Another seed parable? Why, yes! Today’s text follows last week’s Parable of the Sower, and next week you will hear the Parable of the Mustard Seed. Jesus loves seed metaphors. If you will recall, in Kelli’s sermon on the Parable of the Sower, we learned of the extravagant, relentless love of God. I love thinking of God in this way. No matter how empty, rocky, shallow, or thorny my soil is, God never gives up on me, never stops sowing seeds my way; I can always count on the love of God, the God who really, really loves us. But the parable I get to preach on is the one where Jesus sends angels to collect all evildoers and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth! Lucky me.
And unlucky you. Because when I read this gospel, what jumped out at me is that this parable addresses the problem of systemic evil, also referred to as systemic oppression. Groan. I know. Because you came to hear Good News, you say? Well, today you get to learn about systemic oppression. First, a definition: It is oppression that occurs at the institutional level, perpetrated by those with power. It occurs in governmental policies, within educational institutions, in the way healthcare is delivered, in how laws are enforced. Some examples today would be gerrymandering and attempts at voter suppression. Making it more difficult to vote, for instance, by attacking Washington’s mail-in voting.
How is it connected to today’s parable? Notice how good and evil are growing side by side in the same soil. The servants went into the field and discovered weeds growing among the master’s wheat. The weeds resembled wheat, so it was not discovered until the plants had matured. The servants were ready to march into the field and rip up the weeds, but the master stopped them. He told them that the root systems of the mature plants had become completely intertwined beneath the surface. You could say that the weeds, though undesirable, are “systemic.” See the connection? Uprooting the weeds would uproot the wheat as well. In the same way, when we try to tear down broken “systems” with anger and violence, we end up destroying the very people and communities we are trying to save. While we feel acutely the pain of personal experiences of discrimination, systemic discrimination is far reaching when it is embedded in the societal institutions we depend upon. This is the dynamic exposed in today’s parable.
Before I explore this text any further, I also want to tell you that as I was studying this text, I learned that this weekend, July 17 – 19th, is “Good Trouble Lives on Weekend,” so named for the civil rights icon John Lewis, who died on July 17, 2020. “Good Trouble” refers to John Lewis’ request for us to “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the souls of America.” It is a nationwide movement that focuses on voter education, civic engagement, and resisting modern attacks on voting rights in coordinated community actions under three pillars: Teach, Reach, and Preach. The weekend is designed to confront an uncomfortable truth about our social landscape – a truth wrapped around movements like “Black Lives Matter.” It is a cry against a harsh reality: Systemic oppression still poisons our institutions.
Living here in Washington State, it can be difficult to see this truth. We look around our communities and wonder, “Where are all the weeds?” We have secure, accessible, all-mail voting that works beautifully. But Jesus reminds us in his explanation of the text: “The field is the world.” We take seamless voting access for granted when it is actively being stripped away from people of color in many states across the country. Our comfort is deeply intertwined with systems that still oppress others. Good and evil are growing side by side in the same soil.
How should we deal with deeply rooted systemic evil? In our text, the master tells the servants to “Let both of them grow together until the harvest.” In the original Greek in this text, the Master commands his servants to aphiemi – to permit, to leave alone, to let go. Because God delays final judgment, we are freed from trying to play the executioner. We are given the space to operate in a different way. And this is where John Lewis’ life clarifies the radical nature of the gospel. Lewis understood that letting go is not a white flag of surrender; rather, it invites us to take on the world the way Jesus took up the cross: sacrificially, non-violently, with reckless love. Forgiveness and restraint are how we decouple ourselves from the hatred of the oppressor so that we are free to fight the system without becoming the evil we despise.
When John Lewis was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, he forgave his attackers. But it did not stop him from marching. It allowed him to look at the ongoing institutional wrong, acknowledge it truthfully, and say “You do not control my moral imagination. I release my right to hate you, so that I have the spiritual clarity to dismantle the system that corrupted you.” We must begin by speaking words that refuse the cycle of hatred.
Now, I’m not quite done, because letting go, resisting non-violently, releasing hate, is what I call “Good Advice.” But the Gospel is about Good News, right? The Good News is that God does not leave us standing alone in the field. Jesus said, “at harvest time I will tell the reapers, collect the weeds first and bind them into bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” In the original Greek, “gather” is synago, the literal root of the word synagogue, which means to assemble the sacred community. Here, God promises that institutional evil will ultimately be burned away by a refiner’s fire, and that God’s people will be assembled in a beloved, renewed and resurrected community.
This is how the healing of the world begins. Humans are not to separate the evil from the good; our judgment is not the same as God’s judgment. It is God who makes the sun to shine on the good and bad alike, it is God who causes the rain to fall on both the just and the unjust. And it is God who promises that good will prevail over evil.
Finally, don’t think Jesus is letting us off the hook. We are still his hands and feet. I“Let the wheat and the weeds grow together until the harvest,” doesn’t mean we get to sit in the field and do nothing. As Episcopalians, we acknowledge the tension every time we renew our Baptismal Covenant. We were asked: “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” We answered, “I will, with God’s help.” But how do we fulfill that vow when the very soil we stand on is rigged in our favor. By our baptismal covenant, we are called to action while we wait for the final harvest. We must move particularly into the courageous work of justice. We structure our lives around the Good Trouble Lives on Movement’s three pillars:
We Teach. We refuse to look away from systemic brokenness. We learn as much as we can about the roots of injustice, inform and enlighten others, and speak the truth to power.
We Reach. We move past our comfort zones, close social distance and build bridges. We stand up for values of equality, in our workplaces, schools and social interactions, using our structural advantages and resources to advocate for those who do not share them.
We Preach. We proclaim with our words and actions the Good News of God in Christ. We preach a justice that respects the dignity of every single human being, even those who are the very perpetrators of evil.
We teach, reach and preach against systemic evil, not with weapons of hatred, but with the Good Trouble of love, for God has promised that “The righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!”