Sunday Sermon - 19 July

As I have mentioned before, some of my favourite childhood memories were growing up on our hobby farm. There was (and still is) something deeply satisfying about watching things grow. Every spring we planted the garden with great hope, and by midsummer it was bursting with tomatoes, beans, potatoes, carrots, corn—just about everything a family could eat.

But if those are among my favourite memories, some of my least favourite were having to get up on hot summer mornings to weed that garden.

That was one of our regular chores. My sisters, my brother and I knew the routine. Breakfast first, then out to the garden before we could do anything else. And this wasn't a little backyard vegetable patch. Our garden was nearly an acre. On some mornings the sun was already beating down before nine o'clock, the mosquitoes and blackflies were relentless, and no matter how many weeds we pulled one day, it seemed there were just as many waiting for us the next.

I don't remember whether I had heard today's Gospel in church or in Sunday school, but I do remember one morning when I was still fairly young. Bent over in the rows, pulling yet another handful of weeds, I looked up at my dad and declared with complete confidence, "Dad, God may have made the vegetables... but the devil made the weeds, the mosquitoes, and the blackflies!"

My dad still laughs whenever he tells that story. In fact, whenever today's Gospel comes around he usually reminds me of it.

I've always believed there is such a thing as evil. If I believe in a loving God who desires life, goodness, beauty, and wholeness, then I also have to acknowledge that there are forces in this world—and sometimes within our own hearts—that oppose those things. We don't have to look very far to see them. We see them in war and violence, in hatred and injustice, in broken relationships, in addiction, in greed, and in all the ways human beings wound one another.

Jesus doesn't pretend those realities don't exist. In today's Gospel he says quite plainly, "An enemy has done this."

But here's the remarkable thing. The parable isn't really about the weeds. It's about how the children of God are to live while the weeds are still growing. Because the question for Christians has never simply been, "Why does evil exist?" The deeper question is, "How do we remain faithful, hopeful, and fruitful in a world where evil is still present?"

That is the question Jesus answers for us today. Jesus tells us a story that feels uncomfortably familiar. A farmer sows good seed. An enemy comes in the night and scatters weeds among the wheat. The servants notice the weeds and immediately ask the question we would ask:  "Do you want us to pull them up?"

But Jesus surprises us. "No," he says. "Let both grow together until the harvest."

It's one of Jesus' more difficult teachings because our instinct is to fix everything immediately. We want God to eliminate evil now. We want justice now. We want suffering to end now. We look around our world and wonder why hatred still exists. Why war continues. Why children suffer. Why addiction destroys lives. Why greed and violence seem so frustratingly persistent.

We ask the same question the servants ask:  "Lord, shouldn't we pull up the weeds?" Jesus doesn't deny that the weeds are real. He simply says, "An enemy has done this."

Evil is real. The devil is real. Jesus doesn’t pretend otherwise but neither does Jesus allow evil to become the centre of the story. Notice where the focus of the parable really lies. It is not about the weeds. It is about the wheat. It is about the patience of the farmer. It is about the certainty of the harvest. The farmer knows something the servants do not. The wheat is still growing.

Sometimes we spend so much energy looking at the weeds that we forget to notice the wheat. That same truth runs through all of our readings today.

Jacob, in Genesis, is hardly a model disciple. He's running for his life after deceiving his father and betraying his brother. He lies down in the wilderness with a stone for a pillow. If ever there was a place where evil seemed to have won, this was it. Yet in that lonely place God appears. Jacob wakes up astonished and says, "Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it." God had not abandoned him. The wilderness was not empty after all.

Psalm 139 is relevant to this point and pushes it even further. "Where can I go from your Spirit?" If I ascend to heaven—you are there. If I descend into the depths—you are there. If I travel to the farthest sea—even there your hand shall lead me. There is no place where evil can drive God away.  

Then Paul, writing to the Romans, says all creation is groaning. What an impactful, real, description of life - I don’t know about you, but these days I can viscerally feel this - with what’s going on in Ukraine and Iran, gas prices, food prices, the wildfires…  “all creation is groaning.”

Creation groans. Humanity groans. Our hearts groan.

We know things are not the way they should be. Yet Paul says creation groans like a woman in labour. Not because death is winning. Paul’s words are words of hope. Creation groans because new life is coming.

The pain is real. But so is the promise.

Perhaps that's the thread tying all these readings together. God never promises a world without weeds. He promises that the weeds are only part of the story, but not the point of the story and certainly not the end of the story. Pains of labour lead to the birth of new life.

So where does that leave us? Back in the gardens of our lives.  

I learned something over the years, something that I didn't appreciate as that young child in our family garden. My dad never expected us to finish the garden in one morning. There was simply too much of it. Our task wasn't to create a perfect garden before lunch. Our task was to faithfully work the row in front of us. Day after day, we cultivated what we wanted to grow. We laboured for the goodness that would arrive at our table for us to enjoy. Day after hot summer’s day, we pushed through. My parents taught us this - work hard for the goodness you want to enjoy at your table, in your life. There's wisdom in that for us.

It is easy to become consumed by everything that is wrong in the world. Turn on the news for five minutes. Wars. Political division. Economic uncertainty.  Violence. Climate disasters. We could spend every waking hour talking about the weeds. Jesus invites us to do something different. Plant kindness. Grow compassion. Water mercy. Feed justice. Practice forgiveness. Strengthen hope.

Every act of love is another stalk of wheat rising in God's field. Every meal served at a food bank. Every visit to someone who is lonely. Every child encouraged. Every refugee welcomed. Every enemy forgiven. Every prayer whispered. Every act of generosity. The wheat keeps growing.

That doesn't mean we ignore evil, we just weed it out the best we can. Christians are called to resist evil wherever it appears—in our communities, in our institutions, and perhaps most importantly, within our own hearts. Let’s remember how Psalm 139 ends: "Search me, O God… Know my heart… See if there is any wicked way in me."

Before we start identifying weeds in someone else's field, we first ask God to tend the garden of our own soul. That may be the hardest gardening of all and perhaps that's why Jesus tells the servants not to pull up the weeds, because we are often not as good at telling wheat from weeds as we imagine. Lord knows I have pulled up many a young vegetable plant thinking it was a weed and passed over many a weed thinking it was something my father planted.  

History is full of people who thought they were uprooting evil when they were actually destroying goodness. Likewise, planting evil with the intention of doing good. Judgment belongs to God. Planting belongs to God. Cultivation belongs to us.  

Our calling is not to decide who belongs in God's kingdom. Our calling is to live as citizens of that kingdom now. To grow as goodness in the field where God planted us. To become the kind of people in whom love grows more abundantly than fear. Grace more abundantly than resentment. Mercy more abundantly than judgment. Hope more abundantly than despair.

One day the harvest will come. Jesus promises that. Every wrong will be made right, justice and peace will prevail. On that harvest day evil will finally lose its grip on God's good creation. Until then - until then we keep tending the garden. We keep planting goodness. We keep nurturing life. We keep being the wheat God has called us to be—rooted in faith, nourished by grace, and bearing fruit in a world where weeds still grow.

We trust that beneath all the noise and struggle around us, God is quietly bringing forth a harvest of love, mercy, and goodness that no enemy can ever destroy. For this is God's field, this is God's work and, by God's grace, we are God's people.

Amen.