HUMANS IN GOD’S GARDEN: ALWAYS A DIASTER IN THE MAKING

HUMANS IN GOD’S GARDEN: ALWAYS A DIASTER IN THE MAKING

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Jesus offers us a botany lesson. We are not always that good at identifying various species of plants. There’s a Smart Phone app that allows us to take a picture of a plant or a tree or a flower and the app identifies the plant. Lacking Smart Phone technology for telling weeds from wheat among humans, we struggle.

There are weeds in the garden of God. Make no mistake it’s about power and the desire to build a new Eden, constructed by and controlled by “true believers.” The story sounds weird in farm country because it says to let the weeds grow with the wheat. My first full-time pastorate was in a farming community. One of the farmers planted his soy beans every spring. He then left his crop and did nothing. No fertilizer. No weed killing chemicals. No crop dusting plane flying over his crop. He planted. He left it alone. Weeds and beans grew together until harvest and then we went into the fields and harvested everything. He took his soybeans to market and received a reduction in price because of all the weeds mixed in, but he never complained and he farmed this way his entire life. He is like the only actual representation I have ever witnessed of a parable of Jesus: Let the weeds grow with the wheat?

Who ever heard of such a thing? Leave the weeds alone. That is so hard. Isn’t it?

Well, weed pullers make a mistake. They think they are Ph.D.’s in botany. They assume they are God’s judges. They assume they are in charge. Pull the weeds. That’s their mantra. Pull the weeds. Matthew’s editors were a bunch of weed pullers. They wanted to rip out the weeds and make the church a place for the pure.

But beware: Weed pullers assume a power they don’t possess. They claim an authority that belongs only to God. They are painfully unaware of how “fragile” their claims and positions are and how deeply implicated they are in histories of violence.

Actually, we should be more careful around God’s garden. Our mythos, lest we forget, teaches us that we are not good with gardens. God gave us one back in the mists of civilization – an imagined paradise known as Eden. We at the wrong fruit. We frolicked there, but we were sloppy, talked to a snake, got our brains crossways with suspicion and conspiracy theories, lost the entire garden. Went bankrupt. Lost it forever. We should we more careful when we start inspecting the fruit in God’s garden. But I know it’s hard to resist.

The Garden of Eden never made much sense to me until I read Kenneth Burke. He taught me that Adam and Eve acquired Knowledge by eating the forbidden fruit and that knowledge was language, in particular the language of the “Negative.” With the Fall, humanity “invented the Negative.” Expelled from the garden, the long dialectic of History began and that history is one of grasping for power.

Some Christians have a starring role in the story: “Master, do you want us to gather up the weeds in a pile and burn them?” It’s a natural impulse. Get rid of the weeds. Someone is always demanding that we get rid of the undesirables. A senator from Mississippi, back in the day, campaigned to send all African Americans back to Africa. “Put them on a boat and send them back.” Can you imagine such a movement? Senator McCarthy crusaded to rid the country of communists. He said, “I’m going to pull the weeds out of this country. All those pinkos. Communist sympathizers. All those people with communist leanings. They have to go.” And how long will we have to suffer the foolish insistence that gays are somehow less than others and have to hear preachers pour forth condemnation against gays from the pulpit as if they had divine sanction for their weed pulling? Gays are not “weeds;” they are precious flowers in the God’s garden. They are the majority of the people who make up the creative class and any downtown that wants to grow and flourish should have a marketing campaign to attract gays to live and work in the city.

A short story tells of a recently widowed woman being pursued by a particularly aggressive church. In line with her training, she was nice to them. She even attended a service. Then one day, a pair of the church members showed up at her house and she had just gotten out of the shower. She doesn’t go to the door. She’s still, hardly breathing for fear they will somehow know or divine that she’s there. At last they leave. “Suddenly, in her mind’s eye, she can also see herself as from a distance, towel clutched like a fig leaf, hiding from a band of Christians out to save her soul!” Later she sees one of the church members in the street and he’s pushing her about what’s wrong and saying, “We have to pray about this.” Elizabeth, her name is Elizabeth, says, “No, this has to stop. I can’t be in your Church.” And I can’t be in this garden full of weed experts – ripping and snorting and making sure the rows are straight and all the wheat is the same height, same color, same, same, everything.

New Testament scholar, Richard Hays tells us, “The parable of the wheat and the weeds and its interpretation suggest that there was an active debate in Matthew’s community concerning whether the church should seek to be a community of the pure or whether it should accept a more ambiguous status of a [mixture of saints and sinners] awaiting the final judgment” (Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament). What’s your take on the matter? Purity or a mixture of saints and sinners? This is the question that fuels all racism. This is how people start believing in a pure race of white people and why Americans join hate groups and become white nationalists. “In the United States today, angry, straight White men are mobilizing political affect to magnify the spectacle of threat facing their sexist values.”

A second-generation editor of Matthew, disturbed by this grace toward weeds, bared his animal teeth and amended the parable and gave it back harsh judgment of hell. These two interpretations exist side by side in the gospel, and some Christians are determined to hang on to hell no matter what. Matthew’s editor is really fired up about Satan and hell.

There are weeds everywhere and they must be wiped out. The church becomes a religious version of that weed killer Roundup. The name has a ring to it. Round up all the “weeds” and put them in the fire. Really? Seriously? Are you kidding me? And have you heard that Roundup kills more than weeds? Roundup is now linked to cancer. You just never know what you will start once you put the church in the weed killing business. Look, the drive for power is the attempt to build a new Eden – one uninhabited by any except the pure.

One of my mentors, Carlyle Marney was accused of heresy. He laughed and said, “The Baptists have never created a mind capable of heresy.” There’s that.

Weed pullers even have a catch phrase, a verbal tell. “Preacher WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING about these people!” It never matters who the “people” are that are the scapegoats for our anger. There’s always the anger. Here thinking Christians must draw the line. Anger is not in our DNA. It is not of Jesus. The language of anger – hyperbole, incivility, bigotry – has no place among the people of God. We can’t have tongues that praise God and curse those we wish to exclude.

Weed pulling is an addictive habit. If you ever pull one, you won’t be able to stop. When there’s blood on your hands, when you feel the sensation of the power to lord it over other people, it’s hard to break the nasty habit. Once your nose it bent out of shape by righteous indignation, it will take more than plastic surgery to straighten it again. Any weed-pulling church or nation is blasphemous because you are trying to be God, usurping the throne of grace, sitting on the seat of judgment.

What does Jesus say? Of all things, Jesus says, “Leave the weeds alone.” Did you miss that? LEAVE THE WEEDS ALONE. Some folks can’t believe it. Isn’t there such a thing as right and wrong, good and evil, true and false? We need to take a stand, draw the line, pull some weeds. But the boss says, “Leave the weeds alone.” But they are ugly, they are cluttering the garden. “Leave the weeds alone.” Do you see that in God’s garden we are not the experts? We can’t tell weed from wheat.

Don’t you know that we have a bad history with God’s garden? There was Eden and then there’s this in Isaiah. God gave us his people a garden and in exasperation finally cried, “What more could I have done with my garden then I have done?” (Isaiah 5).

Walker Percy raises questions that evangelicals need to answer in Love in the Ruins:

What a bad joke: God saying, here it is, the new Eden, and it is yours, because you’re the apple of my eye, because you the lordly Westerners the fierce Caucasian-Gentile-Visigoths, believed in me and in the outlandish Jewish Event even though you were nowhere near it and had to hear the news of it from strangers. But you believed and so I gave it all to you, gave you Israel and Greece and science and art and the lordship of the earth, and finally even gave you the new world that I blessed for you. And all you had to do was pass one little test, which was surely child’s play for you because you had already passed the big one. One little test: here’s a helpless man in Africa, all you had to do is not violate him. That’s all.

One little test: you flunk!

God, was it always the black business, ow, just as in 1883, 1783, 1683, and hasn’t it always been that ever since the first tough God-believing, Christ-haunted cunning violent rapacious Visigoth-Western-Gentile first set foot here with the first black man.God tests his people as he tested Abraham and we keep flunking the divine exams. God keeps sending us allies and we keep demonizing them: women, gays, immigrants, persons of color. We flunk. We treat God’s gifts as weeds. We flunk.

What you think is a weed turns out to be a precious flower in the garden of God. Don’t mess with God’s weeds. The lesson has to be repeated because the same kind of Christians keep making the same mistakes generation after generation.

Let’s go home with some great poetry in our minds:

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. (Gerard Manley Hopkins)