Preached at First Congregational Church of Battle Creek, MI on July 19th, 2020.

Text: Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43

One of the things I’m enjoying about living in Battle Creek is the fact that I have a yard of my own for the first time in… eight years. Some of you have seen it, some of you have been in it. I’ve become stupendously proud of the little patch of earth that I’ve been put in charge of. Yesterday I picked the largest zucchini I’ve ever seen off of one of my zucchini plants, nurtured by the earth that I’ve been given charge over. The thing was bigger than my head (and though my head probably appears small on screen, I assure you, it’s a whopper.)

All that said, having something to tend to is good medicine for the soul. Having a patch of earth that I have the privilege to care for connects me with my origins: after all, the words human and humus are closely related.

The problem is that my yard is not about to win any lawn awards for landscape design, for homogeneity of grass, for purity of my fescue, because my yard is weedy. Incredibly weedy, especially around the fenceline where forgotten logs and fallen limbs make it impossible to mow or even navigate with a weed eater. 

Even in the areas I’ve intentionally tried to cultivate a little, the weed situation is utterly insane. In spite of my best efforts to mulch my hostas and keep the weeds pulled, my yard continues to put out a crop of weeds that can very quickly take over the entire landscape if I don’t stay on top of them. (Thankfully there’s no HOA in my neighborhood, but still.)

What you all may not know about the history of lawns such as the ones that surround most of our homes is that they are an artifact of 18th century French aristocratic culture. The ideal aristocratic lawn is a monoculture, with only one species of grass occupying the majority of the space. A colossal amount of time, effort, land, and water goes into the maintenance of the palatial lawns that have become the default landscaping option for the suburbs in the West. 

Consider the dizzying array of powders and sprays and pellets and lotions and potions and creams and unguents and elixirs that one can buy at Lowe’s for the treatment of one’s lawn, one’s personal grass monoculture, where biodiversity and variety are things we actively resist and attempt to get rid of through, uh, let me check my notes here, oh yes SPRAYING POISON ON THE GROUND.

You may be at home, thinking to yourselves, “Pastor Nate is on a weird soapbox this morning,” and you would be right. Because I am. Stay with me.

American lawn culture treats land on the small scale in the same way that our colonizing ancestors treated this continent. American lawn culture insists that the right way to tend the patches of earth under our care are to weed out the undesirable species, fill in all the land with a nice, respectable, homogeneous fescue, and siphon water out of the local rivers and ponds and wetlands to maintain the a perfect green lawn that suffers no disruption from undesirables such as dandelions or clover or milkweed or violet or or mugwort or stinging nettle or wild strawberry or bittersweet nightshade or chickweed or poke sallet or four o’clocks or you get my point.

Nevermind the fact that each one of those plants is both ecologically important and has medicinal properties. Even the ones we consider “invasive” have their roles in the ecology, like kudzu, that holds the sides of strip-mined mountains in the South together long enough for the land to heal from its trauma, or like Japanese Paulownia, which grows so fast in one growing season that it is one of the most effective carbon capture technologies known to humanity. And never mind the fact that a homogenous green lawn, uh, does not occur on its own.

Have you considered what might happen if we apply the principles of lawn culture to, uh, say, people? I daresay the results might look quite a bit like the history of the United States. The issue is that we have a tendency to apply our standards for our lawns to people. Actually, that’s not quite correct: we apply our faulty people standards to the natural world, a world which resists such standards at all turns.

The writer of Matthew’s gospel, who was writing to a people in the midst of change as the Jesus movement was reorienting itself following the collapse of Jerusalem, very likely had in mind this common human situation when they chose to include Jesus’ parable of the weeds among the wheat in this portion of their work. 

When we get caught up in a cause, when we get caught up in a movement, it is very, very common that we begin to look around at those who stand by us with an increasingly skeptical lens. When we see someone who doesn’t meet our expectations for how someone in our community should look or act or think or behave, we have a tendency to snap to judgment: “well, this person isn’t growing the way I expect them to be growing, therefore they must be a weed.” And so we run, panicked, to our authority figures: “there’s a weed growing in the wheat! There’s clover in the bluegrass! There’s milkweed in your fescue! Do something about it!”

Bold of us to assume that we’re in the appropriate position to make that call. 

But it’s understandable: in the way groups of humans work, those little surprises that pop up here and there—folks who fall outside the lines of our expectations, people who don’t match our expectations, people who are insistent on their right to be here, or queer, or neurodivergent, or non-English speaking, or who have a mental health thing going on, or who are simply just a pain in the butt (like we all are sometimes, let’s be honest)—those folks often threaten our sense of group cohesion. They threaten our security, our safety, our feeling of control. God forbid our lawn get out of hand.

But hear the master’s words from the parable again: “ln gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest.” 

The master’s words are stunning, because they speak of a long-lived patience that is subtle and supple enough to let the “offending species” live out their life. (The weeds didn’t choose to be there, after all; they got tossed there by circumstance.) So he says, Let both of them grow together, for their roots are so intertwined that removing the offending parties would damage the integrity of the wheat. Let both of them grow together, for we are not even sure which of the rogue seeds are indeed weeds or not. Let both of them grow together, for those weeds might be the source of medicines we didn’t know we needed. 

For even something as simple, as ubiquitous, and as hated as the dandelion can be food and medicine when allowed to flourish.

We all have that one weed, don’t we? That one person or group of people or situation in our life whom we absolutely cannot stand. That one influence that we would love nothing more than to see bundled up and tossed in a fire. For Matthew’s author, it was those people who had ended up as part of the Jesus movement but who weren’t invested in it or intent on seeing Jesus’ teachings flourish. For most of us, it’s usually those people we see something of ourselves in that we don’t want to admit. 

As an example, consider the increasingly common trope of some conservative, homophobic, bible-thumping preacher being caught soliciting men on a gay dating app after hours. That thing we like the least in someone else is often a clear view into the things we like least about ourselves. 

Admittedly, that’s an extreme example, but if we learn to begin to ask ourselves the question, “why does xyz person or situation bother me so bad,” we might be surprised at what we learn about ourselves. I wonder if that’s not why Matthew’s author is also the writer who relays Jesus’ famous dictum, “judge not, lest you be judged.”

To say this another way, the weeds in our field often give us a taste of our own medicine.

But I don’t want to get too far lost in the weeds. I want to dial it back a little bit to Jesus’ first line of the story: “the kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field.” If we catch this line, the story can really knock us off our chair. 

The emerging reality of the kingdom of heaven, this thing that Jesus proclaimed was already within us and ready to burst through the soil at every turn, and the very thing that Matthew’s author was upset about not being pure enough, is the very idea that invites the kind of patient acceptance of diversity that allows everything in the field to flourish in its own way.

Friends, if we would embody the kingdom of heaven (or the “reign” of heaven, if the word “kingdom” bugs you), we would do well to look around us at the things that demand the largest investments of patience, of energy, and of loving attention to be okay with: a child’s behavior problems. That one person in the PTA who tries way too hard. A problematic relative. An obnoxious ex. A group of people or an idea that we look at with skepticism or fear.

Those challenging people in our life, diverse and manifold as they are, carry within them the same image of God that you and I both do. And it may be that we wound up in the same field due to circumstances quite beyond our control but now that we’ve been growing together long enough our roots are so entangled that to rip someone out of our lives might uproot us, too. 

If we welcome the gift of diversity, instead of fighting against it, we might find it a little easier to allow ourselves to grow together. If we allow ourselves to grow together, we might just discover that what we’ve called weeds, Christ calls food. What we’ve called noxious, Christ calls medicine. What we’re ready to bundle up and throw into the furnace, Christ lets shine with the righteous in the reign of heaven. Let anyone with ears to hear, listen. Amen.