My first summer in the northwest, back in 1973, the friends I was staying with heard that a strawberry farmer in the area was looking for field bosses for the harvest. Since teachers were highly prized candidates for this role, they suggested I go see Mr. Tsigawa about a job, which I did. After exchanging pleasantries Mr. Tsigawa asked if I’d ever been a field boss. Oh, heavens no I replied. Oh that’s no problem, he said. Have you ever been in a strawberry field? No, I answered, I actually never have. Have you ever seen a strawberry plant? I thought for a minute before shaking me head and replying, No, I never have. To his credit Mr. Tsigawa remained utterly unfazed. Have you ever seen a strawberry? YES!! Have them pick the red ones. I can do that! Now let the record show that part way through the harvest, as one of my young charges - they were mostly kids bussed over to Ridgefield from Portland - looked up from where she was crawling along the row and asked, Do we have to do that field next? I was able to reply with complete confidence, No, that’s corn. I share this story to make clear that as the consummate Sally Suburbia I am clearly not the audience Jesus was targeting with his many agrarian parables like the one in today’s gospel. Nonetheless today’s reading has much to say to me, as is invariably the case with Jesus’ teachings.
One important message conveyed by this parable for me is the importance of patience. Being an obsessively neat person I would have been extremely frustrated at finding weeds growing with my wheat and would likely have been more than ready for my workers to pull them up when they came to me to report the surprising mix of plants growing in what was supposed to have been my pristine wheat field. Probably this would have made for a neater looking field, but as the wise landowner in the parable explains, it would likely have also greatly diminished the harvest since at least some of the wheat would have been uprooted with the weeds. No, I would have needed to be patient and allow the weeds to grow right along with the wheat. Wouldn’t that diminish the quantity of nutrients in the soil available to the wheat? Possibly, but that would still be better than inadvertently ripping up at least some of the roots of the wheat while yanking out the weeds, thus leaving the wheat starved not only for nutrients but also for water. And what if the weeds turned out to have some utterly unexpected but perfectly useful properties? After all a stray fungus found in a petri dish in 1928 turned out to be the world’s first true antibiotic - penicillin. If we take a step back and imagine that the landowner or farmer in the parable represents God, the Creator of all there is, then it’s easy to understand the willingness of this landowner/Creator to let everything continue to grow until the harvest.
After all, God didn’t create a neatly separated into homogeneous patches world. Rather everything was initially mixed together into an extraordinarily beautiful array of plants and animals that often turned out to have symbiotic relationships at the heart of their survival. It was humans who decided they had to get things organized, to plant specific crops in specific fields in a manner that would yield the best possible harvest. There is value in that of course. As the world’s population has continued to grow, as climate change has made less and less land available for farming, it has become increasingly important to maximize the yield of every acre planted.
But getting back to the parable, suppose instead of identifying with the landowner, the farmer, we identify with the wheat. We know we came from good stock, a bag of absolutely pure wheat seed, so what in the world has gone wrong? We expected to grow in a neighborhood of wheat stalks just like us, stalks with the same background, the same outlook, the same prospects for being harvested into a bumper crop of perfect wheat. And now, look at this? Intruders! Totally unexpected, intrusive occupants of our land! We’re supposed to be growing unmolested, able to benefit from all the land has to offer without having to share any of the nutrients with anyone else. Oh sure, word is some of the intruders are clover which actually puts more nitrogen back into the soil than it takes out but that’s not the point. They didn’t come from the same bag that we did, they weren’t sown when we were, they aren’t supposed to be here.
And what if we identify with the weeds? Nobody wants us. Nobody packages us in nice bags and sells us at the farm store. No, we mostly blow from one place to another on the wind. If we do manage to get incorrectly included in a bag of seeds we just make people mad when we sprout because we aren’t what the sowers had in mind. But we’re not useless. We were created by the same God who created wheat. Given a chance some of us are quite pretty. We’re often terribly popular with bees and other insects. We manage to carry on when the more delicate, carefully cultivated plants shrivel during droughts, and so we’re able to keep the soil in place rather than allowing it to blow away. We enrich the biomes in which we live even when nobody wants us and those who think they’re in charge try their best to eliminate us.
When you get down to it, the peoples who inhabited this continent for millennia before white settlers showed up knew that it isn’t always best to plant only one crop at a time. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the native American practice of planting corn, beans, and squash together. The corn provides a stalk around which the bean vines can grow. The beans, as legumes able to fix nitrogen from the air, enrich the soil by adding nitrogen to it, which feeds the corn. The large leaves of the squash help keep the ground from drying out and yes, provide ground cover which keeps weeds from blowing in and growing too close to the corn and beans.
Clearly my rather simplistic interpretation of today’s parable doesn’t agree with how Jesus explained it to his disciples, but we live in a different time. While we don’t worry as much about “the evil one” a single sinister force out to oppose the will of God, we live in a time when an extraordinary amount of time, energy, and money is devoted to trying to keep nations, societies, neighborhoods homogeneous if you will. That may refer to race, economic status, ethnic background, country of origin. Whatever the emphasis, to refer back to our wheatfield for a moment, incessant weeding trying to keep things pure can end up doing more harm than good. Indeed it seems as though somewhere along the way “they “has too often replaced “we” in our vocabulary and in the way we view the world. The Declaration of Independence begins We the people. I’ve heard We described as the single most powerful word in a democracy. I’ll admit it’s hard to remember that when everywhere we turn there are forces trying to divide us into us and them but that was not how Jesus viewed the world or taught his followers to view it. Indeed We is just as important to Christianity as it is to democracy. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. He didn’t look for ways to set himself apart but rather ways to join in. Furthermore, he wasn’t interested in simply spending his time with the scribes and Pharisees, the intellectual elite, the wealthiest members of Jewish society. While he certainly didn’t exclude them; he was happy to meet with Nicodemus in the night, his message was for everyone and he worked to make it accessible to everyone, not just a select few.
As Christians, followers of Jesus, we’re called to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ everywhere we go to everyone we encounter. Daunting as that sounds, perhaps if we go back to the patience of the landowner who was willing to let the weeds grow right along with the wheat, we can find what we need to go forward when the task before us feels overwhelming. Rather than endlessly focusing on our differences, what if we simply make a conscious choice to simply focus on being neighborly? What if we simply look for ways to have fun together as a way to shake ourselves loose from the isolation that has so insidiosly crept into so many of our lives. We can remind ourselves that the most meaningful legacy that we can leave behind is not our name on a building but rather the difference we manage to make in each other’s lives. And when we feel overwhelmed we can dare, if you’ll permit me to use a sport’s analogy, to remember the New York Knicks in game four of the NBA finals this year. With nine minutes to go in the fourth quarter the Knicks trailed by 20 points. The analytics people who sort out this sort of stuff, calculated that the San Antonio Spurs had a 99.6% chance of winning the game and reclaiming the momentum of the series as the teams headed back to San Antonio for game five. But the Knicks simply didn’t give up. They took their .4% chance of winning and played on. And they won, the game that night and a few days later, the championship. In comparing the people of New York to their team Mayor Mamdani asked, “And who are New Yorkers, if not people who hear those odds and smile? Who look at a .4% chance of success and ask, ‘Why are you giving me a head start?’”
That is the attitude we need to carry with us into today’s world. I doubt that the analytics people would have given the ragtag band of scared Jews who were the first Christians even a .4% chance of spreading what Jesus had taught them beyond the bounds of the land where they lived, and yet by word of mouth, over time Christianity spread all the way around the world. We are the representatives of that faith in this time and place. Just as the Knicks didn’t give up, the earliest Christians didn’t give up, we simply can’t give up either. Not only our wellbeing but that of the people we love depends on us refusing to accept anything less than a world in which loving one’s neighbor is the overriding principle upon which decisions are made. It will take time and an unrelenting determination, but in God all things are possible. Amen.
