You can always tell when you have returned from a vacation in an isolated cabin on a lake in northern Wisconsin when you wake up your first morning home thinking your partner is doing the dishes only to realize it is the neighbor next door.
When some one yells at you on the short trip to the grocery store. And, when you run into an unbelievably surly woman, yelling at everybody in site at the rent-a-car place as you try to simply return your vehicle.
Let me take her side for a moment. She had brought her own car in for service at one of the dealers along the corridor between Larmie and Irving. My personal car is from one of places and when it was under warranty and had to be taken there it was one of the most frustrating experiences I had ever encountered. It seemed impossible for them to do even the simplest of repairs in less than a day.
No doubt it is for this reason that Enterprise® located an office right in the heart of Frustrationville.
Most people suffer their indignity stoically, if not in silence, as they take the paperwork over for a free rental and go on their way. But not this woman.
She is one of those people who believe the world revolves around them. She expected to be waited on the second she stepped in the door and she made her frustrations known with language that would make a sailor blush. She was embarrassingly rude to the clerk making sure that her loud and obnoxious comments were heard by all in the office.
She was slowly drawing a large target on her back for your pastor this morning who does not suffer fools, nor the foolish, gladly.
When she was asked for an emergency contact number - some one to call if she got into an accident she replied: “I have no one. I don’t have a single friend in the entire world.” I mouthed to the other patiently waiting souls, “Does anybody wonder why?”
I got a laugh from the crowd. This, as you know, only egged me on to zero in on something else I noticed.
Hanging around this foul mouthed woman’s neck was a crucifix, gleaming in the morning sun. Never one to leave well enough alone, I asked her, “That cross around your neck. Does it mean anything to you?”
It was like setting off a nuclear reaction. The woman’s face reddened not with embarrassment but rather fury. I only wished that she had been hooked up to a blood-pressure monitor because we surely could have achieved record high levels. She was going into melt-down mode and the explosion came with: “Yes, I believe in God and if you don’t want to see God you’ll get out of my face.”
I figured I had pushed this far enough and left her to stew but not without a honk of the horn, a smile, and a wave, after we had quickly been taken care of, and she was still dealing with the paper-work of renting a car.
Here is the question that today’s parable asks of us this morning: Was she a weed masquerading as a piece of wheat or was she really, really, wheat who had been pushed to her limits by the one thing we all dread – the thought of car repair?
And, upon further reflection, what about me? Was I being a weed by making fun of her disposition or was a being a tall strand of wheat by reminding her that if you are wearing a cross it is best to remember that you are representing the faith even if that cross to you is but a lucky charm?
What confused the disciples and confuses us is that sometimes we never know. But what I do know is that it is easier to be a weed than it is wheat.
It is far easier to point out the faults in other people hoping that our own will not be noticed. It is far easier to point out a problem than to solve it. It is far easier to tear some thing down than to help something grow.
Being weedy is pretty easy. All you have to do is not cooperate. All you have to do is complain. All you have to do make trouble.
And we think we know what we should do with the troublemakers and complainers in our lives. We should get rid of them. Rip them up and cast them out.
And, listen to me very carefully now, men and women, sometimes that is the only thing we can do. If there is someone who is continually dragging you down. If there is someone in your life who is emotionally or physically abusive. If there is someone in your life with whom every conversation leads to a confrontation. If there is someone like that – and here is the key – they won’t take ownership for their part of the problem – then the best thing, the only thing to do, for your own emotional and even physical well-being is to get them out of your life before they are able to choke off any life that is left in you.
But, Jesus warns us, we don’t get to cast them out of the kingdom of God. Sometimes we may have to remind them that forty years of church attendance that is not translated into kindness is waste of time and energy. Sometimes a cross is more than a piece of jewelry, it is a symbol of the extent to which God will go to love us.
The Rev’d Shannon J. Kerschner, the very fine Senior Pastor at Fourth Church put it this way: “The holy presence refuses to let us define who God loves and does not love, who God claims and does not claim, where God can and cannot act.”1
God will sort out who are the weeds and who are the wheat in the fullness of time. Our job, our only job, is to make sure that we don’t give into the easy temptation to become “weedy.” It is far easier to be a weed than it is to be a stalk of wheat.
In Hayward, Wisconsin, where Lowell and I were last Sunday, there is, as there has been for a long time an Ice Cream shop attached to West’s Dairy.
It is packed during the summer. One time, as we walked by, there was a line out the door. Lowell and I went back late on a Sunday night (8 o’clock by Hayward standards) got waited on immediately, met the stores, owner, bought and had him sign his book, appropriately titled, Scoop.
The author, Jeff Miller, a great guy who has since passed away at the all too young age of 56, was a high powered lawyer for an international firm. His partner, Dean Cooper, was an Englishman who also was blessed with a job that allowed him to enjoy the finer things in life.
In a moment of disenchantment with their jobs, along with building a cabin on Teal Lake, they also bought West’s Dairy and a then run-down but now beautiful Bed and Breakfast at the center of town.
Anybody who has ever undertaken one remodeling job, let alone three at the same time, knows that it can be as maddening as taking your car in for repairs. There are delays, excuses, and unreturned phone calls.
Jeff was enduring all of this, and then some, as he remodeled the dairy and Ice Cream Store. In the mean time, not four blocks away Dean was having another kind of experience.
It was so unique that it merited a phone call to Jeff for him to come and see.
There were workmen all over the house as Dean would point out in amazement, working.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. No cigarette breaks, no tea breaks. They’ve been working like this all day.” he told Jeff with wonder and excitement in his voice.
Jeff reflected: “Our history with builders had been one of constant grumbling and complaints about conditions.” What he was seeing was incredible!
When Dean introduced Jeff to one of the workers he wiped off his sweaty had, spoke just long enough to exchange a few pleasantries, and ran, not walked but ran, to help another worker.
But that was only the beginning. The two partners walked to the back of the house and “one of the roofers lost his footing and smashed his hand against the roof. ‘Oh, darn it!’ he yelled.
“Did he say darn it?” [Jeff] asked as if [his] mother had been [the one] removing shingles from the roof.
“‘They don’t swear,” Dean whispered as though it were a closely guarded secret. ‘They all go to some big church outside of town,’” and their boss came out of the Mennonite tradition where your faith was shown by the deeds you did and the words your carefully chose rather than the jewelry around your neck.
“‘Do you know what this means?’ Dean asked. ‘We aren’t going to be ripped off.’”
It means more than that.
It means that, unlike the woman at the rental agency, these workers to paraphrase the wisdom literature allowed their righteousness shine through their kindness. And these righteous shown like the sun in the kingdom of the Father.
In one paraphrase, Jesus asks: “Are you listening to this? Really listening?”
I leave it up to you to decide who was listening – the impatient woman wearing the golden cross at the Enterprise office or the roofer with the throbbing thumb.
And then we can all ponder in our spare time this story of weeds and wheat and who we would rather be like.
It’s easy being weedy but the righteous get to shine as the sun in their Father’s Kingdom. And that, at least to me, sounds like a far, far better thing.
Thanks for listening.
_______
1. Shannon J. Kershner. Sermons from Fourth Church. June 22, 2014.
2. Jeff Miller, Scoop: Notes from a Small Ice Cream Shop. ( St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2014). p. 135–137.
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