Our Gospel lessons the past two weeks fall into a special category of “seedy teachings from Jesus.” I just have to wonder what Jesus would have done with today’s lesson if some smart aleck in the crowd shot up their hand and said “I know, I know.” “Know what?” Jesus asks. “I know how God will do it. God will use Roundup resistant genetically modified wheat and then spray Roundup over the whole field just before harvest time.”

What I find frustrating about these lessons is that Jesus explains MOST of the parable. I am tempted to say, “Jesus explained most of it. No need for a sermon. We’re done here.” But he did not explain ALL of it. We do have some cautionary items and caveats to note here:

First of all this parable offers solid teaching on the age old and unsolvable problem of “Why does God allow evil to be present in the world.” Who here has not wondered why an all powerful God would allow evil in the form of natural disasters, personal health, or individual bad behavior to flourish in the world. The short answer is “Good and bad spring up together from the same soil. They can be difficult to tell apart from one another. Live with it.” For a longer answer, I commend Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

Note that Jesus cautions the slaves NOT to take matters in their own hands by uprooting the weeds. The plants on top may be easily separated, but the roots are intertwined, and uprooting the bad would harm the good. The weed Jesus refers to here is very common in the Middle East. It is called “darnel” and it looks identical to wheat almost until the very end when the seed heads begin to form. When you look at a crowd of people can you tell the good from the bad? The sinners from the righteous? I had a junior warden at a former parish embezzle $750K from a local swim club. Everyone was shocked. He is going to jail. He and his family were strong contributors to the church.

How many times when we see evil or misbehavior in our family or our congregation have we been tempted to take the matter into our own hands? Often what passes for leadership is the person who will pass judgment and take action quickly. “Drive the bum out.” “Get rid of her.” “Those folks are bad people.” When you take this kind of leadership and apply it to groups of people divided by religion, language, race, or geography, what you get is called “ethnic cleansing.” This is NOT leadership. It is madness.

How many times do well meaning people in a congregation try to take action and weed out those people they consider to be troublemakers? Giving in to the all too human desire for control, they circumvent the frustrating and messy process that everyone in the congregation needs to do. Do you know what that messy process is? Prayer, Bible study and discernment. Oftentimes God’s worst enemies are people who assume they are God’s friends doing God’s work. If you find yourself quick to judge sometime, come see me first. We will delay the judgment and begin with prayer, Bible, and discernment.

What would have been apparent to Jesus’ audience, but is lost to us hearing about weeds and wheat, is that these two plants cannot be identified or separated until harvest time. The simple lesson from this is that in spite of our desire to label this or that group as evil or terrorists or just plain bad, the only one who gets to make that call is God at the end of the age when God’s reapers gather the weeds to be burned and the wheat into the barn.

Next I call your attention to the collective nature of this parable. Jesus is not talking about individual sinners or righteous people. Nor is he talking about groups of people who are sinful or righteous. We are in fact the muddy field in which these seeds are planted. Good and bad. Evil and just. Righteous and sinful. All these grow at the same time in each one of us.

For example there was an 18th century English slave ship captain whose early career is worth retelling. His father was a respected ship captain and his mother died when he was a child. He first went to sea with his father’s crew at age 11. By 18 he was captured and impressed into the British Navy as a junior officer. His characteristically foul language and attitude did not serve him well. He abused everyone on the ship including the commanding officer. He tried to desert at one point and was punished by flogging in front of the crew. He was reduced to the lowest rank of seaman. Following this humiliation, he contemplated suicide.

In the mid-Atlantic the British Navy had enough of him and transferred him to a slave ship – as a slave. The ship returned to West Africa and he was held as a slave by a black plantation owner for three years. Eventually his father learned of his predicament and arranged to buy his son out of slavery.

You would think with this kind of resume that a near death experience might turn him around. He eventually got his own ship and made quite a profit carrying slaves, rum, and sugar. One journey off the coast of Donegal a fierce storm came up that nearly swamped his ship. With the main deck awash, the masts gone, several crew lost, rudder disabled, the ship drifted helplessly in the westerly wind at night towards the rocky coast. As the ship filled with water he called out to God and vowed to turn his life around. As he did, some of the remaining cargo floated in the hold and stopped up the hole in the hull. The ship was able to drift into shore.

This first vow was only partly effective. He quit swearing, gambling, and drinking and began to read the Bible. He continued to sail in the slave trade. While sick with a fever on the next voyage he asked God to take control of his life. He made several more slave trips until he suffered a severe stroke.

After the stroke it would take nine more frustrating years of study and application to the church before he became ordained as a priest in the Church of England. As rector of the little parish in Olney, John Newton is most famous for writing the song we know today as Amazing Grace, as well as Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken. With William Wilberforce, Newton was a strong advocate for the abolition of slavery.

Good and evil are in each one of us. With God there is plenteous redemption.