Romans 8:12-25 and Matthew 13:24-30 “In gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” Seventh Sunday after Pentecost • July 19, 2020 Arnolia United Methodist Church • Rev. James McSavaney

How do you react to strangers on the street, or to new neighbors? I’ll tell you how I react. I usually try to keep things polite and keep some sort of distance. Sometimes, if my wife and I are out with Walker, and we cross another pair of young parents with their young child, we’ll smile and give them a nod of mutual understanding – that we’re in the same stage of life and share similar concerns. Other times, if I’m walking on my own (just to get out of the house), and I see a trio on the sidewalk just like my own family, I don’t share a nod with them or even really stop on my way. Since I’m on my own, by appearances, they don’t know that we have something in common, the experience of raising a child in a time of COVID-19. And without something obvious to connect us, it’s hard for me to feel brave enough to overcome the awkwardness of getting to know a stranger. I look for a signal, a sign, an indicator, that I’ll find a friend in the strangers with whom I find myself standing face-to-face, mask-to-mask. I want to know I’ll find welcome before I open up. So I keep my guard up, which leaves them, and in turn me, feeling like we’re all on our own. That’s not very pastor-like, it’s just what I’m normally inclined to do. There’s always been that tension in me, between what I would do in a given situation if left to my own devices and what God would have me (have all of us, as Christians) do. Because, it’s too easy to spot something we don’t like in people and think the worst of them. It’s too easy to make a judgment of people that they will never be able to disprove. When we keep our suspicions to ourselves, or only share them with others within our circles of trust, we do not grow; we do not welcome others; we do not function as the Body of Christ. We become xenophobic and mistrustful, inhospitable and guarded. We become stagnant. What would happen if we let the “weeds” among us grow, bear fruit, and demonstrate their true selves, that they’re really wheat, that they’re what God intended to plant in our midst? What would happen if we gave people room to show us who they are? What miracles of community and gifts from God might we get to witness and welcome into our lives? I know how God’s welcome works. I know what it’s like to be welcomed into a new community. I remember being 18 and moving a long way from home, from the suburbs of Atlanta, to study economics and math in rural, southern Maryland. It was lonely to be away from my close friends from high school and the familiar faces of my church and my community. But in the evenings, I helped to lead a campus Christian fellowship, which had a fledgling group of young men – just five of us, that first year – the year I began at St. Mary’s. Those guys taught me what it was like to be welcome among them. They reached out to me, invited me to share meals together, asked me how I was doing living so far from home, and wondering how they could help me make the most of my first year in that new place. They drove me to the grocery store, they told me which professors were fun to listen to, they showed me how to deep fry a turkey, and they helped me feel at home. They welcomed me. I felt accepted and included, like I was part of their group. For some reason, they saw in me something of value that they wanted to help grow. Over the next three years I did the same, welcoming in new members of my various small groups, learning what they cared about, and sharing meals with them – at one point eating every meal one week with a different small group member! I realized that I truly was at home there, and my friends have remarked for years afterward how I made them feel at home too. The Gospel tells us a story about what home, too. It’s framed as a story about the kingdom of heaven, about heaven on earth, about God’s reign in the world (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43). It’s fundamentally a message about welcome and about giving people the benefit of the doubt. Jesus is teaching a group of disciples who have spent their lives struggling to get by. They’ve been systematically beat up, disenfranchised, marginalized, and demoralized. One thing after another has befallen the people of Jesus’ day, and his “good news” for them is to make room in their lives for the people in whom they can’t see the image of God. Jesus tells a parable about good seed and weeds. As the laborers of the field look out in the world, they see both springing up in their backyard. And they’re disgusted! They want to tear out the weeds at the root. And that makes sense, from a gardening perspective. If you let weeds grow, they’ll only become more established and make it harder for you to pluck them out later. When my wife and I moved into our home, we started tending to the backyard, which hadn’t been weeded in years, and we’re still weeding, trying to turn it into an inviting space. So, when the landowner tells the laborers to let the weeds grow, that advice should have caught the attention of everyone who’s ever cultivated their own backyard garden. Letting the weeds grow, making room in the garden for what you regard as having little value, not begrudging them the same rain and sun that falls on your preferred plants, the fruit of your good seed that you spent money and time on – that sounds outrageous, and it sounds exactly like the kind of challenge you could expect to hear from Jesus. The landowner’s reasoning for the advice is painfully insightful: “in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” The laborers can’t tell the difference between what is good seed and what is not. And neither can we. You and I are God’s laborers today. God is, as always, the landowner, the one who made the earth and called it good. For our part, we can’t tell the difference between children of God and children of evil. Those who, we think, don’t have a chance to be part of God’s kingdom today may well end up being saints tomorrow. Those of whom we have low expectations may still encounter the grace of God and find their lives transformed by love into a new creation. We can’t write anyone off. We can’t tell people that they’ll never amount to anything. Because we don’t know. “Such knowledge is too wonderful for us, so high that we cannot attain it,” as the Psalmist writes. When we think that someone is God-forsaken, maybe that’s exactly the person that God has chosen to pay attention to. And maybe we’ll realize that one day, and maybe, like Jacob, we’ll awake from our slumbers, and we’ll exclaim: “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it.” What’s important for us is to see in the strangers we meet something of value to God that we want to help grow. We need to see their heart. Because there’s another issue at stake in Jesus’ parable, one that’s important for all of us to hear. The laborers want to weed the field, to pull out what they see as irredeemable bad seed, children of evil. And seeing people like that, seeing them not for their potential but for their shortcomings, seeing them not as welcome strangers but as threats, is the kind of behavior that marks the beholder as himself a child of evil, his actions no longer worthy of kingdom to which he ascribes. The laborers, themselves fully grown good seed, children of the kingdom, themselves become weeds the very minute they try to uproot what they see as problematic plants in their early stages. And then, one day, the real reapers come, the angels at the end of the age who do the work of the Son of Man, and they remove such evildoers as those who call themselves laborers, but who only seek to disobey God’s commands, and pull out what they themselves have labeled evil, because it didn’t fit into their understanding of what is good, what is God-given, what is blessed and redeemed and sanctified and made whole in the grace and love of God. What’s important is to see in the strangers we meet something of value to God that we want to help grow. We need to see the heart. Our relationships with each other are tied to our relationship with God. Christ brings us together from our various backgrounds and binds us into one people – all of us children of God, all of us good seed, all of us wheat, all of us welcome. So give thanks to God this day. And may you and I consider all the people in our lives, the strangers and the familiar, the family and the foreigners – all of them – welcome. Amen.