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With today’s parable Jesus bids us into another foray into farming.
My understanding is limited to, at best, two weeks total visiting the Wester Farms in the furthers corner of northwest Iowa. Farms that have been in the family for over 100 years.
Even in that short time I learned a lot.
Last week I told you absolutely everything I know about combines, those marvelous million-dollar machines whose sophistication is beyond the imagination of most city dwellers.
But the most important thing I learned came one evening while I was taking in the “amber waves of grain” enjoying the “bright golden haze on the meadow” and admiring “corn that was as high as an elephant's eye.” I commented about how wonderful everything was and Lowell’s brother-in-law reminded me that is one thing for a city fella like me to visit a farm but it quite another thing to have to own one and work one.
He’ right of course.
Farmers have to be almost everything all at once.
They are, first and foremost, running a business which sometimes has thousands upon thousands of dollars passing through it annually. They have to be crop managers, knowing what crops to plant, where and when. They have to be mechanics for their equipment and carpenters for their buildings. They may be the last of what used to be known as “jack-of-all trades.” Most of all, they have to be hard workers.
While modern equipment may have made things easier, they still have to know how to use their farm equipment and when to use it properly. Farming takes no small amount of skill and manual labour and it used to take more.
For most of his life Lowell’s father farmed before all the “bells and whistles” came to be. Even though he planted, plowed, and cultivated before G.P.S. was invented his rows were straight, and true, and almost weedless. How did he achieve this?
Lowell told me that while a cultivator, which even city folks like us can find in a super small scale at a home centre, which when hooked behind the tractor, could uproot the weeds between the rows something had to be done with the weeds that grew up between the crops. So, every so often, the Wester children were called upon to go out and “walk beans.”
“How do you walk a bean?” I asked. “Do you put a little collar on them and then place the on the ground to see where they go? Do they romp? Can you tell them to sit and stay and when you say ‘Here, bean, bean, bean’ do they rush to you?”
He looked at me like I was being an idiot. (Which I was!)
Remembering that these were not green beans, or any of the kind of beans we are used to seeing at the grocery store, but rather soybeans, I asked him “How did you know the difference?” To which he replied, “practice.”
That one could only be good at weeding between the bean plants by hours of practicing the task in the field brings us finally, and quite nicely to Jesus’ parable.
Apparently, this farmer did not have a family of children whom he could conscript into walking his crops for him until it was too late, and the weeds got totally out of hand.
What he did have, however, was a band of servants whose unrivalled enthusiasm was only exceeded by their lack of knowledge. They are going to get in there and rip out all those weeds. Without any practice they are going to get in there and make everything right. With who knows how much or how little knowledge of what is or is not a weed, they are going to restore their master’s garden into a pristine version of the garden of Eden.
Suddenly this simple parable weeds and wheat is beginning to hit close to home because we know who we are. We know who are weeds and who is the wheat. Or, at least we think we do.
Like the servants, who see the weeds and want to pull them up, we would really like to get rid of all the weeds—all of the things we see in people we believe are not like us—the theology that doesn’t fit with our own enlightened understandings, the hypocrisy of people claiming God but excluding neighbor, or the hypocrisy of judging those who exclude, and all the rest. Often, we are inclined to focus our energy on pulling up all of the dangerous or questionable expressions of faith, narrowing the circle, and ensuring the only people representing God and the church have passed the proper litmus test. And these days it seems like we have a litmus test for every theological, social, moral, and ethical question.1
Surprisingly, the problem with our certainty, as to who is and who is not a weed, was pointed out by Tim Joyce, a master gardener who is also one of the very fine stable of weather forecasters on WGN.
Last Saturday, in his gardening segment he said: “While a weed is hard to define, at its basics it would be the wrong plant in the wrong place.” Then Joyce went on to say, “If you ask a hundred different gardeners about what makes a weed, you'll get about 100 different answers.”2
It is almost human nature to try and sort things out for God. It is a constant temptation for us to try and figure out who is doing the will of God and who is not. But there are 100 different answers to this question.
It is a constant struggle not to give into the notion that we can figure out who will be welcomed into God’s kingdom and who will not. We think we know who is a weed and who is a wheat in this life and Jesus plainly tells us we don’t.
We are like city folk in a soybean field.
If you sent us, you and I, Chicagoans, out into a soybean field who knows what we’d do. We’d have no idea what to look for? We would have no idea what was a weed and what was a soybean? If we would have joined the Wester children in walking beans all poor Roy probably would have had, at the end of the day, was a field that looked like a return to the dust bowl days of the 30's. Our inability to tell a plant from a weed would probably leave nothing behind but a barren landscape. Face it, most of us bring as much skill to farming as Oliver Wendell Douglas did on “Green Acres.”
So, Jesus is telling us, let’s leave this sorting business up to God who has this strange ability to take people who we would have surely seen as weeds and see them as, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”
The Bible is full of these characters. They are almost countless in number, and today we have a prime example before us in our reading from the Hebrew Scripture.
We certainly would have pulled up guys like Jacob and thrown him into the compost bin of history. A wonderful Pastor Friend of mine labelled him as “something of a heel, someone who is not very admirable, someone who does questionable things for their own benefit.”3 In other words, a weed.
When we find him, Jacob is on the lam. And if we were God we would probably say: “Serves you right. All the troubles in your life you have brought on yourself so that’s it! Good riddance.”
Much to our surprise, and Jacob’s, God comes to him when he is tired, worn out and using a rock instead of a pillow.
The Pastor for Youth Ministry where I worshipped regularly, The Rev’d Rocky Suplinger, wrote in a devotional once:
It occurs to me that perhaps the Lord is present in that place not simply in spite of Jacob's ignorance but because of it. Had Jacob been looking for a holy truck stop, I wonder if he would have wandered to some other locale. Maybe there would be a big mountain in view. Maybe a babbling brook the shores of which would be suitable for meditating. Instead, Jacob just needs a place to rest himself. He's not thinking of holiness, or even of God, as he beds down with his rock pillow. And that is how God finds him. Because Jacob wasn't looking.4
What God offers Jacob was a way out in the vision of a ladder. The inspiration of the hymn, “We are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” Did you know that there is such a thing as a Jacob’s ladder?
I was badgering the guys in the bible study I used to participate in at Fourth Presbyterian for an application for this sermon and a Navy veteran told me that the classic rope ladder that we have all seen in movies and perhaps in person is called a Jacob’s ladder because it has to be lowered down to you. You can only toss it so high. It has to be lowered from above.
Upon further research I also found that there is a plant called a Jacob’s ladder, that was originally a wildflower but has now been welcomed for its beauty into human gardens.
Strangely enough, as Tim Joyce noted in his piece on weeds on the Morning News, “Many things folks thought a hundred years ago were beautiful and ornamental and tried to cultivate are now considered to be weeds.”5
You could probably finish this sermon without my help and the end is simply this.
When we stop looking for the weediness in others God finds us.
Even out in the field when we are seeking to root out all the weeds of the world, God is seeking us. When we are at worse, and yes, even when we are at our best, God is seeking us not to weed us out but to redeem us.
God doesn’t care if we are a weed or some wheat.
God doesn’t care if we are a saint or a scoundrel.
God doesn’t care if we are on the lam or following the Lamb.
It all doesn’t seem to matter to God, and neither should it matter to us.
The field is not ours it’s God’s. And if we decide that we are the ones whose job it is to spend our time identifying and removing the weeds ... we will forget to see the goodness of God being revealed in our midst.
So, heads up, bean walkers! Heads up!
Now you know as much about farming as I do. But I, we, do know a little about the farmer, who calls us to live in the goodness, and mercy, and second chances of God, right here and right now.
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1. Cortney Allen Crump, “‘On Being Wheat’,” A Sermon for Every Sunday, July 17, 2023, https://www.asermonforeverysunday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Courtney-Allen-Crump-Wheat-and-Weeds.pdf.
2. Tim Joyce, “WGN Weekend Morning News,” broadcast (Chicago, Illinois, July 15, 2023).
3. Erin Bouman, “Take Hold.” Sermon preached at Irving Park Lutheran Church in Chicago, Illinois on Sunday, July 16, 2017.
4. Rocky Supinger, Fourth Church Devotions. July 18, 2017. Accessed July 18, 2017. http://www.fourthchurch.org/devotions/2017/071817.html.
5. Joyce, loc.cit.
Sermon preached at The Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Luke
23 July 2023
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