Maybe They Just Don't Know It Yet - Matthew 13

Today we continue our series Finding Jesus in Real Lives.  Today's text is Matthew 13: 24-30 and 1st Corinthians 8: 35, 38-39

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

July 12, 2026

“Maybe They Just Don't Know It Yet”

Matthew 13: 24-30 – Common English Bible

Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like someone who planted good seed in his field. 25 While people were sleeping, an enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat and went away. 26 When the stalks sprouted and bore grain, then the weeds also appeared.

27 “The servants of the landowner came and said to him, ‘Master, didn’t you plant good seed in your field? Then how is it that it has weeds?’

28 “‘An enemy has done this,’ he answered.

“The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us to go and gather them?’

29 “But the landowner said, ‘No, because if you gather the weeds, you’ll pull up the wheat along with them. 30 Let both grow side by side until the harvest. And at harvesttime I’ll say to the harvesters, “First gather the weeds and tie them together in bundles to be burned. But bring the wheat into my barn.”’”

Throughout our summer series, Finding Jesus in Real Lives, we've met a Jesus who keeps revealing that God's kingdom is beyond what the religious authorities had ever imagined.  Again and again, he teaches us to choose mercy over religion, compassion over judgment.  And he keeps opening our eyes to a kingdom that is already here, and yet still unfolding.

 That’s true of God’s kingdom.  But I also think it has something to say about the LGBTQ Pride we will celebrate this coming weekend.  

Some may ask, why do we still even have Pride?  As Fernando López, the former executive director of San Diego Pride, said:  “We don’t have Pride because we are free.  We have Pride because not all of us are yet free.”
  
 We do live in a world that has improved in ways few people could have imagined.  So much has changed, yet so much of what is happening today is trying to take us backward.  And so, I want to go back in history to that night in June 1969 at the Stonewall Inn and two brave individuals named Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

 
 Marsha was born in 1945, named Malcolm Michaels, Jr.  The 5th of 7 children.  She began wearing dresses at age 5, but stopped after being tormented.  After graduating from high school, Marsha moved to New York City with $15 and a bag of clothes.  She landed in Greenwich Village, but as tolerant as it was in comparison, it still didn’t protect her and others from constant harassment.  

For example, the police were responsible for enforcing terrible laws, including one that required individuals to wear at least three items of clothing that matched your gender.  Three.  Not two.  And how would that be enforced without violating one’s most intimate being?  

That indignity receded, however, when you consider the fact that no one would hire her.  And therefore, she was often homeless and like many others in her day, was forced to depend on prostitution to survive.
  
 Yet, in the face of all this, Marsha was extraordinarily generous, always jubilant, and always open to anyone and everyone.  And she was deeply religious; raised in the church.  She said she loved Jesus because “he is the only man I can really trust.  He listens to all my problems and has never laughed at me.”  She meant it.

Think about that.  Tormented by family.  Rejected by employers.  Harassed by police.  And yet she knew deep down, "Jesus would never laugh at me."

Marsha loved anyone in need, which is how she met Sylvia Rivera.  Sylvia had been abandoned by her father at birth.  Her mother committed suicide when she was only three.  She then went to live with her grandmother, but she beat Sylvia so badly every time she was caught trying on her grandmother’s clothing or makeup that she ran away.  She too was forced into prostitution to survive – at age 11.  

That’s when she met Marsha.  Marsha took young people off the street and offered the kind of stability and love of a home many had never experienced.
 
 

Years later, Marsha and Sylvia were together at the Stonewall Inn the night that police raided the bar at 1:20 am for the second time that week alone.  

 
 But for whatever reason, that night, when police hit a Black woman wearing pants named Storme, she hit back.  Police tried three times to shove her into a patrol car but she kept fighting her way out.  

 Previously docile patrons waiting patiently as usual to get into paddy wagons began this time taunting the police.  They had had enough.  Someone yelled to flip over the car.  Then they started throwing coins and beer cans.  Things really escalated when patrons began scooping up cobblestones from the street and throwing them.  

Police retreated inside the bar.  Someone wrenched a parking meter out of the ground and used it as a battering ram to crash open the door.  Trash cans were set on fire.  Someone threw a lit match into the bar through broken windows.  And this wasn’t just one night.   Skirmishes continued throughout the weekend and into a sixth day.  It was the beginning of an uprising.

 However, Stonewall wasn’t the first time queer people fought back.  In 1959 in Los Angeles, there was the “Cooper’s Donuts Riot.”  In 1966, the “Compton’s Cafeteria Riot” in San Francisco.  Like Stonewall, these riots involved harassment of the same kind of racially mixed, mostly poor, women who dressed in shirts and trousers, men who called themselves drag queens, and a collection of people who weren’t welcome anywhere else.
  
 There was one other event in New York City that preceded Stonewall.  A “Sip-In” at Julius’ by a group of well-dressed men told bartenders they were gay and ordered drinks to challenge the law against serving homosexuals.  Julius’ had already been raided that week, so, not wanting more trouble, the bartender denied them service – which ultimately led to a court case that overturned the law.  

And yet, still three years later, patrons like Marsha and Sylvia at the Stonewall Inn continued to be harassed and arrested, subjected to humiliations like searches for exactly three items of clothing.
  

Well, if that’s how authorities treated you, what about friends and allies?  Those indignities mirrored how they were treated at “gay liberation” protests in the following days and years.  People like Marsha and Sylvia were repeatedly pushed off stage.  Literally.  

At a rally in 1973, Sylvia was once again blocked from speaking.  When she finally grabbed the microphone, she shouted, “if it wasn’t for the drag queens, there would be no gay liberation movement.  We’re the front-liners.” 
 
 

She was booed and jeered.  She took the rejection hard and later that day attempted suicide.  Marsha found her and saved her life.

The movement wanted the face of gay liberation to be people who were more “respectable, dignified,” like those at Julius’.  I understand why and I hate that I understand why.  

Movements of all kinds often face the temptation to believe their cause will advance more quickly if the more "respectable looking" people stand at the front.  Which means pushing others aside.

There's something strangely familiar about how Marsha and Sylvia were treated because Jesus wasn't considered very respectable either.

Just remember.  He ate with the wrong people.

He touched the wrong people.

He defended the wrong people.

He spoke to the wrong women.

He broke the Sabbath.

He was accused of blasphemy.

Accused of being in league with demons.

Accused of being a glutton and a drunkard.

He died the death reserved for criminals.

No, Jesus wasn’t respectable either.  Because again and again, Jesus walked toward the very people respectable religion had already pushed aside.

And that’s where I hear today’s parable from Matthew chapter 13.  The servants look at a wheat field and ask, “Should we go and pull up the weeds?”

It sounds like a practical question.  Reasonable, responsible.  The servants aren't trying to destroy the field.  They think they're helping.  

But that’s the thing about good intentions.  No one with good intentions wakes up thinking, "Today I'm going to exclude people."  They think, "I'm helping."  "I'm protecting the movement."  "I'm protecting my religion."  Exclusion often comes from people who sincerely believe they're protecting something precious – but ask Marsha and Sylvia whether good intentions make it OK.  

In the parable, Jesus never says the servants are malicious.  He says they're mistaken.  He’s correcting misguided certainty, not bad motives.  

That’s why the landowner simply says, "No.  Because if you pull up the weeds, you'll pull up the wheat too."  

It helps to recognize that the early Christians to whom Matthew was writing lived with persecution.  They longed for justice.  They wondered when God would finally act.  The parable illustrates the question:  Should we do the separating?  And the clear answer is no.  

But you know, most of us spend far more time wondering whether we'll be excluded than wondering whether we'll exclude someone else.  

We know what it’s like to wonder:

Do I belong?

Am I enough?  Am I too much!

Would God ever give up on me for something I've done...or because of who I am?

Fortunately, Paul asks for us.  "Who can separate us from the love of Christ?  Will it be trouble, or distress, or harassment, or famine, or nakedness, or danger?”

And before anyone can answer, he answers it himself.  No one.  Nothing.  “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”

To me, that’s some of the best news the Bible has to offer.

Eventually, Marsha and Sylvia both stepped away from public activism.  In the end, Marsha’s goal was never to become respectable.  It was to open her home to care for young people escaping the brutality of their own families.  And later, to accompany people dying of AIDS.  Loving her neighbors as herself.    

By the way, people often asked what the "P" stood for in Marsha P. Johnson.  She'd smile and say, it means: "Pay It No Mind."  It was her way of refusing to let other people's labels define who she was.

Marsha and Sylvia were pushed off stage by the same instinct that people once used to declare Jesus unacceptable too.  People whose good intentions don't prevent misguided certainty.  But Jesus repeatedly stands beside those told they don’t belong.  They do.  Maybe they just don't know it yet.

So, on Saturday, let’s proclaim to them and to all:  Happy Pride!