Sermon for Sunday, July 20, 2008

as requested, please note, this is not edited for spelling or grammar

When church is over today and after I have lunch, I’m going to the Home Depot. I like going to the Home Depot because the Home Depot makes me feel manly. There’s something about the smell of potting soil and PVC pipe that makes me want to go build something. The problem is, I may be in the top ten of the least handy people in the world. My wife likes to say that the only thing I can do with my hands around the house is to call someone who can.

I can’t even change a light bulb without first having a tense conversation about whether or not I actually know how to change one. But today, I’m going to buy a weed eater. I didn’t need one at our last house, because my mother-in-law would come up a lot.

I kid with my mother-in-law that there must be Billy Goats in her family because nothing satisfies her more than sitting on a towel in the grass all day pulling weeds. All she needs is a screwdriver and wide-brimmed hat and she is set for at least six hours.

Friends and church members would drive by and fuss at me for making my mother-in-law sit out in the hot sun pulling up weeds all day. But that’s what she wants to do, I’d say. And it is true. She loves to just pull weeds.

Winston-Salem is a little far to drive on a whim, so until she gets her plane tickets, I’ve got to pull weeds the old fashioned way – with a rotating piece of clothes line powered by a gas engine.

But here’s my concern. And I have yet to meet a man who hasn’t done this – there are flowers that aren’t blooming that look like weeds to me. The only thing I know about flowers is why roses look like and I know what those look like because I buy them on Valentine’s Day and when I’m in trouble, but beyond that I couldn’t tell you the difference between a hydrangea, perennials, annual, and a dandelion.

My mother used to have to give me a briefing before I would weed the garden. This can go, this has to stay, and if you cut these, you won’t leave the house for two weeks.

And that is why I’m buying the weed eater today – because Cherilyn is out of town.

I don’t remember how many years it ago it was, but it’s been a few. I was standing outside of an Orthodox Christian bookstore in Columbia, South Carolina. The owner of the store lived in the back room and was sort of a mystic. He had a long beard, fasted most days, and would hum old Russian hymns. This day as I was standing outside his store, he was pulling weeds in his garden.

Now I must tell you, his store was right in the middle of Five Points in Columbia. Every college student in South Carolina knows about Five Points, because it is lined with one bar after another, and in the middle of this college mecca is a small Orthodox bookstore and in front of this store, inches from a four lane highway in the middle of the state capital, is a tiny garden. And he was pulling weeds.

“You know after our Lord’s Resurrection, he was mistaken for a gardener,” he told me. And I had forgotten that, but he’s right. Just after the resurrection when Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, she thought Jesus was the gardener.

Maybe that’s why Jesus is so good with plant stories. Last week we heard Jesus tell the story of a sower casting seed. Some fell on the path, some in rocky soil, some among the thorns and some in the good dirt.

And today, here we are again. A sower put good seed in the ground. At night, an enemy came and scattered weed seeds all over the place. So when the sun and the rain pulled those plants from the ground, there was the wheat that was planted, but side by side with the wheat there were the weeds.

The servants of the sower asked him, do you want us to go and pull the weeds? No one wants weeds in their garden. They can choke out the good plants. They aren’t pretty to look at. They don’t belong.
And the master of the garden told them not to touch the weeds. When you pull the weeds, he said, you will also pull the wheat.

My very good friend called me the other day – he’s a United Methodist pastor and a great friend, he called to tell me about one of the churches in his town. A parishioner had confessed to the pastor that she had an affair. The pastor told her that she needed to confess this to the elders of the church. She needed to get all of this out and in the open so there could be reconciliation and healing in the church. In other words, there can’t be any weeds growing amongst the wheat.

She was so full of remorse that she was willing to do anything. So she went before the elders of the church and confessed – and she confessed everything. And before it was all said and done, it came out that three of the elders also had a relationship with her.

And now the whole church, the whole town is rocked. That’s what happens when we pull weeds. There will always be collateral damage. It’s one thing to confess and repent and work for reconciliation – which is something we should do, but it’s something else to uproot a whole community. When you start pulling weeds, you might miss and pull up a daisy or a geranium.

I’m not saying there is no right or wrong or that we shouldn’t proclaim what is holy and righteous and good, but what I am saying is that we aren’t gardeners. Christ has been called the Good Shepherd, and the Prince of Peace, and the Way, the Truth, and the Life. But I think we can also call him the Good Gardener.

Jesus is the only person who truly knows which one is a weed and which one is not. We don’t know. I don’t know. And truth be told, aren’t we all products of cross pollination from time to time? Are we not wheat growing strong on some days and greedy shoots of weeds on the next? In fact, when in his story when Jesus mentions the weeds, he uses the word zizania, which a weed that looks exactly like wheat until the ear appears. Until then they are identical.

How do we know which ones to pull? We don’t.

My constant prayer for the Church is that we stop trying to be the gardeners that we are not. In the Church and outside of the Church we are very quick to point our fingers and declare what is growing strong in God’s pasture and what needs to be pulled. And many times we can’t wait to crank up our weed eaters or get our screwdrivers or even to use our bare hands to pull those weeds and separate the good and the bad.

But that is not our job. Jesus is the one that will separate the weeds and wheat. Jesus is the one that will separate the sheep from the goats, not us. Not bishops, priests, deacons, vestries, or baptized Christians – that is not our job.

Our job is to be as faithful and loving as we can. Our job is to help others be as faithful and loving as they can.
And when we think there are weeds among us – we are to pollinate and not pull.

You know there is peace in that? There is peace in not having to worry or stress over who is in and who is out, over who is right and who is wrong? There is peace in trusting that Christ is the Good Gardener and that in the fullness of time all things will be made right. There is peace in not having to be the judge and jury. There is peace in just being a laborer in the vineyard, planting and watering and fertilizing.

There is peace and not anger.
There is peace and not division.
There is peace and not despair.

There is peace in simply trusting that God knows what he is doing.

Amen to that. Amen.