Several
years ago, a research team from the famous Barna Group polled people across
this country to determine what the first thing or things people thought of when
they heard the word “Christian” was. Care to guess what the top three answers
were – from millions of interviewees nation-wide…? The top three answers were
judgmental, anti-homosexual, and anti-abortion. Those are the top 3 answers of what people out there
in the world associate with us, the followers of Jesus. No wonder there are so
many empty pews. How sad it must be for Jesus to have his supposed followers
known for those 3 things above all
others. In fact, I bet for him that news from the Barna group is kind of like being
crucified all over again!
It’s because of this survey and the
thousands of other stories I could tell about judgmental Christians I’ve
encountered over the years that I wanted us to really look at this particular
kingdom parable of Jesus’s. I think the unweeded garden is a critical and
instructive metaphor for the kingdom God wants us to be building. Let’s take a
look at it together.
I’ve never been much of a gardener, but
occasionally I’ll have the chance to spend some time in some of my friends’
gardens. Some of them have an amazing way with flowers, vegetables, and all
things green. I don’t have free reign when it comes to other people’s gardens. I’m
relegated to watering when they’re out of town or unable to get to it. But my
gardening friends have learned the hard way not to turn me loose on the weeds.
You see, I’ve pulled out more than a few good plants and flowers when I thought
all I was doing was weeding. I’ve pulled out little fledgling something or
others - chives, parsley, and even some tomato stalks without knowing it. So nowadays,
about the only way anyone lets me into their garden to weed is if they can
actually point out exactly what to pull out and what to leave – AND stay there
watching so I don’t screw it up!
Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to this
story Jesus told about the unweeded garden. God’s kingdom, Jesus tells us, is
like an unweeded garden, a huge mixture of good and bad, of productive
and unproductive. And did you happen to hear that it is NOT for the Lord’s
servants to do the weeding? The servants of the king come to their Lord and
Master Gardener dutifully and ask, “Do you want us go and pull the weeds up?” And
without hesitation the king replies, “No, for while you are pulling up the
weeds, you may root up some of the wheat as well. Let both grow together until
the harvest.” Let them BOTH grow TOGETHER until the harvest.
What a lesson! What a challenge! What a
metaphor for life! If we are going to call ourselves followers of Jesus, then
we have to get used to living AND loving in an UNweeded garden. We’re to make no distinctions about who is good
and who isn’t, about who is in and who is out, about who gets water and who
doesn’t.
It really shouldn’t surprise us that
Jesus prefers the garden of his kingdom to be unweeded. Remember in his famous
Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus put it this way: “You have heard it said, ‘Love
your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you; Love your enemy and pray
for those who persecute you, that you may be true sons of your father in
heaven. For God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain
on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:43-45) That’s our model;
that’s our calling – to live and love in an unweeded garden and to make no
distinction in how we treat people. When it comes to people – ALL people - we
are called and commanded to stay out of
the weeding business, to let our light shine and our love fall upon the evil as
well as the good, on the unrighteous as well as the righteous.
As a teacher of World Religions at
NCMC, one of fascinating things I’ve observed is the growing interest my
students seem to have in Buddhism and Hinduism, while their interest in
Christianity continues to wane and fade away. Do you know what draws younger
Americans to these other religions, rather than to Christianity…? The fact that
Buddhists and Hindus don’t dismiss, criticize, or condemn people of other
religions. They consider ALL religious paths equally valid.
When asked by a reporter during his
march to the sea if he wanted to convert the whole world to Hinduism, do you
remember Gandhi’s reply? ”No! I simply want Hindus to be better Hindus, Jews to
be better Jews, Christians to be better Christians, and Muslims to be better
Muslims.” This was Gandhi’s way of acknowledging that no religion is superior
to any other and no truly religious people should ever judge or condemn those
of another religion. Gandhi also once said that “the essence of Hinduism is to
learn to see God in every living being and then act accordingly.” Isn’t that
pretty much the essence of Christianity, too? Isn’t that exactly what Jesus
did? If only his followers could do the same, right?
Judging others is such a slippery
slope, isn’t it? We are always making judgments and acting on such limited
information. We have some teachers or retired teachers here, don’t we? Teachers
know a little something about working in an unweeded garden, don’t we? Each and
every classroom is the ultimate unweeded garden. For the almost 20 years I’ve
been teaching, every fall when I’d get a new class list, I’d do the same,
stupid, judgmental thing. I’d run my index finger down the list, hoping that
I’d have certain “good kids” in my class, and hoping even more fervently that
I’d NOT have to endure certain “weeds” in my classroom. But despite my hoping
and praying over all those years, I always got some unique mix of the kids I
wanted and those I didn’t want to have. And do you know what else I remember
about all my classes over 20 years of teaching? Some of the kids I thought I
really wanted to have weren’t always so great, AND one or two of the kids I
thought would absolutely ruin my class, turned out a lot better than I thought.
In the end, I guess I wasn’t that good at telling which were the weeds and
which were the flowers, which is probably the essence of Jesus’ point in his
parable, right. In the end, the true challenge of teaching was to give all the kids in the garden of my
classroom my absolute best, whether I thought they were weeds or beautiful
flowers. The challenge was to learn to see God in every student and treat
them accordingly.
You know, we live in a time and in a
country where more Christians than ever want to weed the garden, which is why
that Barna survey revealed what it did about what people associate with
Christians and Christianity. And it’s not just that Christians want to weed the
garden: we want to weed it NOW. For many Christians, it’s the Muslims who are
the weeds in the world’s garden, and if we could just separate and get rid of “them”
- with all their terrorists and suicide bombers - we’d be set. For others in
our so-called Christian family, it’s the pro-choicers, the homosexuals, the
liberals, or the conservatives that need to be weeded out, so that God’s “true”
kingdom can come. You can fill in the blanks on who and what your weeds
are, but we’ve all got them, don’t we?
But our Master Gardener – Jesus the
Christ - has made it clear; we’re not very good weeders; we’re not
qualified to do that job. Despite our good intentions, when we weed, we pull
out and get rid of too much stuff that God wants and that God is still working
with. In our impatience to “get-r-done,” we lose sight of the fact that, as
Isaiah said some 2,800 years ago, “God’s ways are not like our ways.” (Isaiah
55:8)
‘Come on, Toby. Aren’t there are a
number of passages in our scriptures that seem to give us Christians license to
weed, or at least criteria that we think we can use to weed on God’s behalf?’
Yes, as a matter of fact there are. I won’t chronicle all of them now, but I do want to examine one of the biggest and
most influential of these apparent “license-to-weed” passages that we Christians
often call upon. It’s the one Gloria just read for us - John chapter 10,
beginning in verse 7. Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came
before me are thieves and robbers; but the sheep did not heed them. I am the door; if any one enters by me
he will be saved.” License to weed, right? Could this be any clearer? Jesus
puts himself at the door of the kingdom of God. He’s the gatekeeper. That
means, that as followers of Jesus, we’re set! We’re on the “right” side of this
whole religious argument, right! The God we worship is the true God, and so
all the Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists must be the weeds. Let the
weeding begin!
Not so fast. Not so fast. If we keep
reading in this very same chapter of John’s gospel, we come to verse 16. Jesus
continues: “And I have other sheep
that are not of this fold; I must bring them
in also, and they will heed my voice. So, ultimately, there shall be one flock
and one shepherd.”
What did Jesus say? Other sheep? Not of this
fold? Sheep that WILL hear his voice – note the future tense. Can you see how
John 10 – when you read it entirely and in its context – is NOT license to weed
at all, but, in fact, quite the opposite?
My friends, the God we worship is
alive. The God that these scriptures give testament to is still working! He’s
not finished with any of us yet, and He’s certainly not finished with the
world. We can’t start weeding. It’s too soon, and it’s not our job.
So here’s my challenge for us this
morning and this week, and it’s a BIGGIE! …What if we agreed NOT to weed?…What
if you and I agreed to let go of weeding forever?
What if we agreed to let go of judging forever?
What if our only job were to love, to serve, to feed, and to lift up others –
ALL others - indiscriminately? What if our little church community embraced the
fact that we are an unweeded
garden? What if we admitted and owned up to the fact that we are the
weeds in somebody else’s garden? What if we committed to letting the rain of
our love fall on the just as well as on the unjust? What if we in this
congregation gave up weeding…for good?
The Kingdom of God is and always will
be and UNweeded garden, and we are neither qualified nor called to change that.
Amen.
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