupted offshoot of wheat. Now that's not technically true scientifically, but in the rabbinic minds, zonin and wheat were literally the same thing until they sprouted. They looked the same. They grew the same.
They were impossible to tell apart. And so they were for all intents and purposes the same plant until they produced a crop. You just simply had to wait and see. Now, it's a long excursion into ancient plant classifications, but it's actually really important when you look at the story here. Because what is every religious person's favorite pastime?
I mean, there's a few of them, but specifically what comes to mind here is taking it upon ourselves to decide who's in and who's out. Am I right? Spencer Burke writes that for years we have focused on excluding those people who don't appear to be like us. We stiff armed other people, even other Christians. We've divided and subdivided and divided again, and in a sense, we have done exactly the opposite of what Jesus asked us to.
And the truth is probably most of us here in this room have some story somewhere about someone that we loved very deeply who was pushed away from Jesus and the church by someone who thought they were protecting his territory. And yet, what Jesus tells us is that the kingdom of God includes the weeds and the wheat and he's not surprised or alarmed by any of it. He's not threatened by it and not only that, actually goes out of his way to hire workers to make sure that everyone in the field is cared for intended to. Given every opportunity to grow into something beautiful and unexpected. To the point of a parable is not just that there's wheat and weeds mingled together in the field.
Who needs a story about that? We can all see that in the world every day. The point is you and I often can't tell the difference reliably. We don't have the appropriate technology to know what will grow out of a person's life. And when we try, when we try to write their story for them in our head, what happens is that we end up doing more damage to the kingdom than they ever could do on their own.
I mean, about this honestly for a second. Jesus is more concerned about us writing people off than he is with the evil one infiltrating the world. I mean, that should be sobering. And if you have ever felt like Jesus was present in your life and that he was near to you transforming you slowly by his grace, but there's something in your story that somehow disqualifies you or stigmatizes your participation in Christ community. Please understand that that is only because we as the church have misapprehended the expansiveness of God's welcome to all.
You are not a weed. None of us are because all of us are still growing and the story is not done yet. Now, there's a hard edge to the story. And here in Matthew 13, this is one of very few times that Jesus does explain his parables. We saw him do it last week.
He does it again here. In verse 37, he says, the one who sowed the good seed is the son of man. The field is the world and the good seed stands for the people of the kingdom. The weeds are the people of the evil one and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age and the harvesters of the angels.
So Jesus does not really leave a lot of room here to misidentify anyone in this story. But he says there are people who will grow into an acceptance of God's kingdom. There are people who will ultimately reject that grace and refuse to participate in God's story extended to them. So this is not a story telling you that your choices don't matter. This is not a parable telling us that weeds and wheat are all the same thing in the end and nothing you do has consequence.
That's not an honest way to read Jesus' words here. But what this is is a parable telling us that the story isn't finished yet. And because it's not over, none of us should harbor, give any space to the interest in jumping to conclusions about the value of anyone's story. You know they say that approximately every seven years you are a completely new person. You know, every day you lose a little dandruff and you get some hair caught in the shower and you exfoliate a little dry skin and you slowly turn yourself into dust.
Right? It's actually disconcerting to me to realize that most of the dust in my house is left over bits of me, but that's besides the point. However, they tell us with a great deal of rounding error that approximately every seven years, every cell in your body will have gone through a regeneration. And that means that the essential physical material that we call you is completely new. So in a very specific and scientific way, you are not the you that you were seven years ago.
You are not the you that you will be seven years from now. In fact, you can say you have never known anyone longer than seven years. You are constantly making new friends. You can count that. It's fine.
But I think that what Jesus is telling us here is that perhaps even more important is how that same regeneration is happening all the time in all of our spirits. And one of the most humbling things for me as a pastor is to recognize just how differently I have thought about God over the course of my professional career talking about God. I've been doing this for two decades now and in that time I got married and I moved across the country and Rachel and I adopted a son and then a daughter. And I've changed my views. I've been ordained.
I've surrendered my license. I've planted a church. I've stayed put for eight years now. But, I am a completely different person than I was and that is holy. It's beautiful because that's what life is.
It's change. And I would feel inadequate if I ever got up here sensing that I had not grown and changed and transformed in my journey. If I didn't have those twists and turns along the way that taught me something completely new about the divine. But if you were to ask, when were you the weeds and when were you the wheat? I could tell you a lot of stories, but I'm not convinced that I could honestly answer that question for you.
All that I know is that I'm convinced that I was loved by God at 20. I'm confident I was invested in by spirit at 30. I know I'm being guided at 40 and I trust that I will be still embraced when I'm 50. Because what I see in this story is that the kingdom of God is much bigger and God takes a much longer view than you and I often do. And where sometimes what we see is a snapshot of somebody's life, who they are in that moment and not who they could be and we wanna judge them based on that very narrow slice of their identity.
God looks and God doesn't see a weed or a seed in that moment. God sees a story that continues to grow and unfold and shape and take root and become something new every single day. Of course, our stories take twists along the way. That's what makes them worth watching. But all of us, there are stories that aren't finished until the graciousness of God says that they are.
And that's what this parable is about. Every single person you encounter is an unfinished story of the open ended grace of God that is at work around us and in us all the time. So hear the word of the Lord today. If you struggle with certain parts of your story that continue to hang on and feel like they weigh you down, don't let the fact that you can't rewrite the past stop you from writing a better story tomorrow. In God's kingdom, you are never a weed until you stop growing.
And that means that my tendency that one that I feel to write people off or to shape the next story of their chapter in my head for them this obsession that sometimes we all have with deciding who's on the right side of the line. Not only is it misguided and shortsighted, it risks uprooting the work that God is doing below the surface in everyone's life around us all the time. Because you and I, we're not here to decide who's in and who's out. We're here to tend the field and to help each other flourish and to trust that God cares deeply about all of us no matter what. May you sink your roots deep and continue to stretch up towards the sun so that when the time comes, you will know that the story you lived, all of the twists included, was the story that God hoped you would live.
Let's pray. God of all graciousness, who extends to us so much time and curiosity, who looks at us wondering what we might become if we could only guide ourselves by the voice of your spirit near us. Would you help us to believe that our story is not finished yet? And that even if the twists and turns and the way that we've grown has been misshapen and off at an angle that we can continue to reach up and towards you every day with new strength. Would you guide us and lead us?
Help us become something we never imagined we could be. And then when that takes root in us, might that same graciousness, that same opportunity and possibility, those same eyes that envision good stories around us all the time. May they become the eyes to which we see everyone we encounter. An unfinished story of your open ended grace and our opportunity to help speak goodness and generosity and light wherever we go. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.
Amen.