SPEAKER_00: In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Please be seated.
SPEAKER_00: Well, lucky me, two Sundays in a row with an agricultural parable.
SPEAKER_00: Sowers and seeds and all of that business.
SPEAKER_00: This is a familiar parable to most folks, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's called the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: It's 'cause it's now becoming called the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds everywhere you read about it.
SPEAKER_00: But it's traditionally been known as the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, because in the in the King James Version it didn't say weeds, it said tares.
SPEAKER_00: And it's another parable.
SPEAKER_00: And I thought as I'm approaching this parable, the first step in reading a parable is always, I think, trying to figure out why is it there?
SPEAKER_00: What's the point?
SPEAKER_00: What is its main purpose?
SPEAKER_00: And I think this parable has two main purposes.
SPEAKER_00: The first, and we're going to throw around some theological terms this morning, the first is eschatological.
SPEAKER_00: Eschatological means things about the end times.
SPEAKER_00: The end.
SPEAKER_00: And that's pretty obvious from when the disciples go to Jesus and say, What?
SPEAKER_00: And he says, all of this thing is about the end of the age.
SPEAKER_00: And you, of course, get the bring up of the weeds.
SPEAKER_00: They are bundled together, and what happens to them in Jesus' explanation?
SPEAKER_00: They're thrown into the fire, right?
SPEAKER_00: And what's in the fire?
SPEAKER_00: Where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, right?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a very Methian phrase.
SPEAKER_00: Whenever you hear weeping and gnashing of teeth, you can almost guarantee that you're in the Gospel of Matthew.
SPEAKER_00: It comes up once or twice in the Gospel of Luke, but mostly it's in the Gospel of Matthew.
SPEAKER_00: He really likes it, says it over and over and over again.
SPEAKER_00: So the first purpose of this parable of the wheat and the tares is eschatological.
SPEAKER_00: What's going to happen when Jesus comes back?
SPEAKER_00: What's going to happen at the end of the age?
SPEAKER_00: How is this going to play out?
SPEAKER_00: The other touches on another theological point, which has been around since the beginning of monotheism.
SPEAKER_00: And the big fancy$15 theological word is theodicy.
SPEAKER_00: Anybody know what theodicy is?
SPEAKER_00: The problem of evil.
SPEAKER_00: Ever since we began worshiping one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we also took into account this story of the creation from Genesis, in which God creates everything that is and says, it is good.
SPEAKER_00: And then creates human beings and says, it is very good.
SPEAKER_00: And we human beings look around and go, Yeah, not so much.
SPEAKER_00: God created everything to be good and God's in control of all this, then why is there so much bad in the world?
SPEAKER_00: Why do bad things happen to good people?
SPEAKER_00: Why do bad things happen in general?
SPEAKER_00: Why is evil allowed to exist in the world at the same time as us?
SPEAKER_00: That's what theodicy is.
SPEAKER_00: And while Jesus' parable, I don't think, is speaking directly to the reason why evil exists in the world.
SPEAKER_00: It is telling us, the people who learn from him, his disciples, what we're supposed to do about it.
SPEAKER_00: So a man gets up and he looks at his field and he sees his servants come and say, There's weeds in your wheat.
SPEAKER_00: And I love the line, did you not plant good seeds?
SPEAKER_00: And he says, What to do about these weeds among the wheat?
SPEAKER_00: Were you were you awake?
SPEAKER_00: He says, Let them grow side by side until the harvest comes.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Leave them alone.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we would say today.
SPEAKER_00: Hands off until we get ready.
SPEAKER_00: But he says, let them grow side by side until the harvest comes.
SPEAKER_00: Now, back to a little farming.
SPEAKER_00: If you weren't here last week, or even if you were, you might remember that the way they farmed in the first century was bag o seed, fling, fling, right?
SPEAKER_00: And in the first century, in this part of the world, there is a grass that when it first springs from the ground looks exactly like wheat or barley, probably is what this is, springing from the ground.
SPEAKER_00: And not until it's ready for harvest can you tell the difference between the two.
SPEAKER_00: So when he says, if you go and you tear up the weed, you're going to tear up the wheat alongside them, because honestly, they won't be able to tell the difference.
SPEAKER_00: They'll just be guessing.
SPEAKER_00: If they farmed like we do today in nice little rows, maybe they'd be able to go, that one's not in a row, it must be weed, right?
SPEAKER_00: But at the time, you couldn't tell the difference.
SPEAKER_00: This seems strange to the modern gardener, because once the one thing modern gardeners spend all their time doing tearing out weeds, right?
SPEAKER_00: But this is this is metaphorical, this fever and these plants.
SPEAKER_00: Now I'm gonna tell you a thing about a word here in the Greek text.
SPEAKER_00: Let them grow side by side until the harvest comes.
SPEAKER_00: The word there in the Greek for let them is afete.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, let them grow.
SPEAKER_00: But the surprising thing is, is that that word is the exact same word that we find in the Lord's Prayer when we say, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
SPEAKER_00: Afete us our trespasses.
SPEAKER_00: So maybe the instruction from Jesus here about what we do about bad people in the world is forgive them.
SPEAKER_00: Let them be.
SPEAKER_00: Because it's not your responsibility to decide who's wheat and who's tares.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: That's the general message here.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't want you to hear this parable saying to you, you Christians can do nothing about evil in the world.
SPEAKER_00: No, that is absolutely not what Jesus is saying.
SPEAKER_00: It is still our business and our call and our responsibility to go out into the world and undo evil where we can find it.
SPEAKER_00: Particularly the things in the world we can change, right?
SPEAKER_00: Sexism, racism, all the isms that you can think of that make the world a hard place to live in for anybody.
SPEAKER_00: It is our job to undo those things in the world around us.
SPEAKER_00: The problem is that people, you and I, human beings, have a tendency not to focus on the evil in the world, but to point at a person and say, you are the problem.
SPEAKER_00: You're the evil in the world.
SPEAKER_00: And we ask ourselves, why does God not do something about this person?
SPEAKER_00: And if we're honest with ourselves, if we had a little bit of magic, we'd like to be able to go with some of those people.
SPEAKER_00: But the problem is that you are the person someone would like to go with some of the time.
SPEAKER_00: So if we were given the power, the responsibility, the authority to simply erase from the world those people with whom we do not agree, people who don't do things the way we do things or think the way we think, what would be left?
SPEAKER_00: Nothing.
SPEAKER_00: It's not my job, and it's not your job to separate the wheat from the tares.
SPEAKER_00: Or in so many of other of Jesus' other parables, the goat from goats from the sheep or whatever, right?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says that will happen at the harvest, at the end of the age.
SPEAKER_00: Our job is to live a life of faith and hope.
SPEAKER_00: And Saint Augustine says, if I can hearken back to last week's sermon just a little bit, Saint Augustine says about this parable, something to the to the something that sounds like, because I can't remember his exact words.
SPEAKER_00: For all we know, today's tares may tomorrow be wheat.
SPEAKER_00: That's why this is metaphorical, you see, because in an actual field, the weeds cannot turn into wheat.
SPEAKER_00: But in the grand scheme of God's world, the unrighteous can in fact join the righteous.
SPEAKER_00: And Augustine wants to point out also, it happens in reverse.
SPEAKER_00: For all we know today, some of the wheat may tomorrow be tares.
SPEAKER_00: So how do we live?
SPEAKER_00: We live like St.
SPEAKER_00: Paul tells us in this reading from Romans today.
SPEAKER_00: At the very end, he says, For in hope we were saved.
SPEAKER_00: Now, hope that is not seen is not hope.
SPEAKER_00: For who hopes for what is seen?
SPEAKER_00: But if we hope for what we do not see, the coming of the end of the age, and the changing of the tares into wheat, we, he says, wait for it with patience.
SPEAKER_00: That's probably the hardest thing there is to do as a Christian is to accept that we are who we are, that the world is as it is, and have faith that God will do what God will do, and let him do it, not take the responsibility all on our own shoulders.