Christ the King Epiphany Church, Wilbraham

The Rev. Martha S. Sipe

July 19, 2026 / Pentecost 8 (Lect. 16A)

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

So which are you:  wheat or weed?

Of course, you’re here in church on a Sunday morning in July – you must be wheat.  You must be wholesome grain.  But when we get to the confession in a few minutes, if you’re anything like me, a few less-than-totally-wholesome moments might pop into your head.  Gee, I really should have been more patient with that customer service rep on the phone, even though I was on hold for 20 minutes.  And why am I so quick to judge people who hold different opinions than I do?  And why can’t I just be happy for people when they have fancier or nicer stuff than I do?  I’d like to think I’m a stalk of wheat . . . but I’m not always.  We are prone to binary thinking:  you’re either this or that; a good guy or a bad guy; you’re with me or against me; friend or foe; right or wrong; righteous or sinner.  We think that way.  And yet the world isn’t always that simple, is it?   There’s very little that’s black and white, including us!

I’m reminded of the joke about an incident at a traffic light.  A man was stopped, waiting for the light to turn green, but when the light changed, he was distracted and didn’t budge.  The woman in the car behind him honked her horn.  He still didn’t move.  She honked again, and began pounding on her steering wheel and cursing at the distracted driver ahead of her, who finally, as the light turned yellow, woke up and drove through the light.  The woman in the second car was beside herself and was still screaming at the car in front of her as it disappeared in the distance, when she heard a tapping at her window.  She looked up into the face of a police officer, who said, “Lady, you’re under arrest.”  At the police station, when they got the whole story out of her, they let her go, of course.  But while the arresting officer apologized for the misunderstanding, he defended his actions.  “Lady, you’ve gotta understand,” he said.  “When I pulled up behind you, you were blowing your horn and cursing at the fellow in front of you.  When I noticed your bumper stickers – one that says ‘Follow me to Sunday School,’ and the other which says ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ – I assumed that you had stolen the car.”

Who would have thought that it could be hard to tell the difference between a car thief and a Sunday School teacher?  But it can be difficult to distinguish between weed and wheat, to use Jesus’ parable analogy.  What I noticed on reading the parable this time around is the landowner’s order not to be so quick to judge.  He tells them not to pull out the weeds for fear of uprooting the wheat.  “Wait,” he says.  “Just wait and let the weeds grow up alongside the wheat until it is time for the harvest.”

I think it’s safe to say that Jesus’ counsel here is not agricultural.  Not paying attention to weeds isn’t great gardening advice.  But even above and beyond the weirdness of the laissez-faire farming technique, words fly in the face of our natural instincts.  As humans, we are programmed to judge, to distinguish between good and bad, healthy and harmful – and to eradicate (or at least avoid) the negative.  The thought of letting “the children of the evil one” co-exist with us feels just wrong.  We are much more comfortable drawing the line between who is in and who is out, for our protection and self-preservation.  But no matter if we draw that line mentally or if we actually exclude some people from our fellowship or from our compassion – either way, it is exactly NOT what Jesus would do.  As Nadia Bolz-Weber says, “Every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.”  That quote always give me pause.  Every time we draw a line to exclude someone – the person from a different country or a different immigration status or a different family structure or a different political party or a different work ethic or a different income level – every time we draw a line to exclude someone, Jesus is on the other side of the boundary, with the people whom we have chosen to exclude.

Jesus says, “Let the weeds and the wheat grow up together.  I’ll sort it all out at the harvest.”  And that’s good news for a couple of reasons.  First of all, if Jesus is going to do the sorting out at the harvest, it takes the pressure off of us to figure out who’s in and who’s out, who’s friend and who’s foe.  If Jesus is going to sort it all out in the end, we can just go on loving and serving all of God’s children without being afraid that there won’t be enough for us and without worrying about whether they deserve to be loved and served or not.

The second reason that it’s good news that Jesus will sort it all out at the harvest is because it’s not harvest time . . . yet.  And that’s probably a good thing because there’s a little bit of weediness in even the wheatiest among us.  I’ve already confessed some of my weeds:  impatience and judgmental thoughts and envy.  What weeds pop up in your little corner of God’s field?  Are you ever angry?  Or self-absorbed?  Or maybe a little less generous than you could be given the blessings you’ve received?  Yeah, those weeds pop up in my garden, too.  But don’t worry – there is still time to nurture our wheatier instincts.  There is still time – and there is still help available from the Holy Spirit – to bring forth good fruits.  Just ask for help, and you will receive it.

The world is a complicated place, perhaps now more than ever.  And we are complicated beings!  There is very little that is black or white, very little that is exclusively weed or wholly wheat.  But what is not complicated, what is, in fact, absolutely clear, is that God’s got a plan to sort everything out in the end.  It’s God’s job, not ours.  And when God does that final sorting, we who are righteous by his grace – we who have been named and claimed by Jesus– we will shine like the sun in the kingdom of our Father.