"Hit the Floor" -- Weeds & Wheat

(Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43) – He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, 'Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?' He answered, 'An enemy has done this.' The slaves said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he replied, 'No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'"

Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field." He answered, "The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!

Karen, a Midwestern housewife, took her first trip to Las Vegas last year. She had done very well playing the slot machines, winning a bucket full of quarters. Needing a break, she leaves the casino heading toward the elevators, taking her bucket with her.

She steps into the elevator and before the doors shut, four beefy, leather-clad African-American men step in. Karen clutches her bucket close to her body.

After a moment of awkward silence, one of the men says, "Hit the floor, lady," and she does: quarters fly everywhere. The men bust up laughing and they help Karen collect her winnings. Then one of the men explains that he meant for her to select her floor. They help her collect her quarters and the elevator finally arrives at her floor. She walks off embarrassed, and the men are still laughing.

Later that evening, a dozen roses are delivered to Karen's room. There is a one hundred dollar bill attached to each rose. The note attached reads: Thank you for the best laugh I've had in years! Signed, Eddie Murphy.

It's one of those urban legends that gets passed around on the internet. It's not a true story, but it's funny, and it makes a point. We're not always good at discerning the weeds from the wheat.

There is an obvious teaching that we can take from Jesus' parable today -- "Judge not." Given the finitude of our own knowing and the complexity of life, scripture tells us in several places, that judgement, and especially vengeance, belongs to God. We hear the remarkable command today, let both good and evil grow together. You aren't competent to tell them apart, and when you start trying to uproot what you believe is evil, you will inevitably damage the good.

That might make a good sermon, but I want to go in a different direction today. I want to think of this mixed field of wheat and weeds as a metaphor for each one of us.

Last week we heard the story about the sower who scatters seed extravagantly, with almost wanton abundance over path and rock and thorns and field. Each of us has received abundant grace, goodness and wisdom from God. God loves us and energizes us abundantly. We all have received the seeds of God's blessings. But each of us also has planted within us other seeds that are false and even poisonous. And it's hard to tell the difference.

There is a subtle difference between healthy self-acceptance and false pride, between proper group loyalty and shadowy discrimination, between graceful service and poisonous counter-dependency, between freely being responsive and pathological do-goodism. Often we don't know the difference. We are rather poor judges of our motivations because we are too close and too attached to our own self-interpretations.

One reason we can laugh at that story about the woman in the elevator with Eddie Murphy is that we've each had that seed of racism planted in our consciousness. We all carry shadows of fear that tell us that the universe is dangerous, that those people different from us can be threatening. Like the nervous woman, we hear the words "hit the floor" and don't immediately think "elevator buttons."

What Jesus does not say is, "You'd better root around in there and fix yourself. Root that bad stuff out of you before you get poisoned." We're just not competent enough to do that job without causing even more harm.

Instead Jesus says, "Be patient. Just watch. You don't have to be anxious about that weedy stuff. Just be aware of it, not afraid. Relax. Be alert. Eventually the fruits of Spirit will be revealed."

Carl Jung said a similar thing when he spoke of our shadow side. The shadow is the part of us that we disown. It comes to our awareness most easily like the weeds came into the field, while everybody is asleep. Our shadow side is freer to express itself in our dreams.

The shadow is most dangerous when we are not aware of it, because we tend to project our shadow on to others, seeing what we least like about ourselves in them. That's often when we judge others. That's when we are tempted to do some weed pulling. And good people get hurt.

The healthiest living comes when we are able to raise our shadow into consciousness. When we are aware of our shadow side, gently observant and accepting of its reality, it loses some of its destructive power over us.

I want to mention four common expressions of our shadow, borrowing from Parker Palmer's reflections on spirituality and leadership, Leading from Within. Many of us live with a deep insecurity about our own identity, our own worth. Sometimes we attach our identity with something external -- a title, a relationship. If that role or relationship is threatened, our very being feels threatened. A second shadow inside many of us is "the perception that the universe is essentially hostile to human interests and that life is fundamentally a battleground." Listen to the battle language that pops up in casual conversation -- "we're going to fight for that; let's bring out the big guns; if I don't finish this I'm afraid it'll kill me." A third shadow is the belief that "ultimate responsibility for everything rests with me." You may say you believe in God, but you work like it's all up to you. Parker Palmer calls that "functional atheism" -- "if anything decent is going to happen here, I am the one who needs to make it happen." And a fourth shadow is fear, especially fear of the natural chaos of life. If I can just get things organized... If we can get some functional rules around here... We forget that God created out of chaos, "chaos is the precondition to creativity, and any organization (or any individual) that doesn't have an arena of creative chaos is already half dead." Of course, the biggest fear is fear of death, and its cousin failure. Yet, chaos and death are natural; failure and death is never the final word.¹

Insecurity, defensiveness, control needs and fear. If you are like most people, those weeds of insecurity, defensiveness, control, and fear are deeply rooted in your consciousness, particularly in your unconsciousness, below the ground of your awareness.

The Gospel speaks to us with disarming acceptance. Jesus tells us that we are each held in a wholly loving gaze. We are known, and we are infinitely loved. Therefore we don't have to be anxious about our insecurity, defensiveness, control needs and fears. The gaze of God loves the whole tangled bundle that is you, loves with an utterly free, utterly selfless love. So, you need not be anxious about your weeds. Leave them alone. Relax. You don't have to pull them out. You don't have to fix yourself. You don't have to feel defensive.

In fact, it is that gaze of love that disarms us. We are held by a gracious love "which undermines and overthrows the selves we have built from defensiveness and calculation." The end of this Gospel today says that God's angels will collect the weeds and bind them and burn them. We know what the foretaste of this heavenly fire is. It is the fire of Pentecost. It is the wonderful, purging fire of love which alone can refine and burn away all that is not Christ, and do so without harming.

I quote from Mike Higton's fine summary of Archbishop Rowan Williams' teaching:

So this is the good news that crucifies us. The message of this unearned acceptance works upon us like an acid, eating away at our defensiveness, our terror of exposure, our fear of failure, our "dread of having our powerlessness nakedly spelled out for us"; it undermines the false solidity we have given ourselves; it erodes the "nightmares of guilt and insecurity which paralyse our imagination"; it saps the deep belief that our place in the world is something to be "laboriously perfected, precariously possessed and violently defended". The Gospel eats away at the foundations of our self-understanding, our understanding of others, and our understanding of the world -- understandings which have been built on the sand of an ultimate insecurity.

The Gospel is the message that we are held in a loving regard which we cannot coerce or fight off, and which has no shadow of selfishness about it... And so it is the message that we are set free to see and accept our finitude, our limitation, our mortality, and to surrender that finite, limited, mortality to the love which upholds us.²

"Hit the floor." Your home is the penthouse. Relax and enjoy the ride. But, when you get to the top, you'll find that you'll need to let go of that bucket of quarters in order to get through the door. It's okay though. You don't really need them.