Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
Does It Have to Be This Way?
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli for Foundry UMC July 19, 2020, seventh Sunday after Pentecost. “Living As If…” series.
Text: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Invasives. They threaten to devour my yard. They are what my landscape architect friend informs me is destroying so many of our habitats. They may look pretty at first but then proceed to cover over and strangle everything else. Invasives seem to have an uncanny ability to multiply at an alarming rate, to flourish in places they don’t belong.
The Kin-dom, Jesus says in our parable today, is like a cultivated field that has been invaded and planted with seeds that don’t belong. And when this becomes apparent as the plants grow, the farmer counsels letting everything grow together—out of care and concern for the survival of the intended crop—with a sorting out of everything at the appropriate time.
This is a risky proposition, this “growing together,” because invasives are so aggressive, and can do so much damage. But evidently, the planter has confidence that the wheat will be strong enough to thrive and produce its life-giving food even in the midst of struggle and assault.
This metaphor would have made sense to the original audience of Matthew’s Gospel, a community of Jewish Christians who not only had the usual conflicts of religious community within its own ranks, but were also actively engaged in conflict with leaders of the Pharisee-led Judaism that predominated in 80-90 CE. Trying to grow in healthy ways in the midst of attack and surrounded by philosophies, theologies, and practices that don’t fit into the vision of the Kin-dom Jesus taught was difficult. This parable offers a rich image through which to consider how to respond to this reality.
And, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that the writer of Matthew took this rich parable and sucked every drop of nuance right out of it in the allegorical “explanation” that follows. When we are in conflict—polarized, defensive, and fearful—it seems common to want to categorize things, to lump people together, to assign absolute values—“good” or “bad”—and to take comfort in our self-appointed “goodness” and the promise that the “bad” people will get what’s coming to them. There is something very emotionally satisfying about imagining our enemies weeping and gnashing their teeth.
But does it have to be this way?
My first reaction when I started praying with our text for today was to notice that in the parable, the enemy appears and plants troubling seeds “while everybody was asleep.” I thought, “If people stayed awake this wouldn’t happen!” See? It doesn’t have to be this way! Perhaps this is true to some degree—constant vigilance could protect the field from destructive invasives. But then I realized that can’t be the core message. Because the truth is we are all planted in a field, born into a world, that has “pre-existing conditions.” No amount of vigilance can undo what’s been already done. Ways of thinking and reacting and treating others are all around. Like seeds of invasive plants that get eaten by birds and then migrate with them, being excreted in all the places they alight, concepts, ideas, philosophies, prejudices, are consumed and carried and shared. For example, Ibram X. Kendi’s book Stamped From the Beginning illustrates the way the idea of racism moves and morphs and takes root over centuries.
Whether we like it or not, this is the way it is. We are in a proverbial field in which things are all mixed up. There are planted seeds of love and life and there are seeds of harm and death. And seeds want to grow. And they do grow together. In a world of pre-existing conditions we are surrounded not only by creative, gentle, playful, inspiring, soul enhancing energies, but also by aggression, malicious intent, pain, greed, and other potentially soul-damaging stuff. We’re not only surrounded by these things—as though we can remain separate or distant from them—but we soak up and ingest them to varying degrees. Our make-up is affected by the field in which we’re planted—like a wine that tastes a certain way because of where the grapes were cultivated or milk that tastes a certain way because of what the cows ate or the flavor of honey tinged with the flower the bees loved most that season. Within each one of us are the capacities for care and for harm, for love and for hate, for violence and for peace.
With the way things are, we have to choose what way we will respond. How do we navigate this complicated world, this human life, so beautiful and broken? One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is just how tempting it is to do the thing we hear in the allegory today—to assign everyone a label and to tidy things up with hard and fast absolutes. You go into the “children of the kin-dom” camp and you go to the “children of the evil one” camp. The impulse will always be to rip out or cut off or otherwise lay hands on whomever we deem “the evil ones.”
Now some will argue that the text is clear that it’s not up to us to make these assignments or to try to get rid of the “children of the evil one.” But let’s be honest, that’s what people do. And texts like this one have provided handy religious legitimation for doing it. And let’s be honest about how it’s not just those other people who do this, but we do it too. Let’s be honest about how easy it is to fall into this way of thinking even when we try not to (“I hate people who hate people!”). And perhaps we can also be honest about how some of us turn this thinking on ourselves and believe that we are “bad seeds,” deserving of punishment, undeserving of care or love. What we imbibe from the soil in which we grow can be deeply internalized such that it is difficult to extract ourselves or others from these labels.
Lumping people together based on anything—race, accent, education, appearance, political affiliation, orientation, personal style, identity, vocation, whatever!—erases a person’s humanity and identity. You put a person in a category or under a label and all of a sudden they are no longer a person with a story and a family and a body and dreams. They become a thing. They might be a thing you consider good—“wheat”—or a thing you consider bad—“weed”—but they become an object, not a subject. The wheat isn’t expected to have weediness in it and the weed isn’t expected to have any wheatness in it. They can no longer be truly human.
A recent example that is resonant with our current challenge and work: writer Michael Harriot, whose work I’ve come to know on Twitter through The Root wrote, “That ‘anti-white’ sentiment people keep talking about is just the erosion of what I call the ‘privilege of individuality.’ White people aren’t accustomed to being lumped together and being defined by the actions of others. Welcome to the club.” Being lumped together under any label is literally dehumanizing. And it is what our labels, stereotypes, racism and all the isms do. When we have successfully dehumanized people, it is much easier to blame, use, abuse, and kill them.
My guess is that there will be some listening to my words and thinking something like, “But some people are awful! Are we not supposed to get in the way of injustice? Are we not supposed to call out those who harm the vulnerable? Are we not called to get into ‘good trouble’ for the sake of the Kin-dom?” The answer to all of those questions is simply “yes.” That is absolutely part of our work as we engage sacred resistance. I don’t think our parable today is asking us to do nothing or to ignore evil, injustice, and oppression.
I do think it is about being honest about the reality in our world and in our own lives, a reality that is much more complex than the easy dualisms and absolutes so prevalent in our current context. Remember, Jesus calls Peter “Satan” in a moment of hyperbole and then entrusts him with the keys to the Kin-dom; he sees through the small life of despised “tax collector” Zacchaeus to perceive the big things he will do with his generosity; Jesus loves Mary Magdalene and draws her into the inner circle when others exclude her due to her “demons.” In Matthew 5:43-44 Jesus teaches us to love our enemies and in 18:14 says that it’s God’s will that none will be lost. Our parable today uses scary images to highlight that there are consequences for our choices—it is damaging and painful to body and soul to be hateful, cruel, and selfish. But the whole of the Gospel affirms that God’s way of dealing with a broken world and with broken lives is not to abandon or destroy, but to draw ever nearer in love, mercy, and grace—even stepping directly into the mess of the world with us. Jesus shows us what it looks like to be truly human, perfectly reflecting the image of God’s love. Jesus never dehumanizes or allows a label or a mistake or a flaw to define a person.
And thanks be to God for that. Right? We are all human. Not one of us is “weed-free.” We are all trying to find our way. None of us are perfected in love, we all do harm, we all experience pain, we all have tangled up roots from all sorts of seeds, taken on the “flavor” of the soil in which we’ve been planted, we are all complex, unique creations and children of God. As followers of Jesus, our call is to be human with other humans, to be “humanizers” in a world where the seeds of inhumanity and dehumanization want to grow. We are called to be planters and cultivators of love, mercy, and grace and to let those Kin-dom values fuel our resistance, to let those divine gifts live and grow in us and make us and the world more truly human.
It’s never easy to be human. The world, our lives, are beautiful and broken. And God knows, right now everything is hard.
Perhaps it didn’t have to be this way, but this is the way it is right now. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to be in it?
What might happen were we to live as if God’s amazing grace is at work in every single moment, in every single tangle, in every struggle, on every bridge, in every triumph, on every street, in front of every courthouse, along every line, in every weakness and strength, in every mistake, in every life, including our own—determined to strengthen, to mend, to liberate, to save? What if we were to live as if all we are made—planted—cultivated—to do is love?
https://foundryumc.org/
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free