A Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Linda M. Maloney
Wisdom 12:13, 16-19
Psalm 86
Romans 8:18-25
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
I really like this parable. It offers such comfort for inept gardeners like me! As many of you know, I bought a house this spring. In the backyard there is a beautiful garden plot with lovely, rich soil, and I had every good intention of planting some gorgeous vegetables there. Well, the time got away from me. I started some tomato and pepper plants indoors from seed, but by the time I was ready to plant them out, it was too late. I put them in pots on the deck, and I'm hoping I might see a tomato or a pepper before it snows.
Meanwhile, the garden was doing its own thing. I looked gloomily out the windows at the rain sheeting down through May and into June, and I saw green things just jumping out of the ground there: weeds, of course. But when I took a closer look, some of the weeds seemed familiar. They looked like tomatoes, and maybe potatoes. I didn't trust my own eyes, though. I called for a consultation. One of my friends from work came over and assured me that yes, indeedy, those are tomato plants, a whole row of them, and the other things do seem a lot like potatoes. There may even be a squash vine.
I thought that, since the garden was being so good to me, I ought to be good to it. So one day I went out to do some weeding. I got a little way along, and pretty soon I found that some of what I took to be weeds were pretty intimately involved with some of what I knew were tomatoes, and pulling up the weeds was likely to be fatal to the veggies. So I weeded cautiously around the edge, pulled out the incipient trees, and let the rest go. I did offer the tomatoes some stakes to climb on. Other than that, I'm going to wait and see.
Now you understand why I like this parable so much. It seems to offer sanction for the stupid or the lazy in the gardening field, like me. (Imagine how much I need comfort: two doors down is a yard that's been selected for the garden tour next week! If you want to aid my humility, come on the garden tour and then stop by my house to see "how not to." I'll offer you a cold drink if you promise not to laugh too hard.)
Of course, the parable is chastening, too, taken in tandem with the state of my garden. It occurred to me when I read it this week that weeding is really a risky business when it comes to human relationships. "Listen, self," I said to myself, "you can't tell a vegetable from a weed without getting advice from someone else. How on earth can you think you can tell who are the flowers and vegetables in the garden of God and who are the weeds?"
Unlike the landowner in the story, I didn't carefully plant good seed in my field. But like him, I am suspicious of my ability to straighten things out on my own. I think I'll just sit back and watch the garden, and the family of God, sort itself out. Every time I look at the garden patch, I'll remind myself not to make judgments about who's a weed and who's a plant, who looks good in God's eyes and who's a blot on the landscape. As long as God knows that, I don't need to. I know for sure I'm not going to burn the dead stuff next fall. I think I'll just mulch it back onto the garden and see what comes up next year!
After all, in the end it's all gift, all grace, all good. Amen.