Running Ahead of God

Exodus 17:1-7, Numbers 20:1-13; Matthew 17:1-8

Preached at Tigard Community Friends Church

Oct. 6, 2019

            I mentioned last week that we have dug 80+ holes for trees, shrubs and plants, and some of those holes were into rocks. We did have enough sense to wait until rain softened the top 4 inches of soil, but nothing softened the rocks.

            I really enjoyed the work, to be honest. I watched my spouse use the 26-pound prybar to evict sizable rocks and break up the hard clay, and I used it myself (though I thought I might lose my balance on the sloping surface, fall on prybar and break out my front teeth). One day, I felt a decided burning in my tricep and thought, “Well, that’s enough for the day.” So I waited a day or two before using that prybar again. And I congratulated myself on paying attention to my body.

            A couple of weeks into heavy digging, I noticed my hands were really sore in the morning. They got better as I used them during the day, and when I really got going, endorphins took all the pain away. Then my middle fingers on both sides started catching in the phenomenon known as trigger finger. Now I get them caught in the shape of claws and they stick there for a bit until I can pry them open. They wake me up in the night to complain. So I warm them up, massage them with various liniments, and continue digging. 

            The amount of work I did made me proud of myself, and I wanted to impress my spouse when he got home each day. Also, I just love planting things. So I pressed on, until a little voice whispered, “You might want to get those hands looked at.” I made an appointment and got referred to physical therapy. Where my therapist “congratulated” me on doing so much hard work as a happy way to transition into telling me I’d better take it easy if I want my hands to improve. This is annoying. I could, of course, ignore her warning and persist with my shoveling and raking and digging. But I’m going to try to listen and obey.

            The significance of my story is that all the work I was doing was positive, and I enjoyed doing it despite all the aches and pains that ensued from it. But I didn’t quickly listen to when to ease up, and now I owe my body some rest. I pressed on when I should have put my feet up. Maybe some of you can relate. 

            On a day off from work at the yearly meeting (denominational) office, I thought about what things I should get done, and I asked God, “What do you want me to do today?” And, to my surprise, God said, in my inner self, “It’s a nice sunny day; get outside and enjoy it.” So I went and sat in my swing. Another time, after the career disappointment I mentioned, I said, probably angrily, to God, “Now what? What am I supposed to do now?” And God said, “You don’t have to achieve another thing in your whole remaining life. I’m fine with that.” Notice God didn’t say, “I forbid you to achieve” or “you better not try another job.” Just that God didn’t require me to continue to be ambitious and aspirational, God isn’t pushing me to fulfill my potential, God is just happy for me to be.

            I’ll add, right up front, that my whole spiritual life took a turn for the better when, as a young adult, I heard Bill Vaswig at Newberg Friends Church say, “Jesus promised that the Spirit would guide us into truth, so why not ask what the Spirit of truth would have you do, take some time and space to listen, and then do what you hear.” St. Augustine said, “Love God and do what you will, acting always out of love.” (No law but the law of love: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.) This sounds enormously free and a little scary if we aren’t accustomed to working without a net of rules and guidelines, without expectations we are trying to meet.

            (Just a word about what I “hear” when I say I hear God. Some of what I hear are mental impressions, metaphors, ideas about things I’m turning over in my mind. George MacDonald said that God sits in the darkness where the light of our consciousness goes out and sends us up beautiful things. Sometimes also, when I’m working on a course of action, I receive in my mind a simply factual statement about what I need to do next, such as “take the day off,” or “take the next step in forgiveness,” or, in the middle of an argument with my spouse, “you know you’re going to have to get over this, so watch what you say.” God’s word doesn’t come clad in shaming, guilt-producing, manipulative language. I’ve never had God thunder at me, despite my various wayward tendencies.)

            And look at the arrangement in the garden, before humans took their fate into their own hands. Every evening, after the humans doing anything they wanted to (except that one thing of eating the fruit of the Tree of Death), God showed up to walk and talk with them. This sounds like a golden age to me, and we do keep trying, on our own steam, to get back to the garden.

Last week I mentioned the problem of running ahead of God. God wants humans to live in ongoing conversation and responsiveness to God’s leading. The temptation in the garden speaks to us of human beings running ahead of where God leads, putting our own ideas of how we want things to be in the place of listening to God, pushing forward because that’s what we know how to do.

            So today, I want us to look at the story of Moses, who led the Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery to the edge of the promised land. I am going to simplify the story, leaving out huge portions to focus on three incidents in Moses’s life.

            To recap, for those who are unfamiliar. Moses was born a Hebrew in Egypt at a time when all Hebrew boy babies were supposed to be killed at birth. His midwives disobeyed this law, and his mother nursed him up until she felt he could survive, then put him into a little boat on the river, where he was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. She brought him up as a prince in Egypt, and she employed his mother to be his nanny.

            One day Moses saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, and he flew into a rage and killed the Egyptian. (This is Moses acting on his own, by the way.) He fled the country and went to work as a shepherd at the back of beyond. After decades, God got in touch with Moses via a miraculous burning bush, and God told Moses to  use what was in his hand, which was his shepherd’s rod. This rod became imbued with powers that looked magical: it could turn into a snake and then back, for instance. God sent Moses back to Egypt, saying, “I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say.” So Moses went.

 After a lengthy negotiation period between Moses, Pharaoh and God, Pharaoh let the Hebrews go into the wilderness to worship God. When Pharaoh saw that they had escaped, he and his army pursued them, thinking them trapped by the Red Sea. But God told Moses to lift up his shepherd’s rod over the water, and it parted so that the Hebrews could escape.

Now I’m going to take you to three times when the Hebrews murmured against God and complained to Moses about having no water. The first time was not long after their escape across the bed of the Red Sea. Three days into the wilderness they ran out of water.  The only water was a stream called “Bitter” (Hebrew: Marah) because of its nasty taste. They couldn’t drink the water. And God said to Moses, “Take the tree I’m pointing out and throw it into the stream.” Moses did exactly that, and the water became sweet and drinkable. Moses took the opportunity to point out to the Hebrews how important it was to listen to God and do what God says.

Some time later, the people arrived in another place in the wilderness where there was no water. Keep in mind that they had livestock as well as families along, so there was a lot at stake in having an adequate source of water. Moses asked God for help, saying “Help! They are about to stone me to death!” and God replied, “Take the elders of the people with you, and bring your shepherd’s rod that struck the sea. I will go with you to the rock, and you will smite the rock with your shepherd’s rod, and water will come out of it.” So Moses obeyed God’s word, and indeed, water flowed out of the rock.

Much later, after the Hebrews have reached the promised land and denied themselves entrance by their cowardice and then disobedience, they arrive again at the place in the wilderness where there is no water. They complain against Moses and God, saying, “Why have you brought us up into the wilderness to die of thirst? Why have you taken us out of Egypt, a place of figs and pomegranates, to this evil place?”

So Moses went to seek God’s face and will. And the Lord spoke to Moses, and said, “Take your shepherd’s rod, bring your brother Aaron along, and gather the people together. Then speak to the rock, and water will gush out of it right before their eyes.” Moses got Aaron, picked up his shepherd’s rod, and gathered the people together.

And he said to them, “Listen up, you rebels! Must we fetch you water out of this rock?” Then he smote the rock with his shepherd’s rod. Nothing happened. So he struck it again. Uh-oh.

Moses does not follow God’s leading. Moses takes the rod into his own hands and does what worked in the past, rather than trusting that this time, it will be enough to be simply obedient and speak to the rock. Now, God is kind and the people are thirsty, and God still provides water gushing from the rock. But there will be consequences for Moses.

Some here may have a hard time believing the miraculous parts of this story, thinking of wizard’s wands, and magic spells, and so on. And certainly, in Egypt Pharaoh’s sorcerers were able to match Moses miracle for miracle up to a point (which, somewhat amusingly, was the plague of lice. They could make frogs but not lice. Perhaps once you’ve hidden a louse up your sleeve, it sticks around.) And I don’t want to worry about defending whether these things did or did not happen exactly as written in the Bible. What is written is for our correction, encouragement and instruction in right living, so that’s how we’ll use it.

What I want us to focus on is that the Bible faithfully recounts both Moses’s obedience and Moses’s disobedience. The Bible tells that this man, who talked “mouth to mouth” with God, chose, after decades of obedience, to take matters into his own hands and do what worked in the past.  And God took note of this break in relationship. Moses did not live to enter the promised land after all his wandering through the wilderness with the wayward Hebrews. Instead, God took Moses up on a mountain to see the promised land, and said, “Because you rebelled (the Hebrew word is Marah, like the bitter stream) against my commandment in the strife of the congregation and did not honor my name and word as holy at the water before the congregation, you may not enter the promised land.”

This is instructive to us. The life of the Christian is a life lived in obedience to the living Word, God’s Holy Spirit, a daily and ordinary obedience. We are always likely to let the clatter and conflict around us rattle us so that we can’t trust what God is saying to us. We are likely instead to do what worked before. When we disobey, our actions have consequences. Otherwise, our actions do not have any meaning. But God is not harsh with us. I notice that God allowed Moses to draw water from the rock because God is kind and gracious. And as an important side note, God promises Moses that he will be gathered unto his people, which seems positive, perhaps even more positive than entering the physical promised land. So though Moses didn’t get to fulfill his hope of entering the promised land, he moved on into a dimension of unbroken and unbreakable conversation and relationship with God.

Jesus showed us what it looks like to be a human being in living, continual, responsive conversation with God. He said that he did nothing but what his Father told him to do, and that we could see God by looking at Jesus. If you have questions about why Jesus did one thing with a particular person and something else with another, perhaps here is your answer. He was and is responding to the guidance of his Father in his responses to individual human beings.

One day toward the end of the three years Jesus ministered publicly, he took Peter, James and John up a mountain (reminding us of all those mountains Moses climbed to be with God). On that mountain, Jesus was transfigured: he lit up from within and his clothing glowed with light (reminding us of how Moses’s face glowed with light). He looked for once like the Son of God might be expected to look.  And importantly, Jesus had visitors on the mount where he was transfigured. Here is Moses, along with the prophet Elijah, signifying that Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets.

And because humans want to memorialize big events like this one, Peter says, “Let us build three tabernacles here for you, Moses, and Elijah.” You see, if there are tabernacles there, people can make pilgrimages, people can hope to capture some of that experience again. People like to have a place of worship that holds still so they can find it whenever they want.

But God says in response to Peter’s suggestion: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” And isn’t that the way of following Jesus? We tend to pray at Jesus, telling Jesus what should happen next. Like Peter, we find it challenging to be quiet so we can hear Jesus, so we know what our next act of worshipful obedience will be. God doesn’t give us a nice shrine we can revisit every year or every week. We get an ongoing, intimate, personal, instructive, loving relationship with the Son of God.

Jesus promised us a relationship to God like his Father/Son relationship. Like Moses, like Jesus, we too can have an intimate (if usually invisible) mouth to mouth conversation with God, and our part in life is to enjoy that relationship and do what God tells us.

Respect for the Body

1 Corinthians 6:19, 20

Preached at Newberg Friends Church, October 21, 2012

When a person dies, we can tell that something crucial is gone that we had counted on being there.  The body looks just like the person we know but the animating spirit is gone.  In physical terms, all the electrical energy that circulated through the nerves and brain and kept the lungs breathing and kept the heart pumping simply stops. Though the body is not equal to the person, yet without the body, we would never know each other.  Our bodies are not all we are, but through them we relate to each other and to God and it matters to God what we do in and with our bodies.

Our mind and spirit, we are pretty sure, depend on our bodies for their beginnings.  One of my daughters asked me when she was 2 or 3 where she had been before she was born.  I wasn’t sure which answer to give, so I gave the philosophical Idealist answer: “You were in the mind of God,” I said.  She took that in and then some time later came up with this comment about the dog: “When Dusty was in the minda God…” (I will have to add that my other daughter told me that when she was in heaven before she was born, she picked our family out as the one she wanted to come to.  This is sweet, but it creates more questions than it answers.)

Though God has known us from before time, we have not known ourselves without our bodies. But we do start to know our bodies very early, and one of the joys of grandparenting and parenting is watching babies learn to live into their bodies and their minds. And somewhere, we watch babies act in ways contrary to their best interest and contrary to what their parents tell them to do, and they learn they have their own separate will.

I may be making this too simple, but the entire rest of human life is learning to use that separate will.  And we exercise our will in how we use our bodies.

The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being….Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” …So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man….And the man and the woman were both naked, and were not ashamed.

The story of sin’s entry into human experience is in part a story of becoming ashamed of being human, and particularly ashamed of the body.  The exact form of the temptation to disobey was to become like God.  Adam and Eve rejected their status and limitations as human beings. After Adam and Eve disobeyed the one rule God gave them, their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked,  They knew as God knows just how far from being godlike they were.  Therefore, they covered themselves with clothing made of leaves because they were ashamed and afraid of being human.

However, Jesus never depicts the body as despicable or its vulnerabilities or imperfections as shameful. Remember the many times Jesus touched the sick and disabled, the lepers and the other unclean.  Remember that Jesus said that the man born blind was not born that way because of sin, either his own (from before birth!) or his parents’ sin.  Instead, he was born blind so that the glory of God could show up in him. I think the glory of God is not the healing, but the condition of his heart which was ready to meet Jesus. His good heart is revealed by the healing and he stands up for Jesus the son of God.  (In contrast, the man by the pool turns Jesus in to the religious leaders after he figures out who he is.)

God wants us to live fully into our humanity. And Jesus came to show us how to live fully into our humanity: namely, to live in mindful listening and consistent obedience to God.

Personally, I have persisted in a course of action that in my gut (note the body’s usefulness) I knew was unwise or downright wrong.  I ignored the warning signs from my body—the physical symptoms of heartburn, stomach ache, tight muscles, headache, and so on.  Our bodies are one of the ways God talks to us:  you’re putting yourself in danger, our stomachs tell us; you’re still angry, insomnia tells us; you’re making your job too important, our ulcers remark. One way we misuse our will is to ignore the truth we can learn from our bodies.

The body has its own wisdom, instinctive, intuitive.  We need to listen to what it says.  The listening is done with our minds, of course, our imaginations, but the attitude we preserve is one of respect.  Otherwise, we can pervert our common sense, logic, all kinds of useful thinking skills to justify a course of action that our intuition, based more than we like to admit on the body, rebels against.

Jesus calls us to account for our tendency to blame our sin on the body in Matthew 5:29-30. Jesus knows that the source of sin is the will, not the body.  People sin because they choose to. To those who blame the body because they lust, Jesus said, “Cut off whatever causes you to sin.” Just how much of the body will one have to remove in order to quit lusting after what God does not will for us to have? My opinion is that cutting off parts of my body to prevent my sinning will work only if I cut off my head.

C. S. Lewis said in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy that his body never led him very far astray by itself.  It was his imagination that got him into serious trouble.  By imagination, he meant the whole human capability of imagining circumstances different from reality and choosing to prefer that illusion.  The first illusion depicted in Genesis is imagining being like God, or being God.  When we place our will in the place of God’s will, what we want is more important than what God wants.  This, put simply, is idolatry. 

Matthew 15:10-20

Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles….Do you not see that whatever a person eats enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what a person says arises from the mind, the will, the character of that person, and this is what pollutes a person. As a result, out of the inner self come evil or distorted thoughts and arguments, murder, adultery, illicit sexual intercourse, theft, false witness, speech that destroys another’s reputation or misrepresents God. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.” The sin that pollutes us starts in the will, not in the body.

Jesus said to Nicodemus that a human must be born again in order to enter the Kingdom of God.  That new birth includes both spirit (the same word as breath) and body.  We may be entirely wrong to think that spirit exists separate from body.

In a letter to an early church, Paul calls the body “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (I Cor. 6:19-20).  Christians talk about God living in their hearts, which is clearly a metaphor; but what if this temple phrase is literally true?  What if God dwells in our bodies?  That makes them holy places, inside and outside.  We can’t put God out of our minds and do irresponsible or wicked things with our bodies or with the bodies of other people.  I think of this when I worry about how workers in other countries or even in our own are treated.  I don’t want my wardrobe to be made by mistreated factory workers.  I think about the body’s holiness when I evaluate addictions.  I don’t want to destroy my body by using food, exercise, or chemicals that excite or soothe my mind at the expense of my body.  I think about the body’s holiness when I am confronted with abusiveness.  Violating another person’s body is violating a holy dwelling where God lives. (As an acquaintance once said about the practice of female circumcision, “I can’t make moral space for that.”) God comes with us wherever we go and whatever we do, and God inhabits those we meet as well. 

Romans 12 helps us recognize that because of what Jesus has already accomplished through identifying with our humanity, our sin, and our death, and through prefiguring the resurrection we all hope for, we are free to offer our whole selves, body and spirit, to the service of God. We don’t have to be pawns of the forces that dominate our social world. As we obey God with our bodies, we worship God in spirit and in truth. God renews our minds so we can see clearly the good, acceptable, complete actions that are the will of God for us.

Jesus consistently locates sin in the will and diagnoses a sinful will by looking at what people do with their bodies.  Matthew 25:31-46

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. Just as you did it to one of the least of these members of my family, you did it to me. My Father blesses you. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

Just as you did not do it unto one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And these will go away into eternal punishment. In John 5:28, 29, Jesus adds that when the dead hear his voice they will come out and those who have done good will be resurrected into life.  So it really does matter how we treat other people, how we treat other people’s bodies.

Jesus rewards kindness to other human beings in their bodies. Kindness has in its heart the recognition that others are the same kind as we; and the Golden Rule and the law of love pertain.  How do we want to be treated when we are hungry, thirsty, homeless, defenseless against the elements, sick, imprisoned?  What can we do by means of our own bodies to make another’s life more bearable?

So if I were to modify the Northwest Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice statement about respect for the body in any way, I would add to it the emphasis that we respect the bodies of others as temples of God, also.

In Genesis, God breathed into human bodies the breath of life. When Jesus appeared to the disciples in his resurrected body, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit of God now lives inside our bodies, as intimately as the air we breathe.  

Christians live in a mystery; we do not earn the grace of God by being good or by doing good deeds.  Rather, by believing what Jesus has taught us about God by Jesus’s own life, death, and resurrection, and by trusting that Jesus has brought us through death into new life, we are free to live as Jesus did, in complete confidence that God is good and loving toward us.  The Holy Spirit breathes in us and guides us daily into knowing and doing good. 

Paul teaches what Jesus teaches:  food is for the belly, the belly is for food, both will come to an end in death; however, the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body.  We are the limbs of Jesus, the members of His body.  Therefore, what we do with our bodies makes a difference.  In John 9, Jesus says, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” And in Matthew 5, Jesus says, “You are the light of the world; let your light shine before others so they may see your good works and glorify our Father in heaven.” 

Paul refers to the body as a tent (II Cor. 4:18-5:1, 4). Thinking of it as a tent, we recognize its temporary status.  We are always camping out in it. We can repair it, we can take good care of it, but we can’t keep it from wearing out, blowing away in a storm, or collapsing.  Gravity holds it on the earth, but it also drags it down, given enough time. Practically, this means that we have to do maintenance—reasonable exercise, healthy diet, occasional patching (I heard a woman once say that after forty, it’s patch, patch, patch), but it also means we don’t expect it to look new forever.  Christians believe that the tent is not finally transcended in death; instead, it is replaced by a more permanent house, a new body.

We need to pay the right kind of attention to the body, our own and others’. We neither worship the body nor dismiss it.  We recognize that the body is how we stay connected with this planet and other people. God’s presence in each human being gives each body eternal value. We take appropriate care of the body, both our own and others’, preserving the body’s wholeness and holiness, and we listen to the body when it helps us recognize truth.   We use our bodies now to obey the Holy Spirit of God who lives in us, and we look forward to joining Jesus in the resurrection.

God the Gardener, IV: Pruning and Weeding

John 15

Every branch that bears fruit he prunes so that it will bear more fruit.

The Word I have spoken to you                  Pruning branches

                                                                                    Cut off fruitless

Cut back fruitful

The pruning instrument in the parable is the Word Jesus spoke to his disciples.  What this means to me is that Jesus and his teachings are how we understand what God wants from us, how God views us, and how we are to view God.  I think of how translators of the Bible tend to start with a Gospel, often Mark, believing that Jesus is in fact the central story and interpretive principle for those becoming Christians and all who are Christian already.  When we allow what Jesus said to reshape our actions and hearts, we will be ready to interpret the rest of the Bible well.

These next parables are from the Old Testament. They suggest that when God stops pruning, God is ready to turn the vines over to natural forces and consequences.  So we’re glad for pruning that helps us become useful and healthful producers of fruit for the good of other people—just dealings and right actions toward others.

Isaiah 5:3-6

You who live in Jerusalem, you members of Judah, judge now between me and my vineyard. What more could I have done to my vineyard than I did?  Why, when I looked for grapes, did it produce only stinkberries? Now listen; I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove the hedge around it and animals will eat it up; I will break down the wall around it and animals will walk over it; and I will destroy it. I will not prune the vines, nor dig around them.  I will let briers and thorns grow up in it.  I will also command the clouds not to rain on it.  For my vineyard, the vineyard of the Lord of hosts, is the house of Israel; the members of Judah were my pleasant plant.  I looked to them for just dealings and I found bloodshed and oppression; I looked for justice and right actions and found cries of distress.

Joel 1:12

The vine is dried up, and the fig tree droops; the pomegranate, the palm, the apple, all the trees of the field are withered, because joy has dried up among the children of Adam.

Joel 2:12-13, 22

Therefore also now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, fasting, weeping, mourning; tear your hearts and not your clothes, and return to the Lord your God, who is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, greatly kind, who himself laments the harm done…Do not be afraid, animals of the field; the grasslands do spring, the tree bears fruit, the fig tree and the vine contribute their plenty. 

What can we learn from these pruning parables? 

The pruner is God.  The pruning is done because of God’s love for us and desire for our good. And refusing to be pruned has negative natural consequences.

Therefore, we can ask ourselves these questions: What makes an event in our lives a “pruning” event? It’s hard to imagine a pruning event that doesn’t have some sense of an avenue of behavior or thought cut off.  We won’t or can’t do something we might otherwise have done.  What makes this pruning rather than vandalism in our lives, I think, lies in our attitude toward the event. 

How can we lean into God’s intention for us in these events? I think turning toward God and moving in closer to God is the first step.  Even if we are angry about the pruning, communicating honestly and frequently with God keeps us close.  I remember clearly a time when I was deeply disappointed and angry with God. I sat in church with my head down, reminding God of how angry I was and how unfair God was.  I felt in my heart (and it was nearly audible) God saying, “Lift up your head and look at me.” I wouldn’t do it, just like an angry child.  I felt that God lifted my chin, and said, “Look in my eyes. What do you see there?”  I could see only love.  “I see only love,” I said. This changed everything in my attitude and heart to this day.  I want everyone to have the same experience of God—look into God’s eyes and you will see love.

How will we know the pruning has been helpful? My observation is that pruning is helpful when we end up trusting God more, listening to God and others more before acting, and doing the good God tells us to do more readily.

Here’s another parable, this one about weeding.

Matthew 13:24-30

Jesus told them another parable (right after Sower)

The Kingdom of heaven is like this:

A man sowed good seed in his field. One night, while everyone was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away. When the plants grew and the heads and grain began to form, then the weeds showed up. The man’s servants came to him and said, “Sir, it was good seed you sowed in your field; where did the weeds come from?”

“It was some enemy who did this,” he answered.

“Do you want us to go pull up the weeds?” they asked him.

“No,” he answered, “because as you gather the weeds you might pull up some of the wheat along with them. Let the weeds and the wheat both grow together until harvest. Then I will tell the harvest workers to pull up the weeds first, and then to gather in the wheat and put it in my barn.”

Matthew 13:36-43

When Jesus had left the crowd and gone indoors, his disciples came to him and said, “Tell us what the parable about the weeds in the field means.” Jesus answered:

“Good sower=Son of Man (Jesus)

Field=world

Good seed= people who belong to the Kingdom

Weeds=people who belong to the evil one

Bad sower=devil

Harvest=end of age

Workers=angels.

“The Son of Man will send out his angels to gather up out of his Kingdom all those who cause people to sin and all others who do evil things. Then God’s people will shine like the sun.”

The Old Testament provides a context for this parable in Leviticus 19:19: You shall keep my statutes. You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed.

These are part of the purity laws for the ancient Israelites; many believe one purpose of these laws was to separate the Israelites from all other peoples who did not follow Israel’s God. If the Israelites were concerned to be pure, they must have spent a lot of time removing weeds.  It would indeed be seen as the act of an enemy to deliberately sow another kind of seeds in a field meant to be pure. 

So the Levitical context explains their energy to remove the weeds in the parable, the “mingled” seeds, but the owner says no, let it wait until later.

What we can learn about the Kingdom of God from this parable is that Jesus is not a worrier. He does what God says to do, and he knows there will be a time to set all things right.  In the mean time, we can let people grow and see how they turn out.

For the Jews, this was likely a warning similar to the new wine in new wineskins—that the Kingdom of God was not a continuation of the system of Judaism but a fulfilling and completing of the law, which Jesus summed up as loving God wholly and loving our neighbors as ourselves.  The day of the Kingdom dawned with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Another possibility is that Jesus is not surprised or stymied by the messiness of the church, universal or particular.  Jesus knows that weeds are also growing, that within the church community are those who do not bear fruit, do not do the things Jesus said and says to do.  Jesus gives them time and reminds us to let Jesus do the judging.  My own denomination has frequently disowned folks who were “weedy” in the denomination’s perspective—people who performed music, people who joined the military, people who married non-Quakers.  It’s not one of our best sides, and it reflects the zeal for purity that uproots the good with the bad. Clearly, we need to tell people who harm others (or themselves) to stop it, and we need to take steps to protect the vulnerable.  However, it takes time to see whether people are moving toward God or away from God, and telling people to stop harmful behavior is not the same as judging the condition of their hearts with regard to God.

Personally, I have thought that I often don’t even know what needs to be weeded or pruned. Some of the aspects of myself that I think of as liabilities may in fact be seen differently by God; same with what I think of as my strengths. It is a great comfort to have Jesus in charge of these things.  My main energy can be spent listening and doing what I’m told.  When I do this, I lean into Jesus, follow close behind him, and he can help me become who he wants.

Matthew 6:28-34, Luke 12:27-31

And why worry about what you will wear?  Look how the wild flowers grow. They do not work or make clothes for themselves. But I tell you that not even King Solomon with all his wealth had clothes as beautiful as one of these flowers.  It is God who clothes the wild grass—grass that is here today and gone tomorrow, burned up in the oven.  Won’t he be all the more sure to clothe you?  What little faith you have! So do not worry…Instead, be concerned above everything else with the Kingdom of God and with what God requires of you, and God will provide you with all these other things.

Matthew 24:32-35, Mark 13:28-31

Let the fig tree teach you a lesson. When its branches become green and tender and it starts putting out leaves, you know summer is near.  In the same way, when you see all these things, you will know that the time is near, ready to begin—you will know that the Kingdom of heaven is about to come.

The Kingdom of Heaven is where God is King.  God’s will is to bring reconciliation between the whole earth, including humanity, and God’s own self.  Jesus came to make this clear to us and to show us how it looks to live in harmony with God our Father.  God gives us the beauty of flowers, the clothes that show we are in the right place in our spirits.  So we do not need to worry, we need not to worry.  Live into the promise here that Jesus gives—small beginnings signal great awakenings.

To sum up:  Abide in Jesus, seek first God’s kingdom, don’t fear, do what God says to do.  That’s the secret to God’s gardening.