RoundUp

Sermon: Gen 28:10-19, Rom 8:12-25, Mt. 13:24-30, 36-43
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, 7-17-11

Having grown up on a farm I can certainly understand this parable of the wheat and the weeds. My father hated weeds in his corn fields. He hated them so much that he did everything he could to eradicate them. That meant I would be doing it with him. Understand please, those were the days before chemical weed killers, the herbicides, and the days of cheap gasoline. After the grain came up we would cultivate it by plowing with a tractor between the rows in order to do in the weeds. There would always be weeds. In a good year we might do that three times, about the same number of times you hoped to get a cutting of hay from the alfalfa fields. It was boring work, driving down the rows pulling the cultivator behind the tractor. On a hot summer day in western Illinois, especially just after dinner and the noon meal was called dinner, one could get a little drowsy. It did come to my father’s attention on a couple of occasions that I had fallen asleep and ran into the fence at the end of the field.

That was nothing compared with what came next. When the stalks got too tall to pull a cultivator over them there would still be weeds that had survived. It was true, like the gospel parable says, that you couldn’t pull the weeds out without uprooting the corn as well. And then you had defeated the whole purpose of the project. But my father was not to be outdone. He developed an ingenious method. He and I would go down the rows, sometimes on our knees, where there were weeds and cut them off with a knife. That way they were defeated and the corn survived. His corn fields were immaculate. As I said, my father hated weeds. I came to share the sentiment.

But that all changed with the advent of the fertilizers and herbicides and high gas prices. Farmers can’t afford to drive through their fields very many times in a season. They use chemicals to kill the weeds. Too bad I had already left the farm when that happened. I might have made a different career choice. Instead of standing up here preaching I might be a gentleman farmer in Illinoi, sitting on my front porch watching the corn grow without weeds and getting ready for the next cutting of alfalfa.

One of those chemicals is RoundUp. How many of you use RoundUp in your gardens and lawns? Pretty powerful, isn’t it? You have to be really careful with it, don’t you or you will kill the very plants you are trying to nurture. I can remember the first time I used it on my side walk to get the weeds out of the cracks. I wondered a couple of days later why the grass and flowers along the side of the walk were dead along with the weeds in the cracks. I had killed the plants I was trying to save.

So, even in this chemical era of agriculture, the parable still has meaning. The farmer in the parable is saying no, don’t uproot the weeds; you will pull up the wheat or the corn. Let them grow alongside together and at harvest time then you can separate them. I suspect my father didn’t like this parable and he heard it many times.

So, what does this all mean for us? That we should use RoundUp carefully in our gardens? Oh, we’re not getting off that easily.
There are several possible messages here. The popular one with folks is that the wheat are the good guys and the weeds are the bad guys. Of course, I am one of the good guys and see those other people over there. They’re the bad guys. They will burn at harvest time.

But I like this other interpretation. We are the field. In our field, in our lives, is both wheat and weeds. It is my job to cultivate the good crop and eradicate the bad growth. They grow side by side in my life. My calling is to transform myself in such a way that I am less self-centered, more giving, less hating, less lying, less gossiping, more looking out for others, less hurting them. It is a lifelong work. Paul in the reading from Romans is, I believe talking about the same things. He used the distinction between spirit and body, instead of wheat and weeds. We are called into sonship and daughtership with God. We are called to be so close to Him that we call him by the intimate name Abba.

It was fun this past week in San Francisco, observing our eighteen month old granddaughter calling her father “dada.” Abba is the Aramaic equivalent of dada. We are called in Paul’s words, to live the life of the spirit instead of the life of the flesh or in Matthew’s words to cherish the wheat and destroy the weeds. It is not easy. There is no magic spiritual can of RoundUp. Paul compares it to a lifelong birthing process. The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, he says. And not only creation but we ourselves groan inwardly as we wait for adoption, for the redemption of our bodies. And I thought it was painful crawling on the ground cutting those weeds!!

Are there weeds in our fields? Sure, some of our own making; some of others’ making. Some of those we can’t change. We just have to live with our own failings and those of others. But many, should I say most, we can change. We can transform them, can transform ourselves, before the great harvest, the great RoundUp.