SPEAKER_01 0:05

May the Lord be with my mouth and teach me what I am to speak. Amen. Please be seated. My husband Trevor and I often use the phrase weeping and gnashing of teeth as a joke. Usually in reference to chores. The endless pile of laundry or the dishes that just keep piling, no matter how many times I wash them, there is always weeping and gnashing of teeth. To be honest, though, the concept of hell makes me a bit squeamish. As I prepared for my sermon this week, there was indeed weeping and gnashing of teeth. I would like to thank whoever makes the preaching schedule for this opportunity to grow. Growing up, though, hell was used like a bludgeon. The tradition I grew up in had a very one way of interpreting Scripture. And today's gospel would have been interpreted something like: if you believe in Jesus, you'll go to heaven, and if you didn't, you're going to hell. One of the reasons I left that tradition is because I struggled to reconcile an all-loving God with eternal damnation. But after I left that tradition, and as I grew and as I learned and as I studied for ordination, I came to learn that the Bible doesn't have one doctrine of hell. In the Old Testament, we read about Sheol, or our Greek translations translate the same word as Hades. If you're familiar with Greek mythology, or maybe the Disney movie Hercules, you'll be familiar with this concept. Sheol and Hades are a place for all departed spirits. All the dead go there, whether they were good or evil. The Gospels and the New Testament present several different versions of hell, separate from Sheol. One is annihilationism, where the wicked just cease to exist. Other versions, both in the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament, refer to torment, and sometimes this is eternal, but not always. Still, other passages talk about God drawing all of creation back to himself, seeming to suggest some sort of universal salvation. The early Christian theologian Origen from the first or second and third centuries was famously believed in a kind of universal salvation. For him, he said that hell, that every sinner kindles for himself the flames of his own fire and is not plunged into a fire which has already been kindled by another or existed before him. For Origen, hell was a personal experience that happened when the sinner experienced, the unrepentant sinner experienced God. It wasn't until St. Augustine in the four hundreds that the idea of hell as eternal conscious torment begins to gain common acceptance, though not universally. With the lack of any consistent theology of hell in the Bible or the early church, I don't think that that's what this parable is about today. In fact, I think it misses an even more profound point that Jesus is trying to make. But if it's not about hell, what's it about? We rewind several weeks. The context of today's parable comes after the disciples have gone out for their big mission of evangelism and returned. Jesus has been sparring with other religious leaders about the kingdom and the nature of the kingdom and the nature of Torah. And the disciples are continually having throughout the whole gospels continually misunderstanding what this kingdom of God is, what this kingdom of heaven is. And so today's parable falls within a set of parables that we heard the first one last week and will continue to hear them over the next coming weeks. Falls in this set of parables that addresses what this kingdom of heaven is. I'd like to imagine what the disciples were thinking and talking about when Jesus wasn't around. These are the same guys, after all, that asked Jesus if they should pray for God to destroy a town that rejected Jesus. So you can probably imagine their attitudes when witnessing this sparring with other leaders, and after their big trip in which many towns and villages rejected them. I can imagine them thinking about come up in this. I can imagine them thinking, when Jesus finally does his thing, ooh, these guys are gonna get it. I think this is what today's parable is addressing. So to recap real quick, in our parable today, the master sows good seed, Jesus sows believers, the enemy sows bad seed, evil ones, and the master says to his servants, don't pull the weeds now, wait until the harvest. Well, our translation today says weeds. Jesus is actually referring to a specific plant that other translations render as tares or darnell. This plant looks identical to wheat. In fact, so identical that you can't tell the difference until harvest time. Before modern separating equipment, farm equipment, basically all wheat had some amount of tear in it. The thing with this tear, though, is it wasn't just a harmless weed, it was actually poisonous. In small amounts, it just makes your bread taste a little acrid. But if too much is eaten, it can cause dizziness, headache, confusion, vomiting, inability to walk, diarrhea, tremors, coma, sometimes even convulsions or delirium. Kind of makes that explosive diarrhea thing going around sound not so bad. So these tears that are mixed into the wheat crop, it's not just I've destroyed the value of this crop, it's actively dangerous to those who consume it. Perhaps the evil ones are dangerous to God's kingdom, are dangerous to God's creation in some way. But the tares are not just bad. I'm sorry. Just two weeks ago, we heard Jesus lamenting because people were not embracing the gospel. And over and over, the prophets describe God as bemoaning Israel's oppression of the widow and orphan. It seems that these weeds or tares do hurt God, even if it's God's, only God's heart. But the tares are not just bad for those who eat them, they're also bad for the wheat they grow with. Tares have a fibrous root system that competes with the grain for water and nutrients, and more often are more successful than the wheat, meaning that the weed flourishes at the wheat's expense. The weeds are actively harmful to the wheat. The evil ones in today's parable are actively harmful to God's good children of the kingdom. Yet, because of those fibrous roots, pulling those weeds out would destroy the wheat. So as much as we have this human desire to see evildoers punished, to see them get their come up ins, to do so would destroy us. Any punishment, if there is any at all, belongs to God and God alone at the end of time. I'm also not saying that we should forgive and forget, that there's no room for accountability, there's no room for blame, there's no room for prophetic witness that calls injustice to account.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

What I am saying is that retribution is harmful to the children of God.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

In today's climate of growing Christian nationalism and zero sum political games and cancel culture, I think about how ready our culture is to exhibit retribution. When the cards shift, will we be ready to let judgment belong to God alone? Will we be ready to forgive the ones who have done us great harm? Or will we hold on to that resentment?

SPEAKER_00 11:57

Will we hunger for retribution? One more thought. So that neither the weeds nor the wheat know who they are.

SPEAKER_01 12:13

They just know what they are doing, that drive to grow. And the weeds and the wheat cannot be told apart until they're mature. So as we find ourselves sitting in that desire for retribution, that desire to see people get what's coming to them, it's probably helpful to keep in mind that what looks like a weed now might grow up to be wheat after all. So, what do we do with the furnace of fire and the weeping and gnashing of teeth in today's parable? One commentator writes that suffice it to say, however these images are interpreted, they do witness to a seriousness about the direction of human life. How one decides to live, and the sort of virtues and vices one chooses to cultivate do have an eternal dimension.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

May we learn to forgive and cultivate mercy.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

Amen.