July 17 -- 5th Sunday after Pentecost

I’m going to try my best to be concise here: God gathers us in, the weeds and wheat.

God tells us, and relieves us, with a message: it’s not our job to sort out weeds and wheat. God is the almighty Gardner-Farmer, and God will sort it out.

Weeds and wheat as evil and good people is a world-view prevalent in Matthew’s day. It’s also prevalent today…Star Wars theology.

But other theologies, such as Lutheran theology, have suggested more complicated ways of envisioning weeds and wheat.

Could it be, some have wondered that we possess within ourselves both weeds and wheat? Sinner-saint. And sometimes it’s even difficult to distinguish what are weeds and what are wheat in our own thoughts and actions. Seven Deadly Virtues. Weeds are sneaky.

All the more reason why this Gospel text is such good news: God is the one who comes and does the weeding. We need God to sort it out. Contrary to the self-help phenomenon, ultimately we can’t do our own weeding.

We need Jesus, the great and mighty…Gardner Farmer…to come and gather us in, to sort each one of us, i.e. to free us from our weeds of self-centeredness, anger, hatred, apathy, arrogance and neglect. There is forgiveness at the font, right from the beginning.

But being freed from death and sin, or choking weeds, is just the beginning. There’s a big difference between life abundant and simply not-dying, and Jesus not only frees us from death, he offers us life abundant.

This Gospel parable ends with the Gardner Farmer gathering the wheat into the barn…I think we would benefit to take a cue from Matthew the wonderfully creative Gospel writer, and imagine together what happens to the wheat once it’s gathered into the barn.

The barn could be a wonderful metaphor for the church. And the wheat that we are – after Jesus sifts out our brokenness, our weeds – doesn’t just go into a pile in the barn. It is turned into bread.

We are turned into bread that feeds, that initiates community, that nourishes…think of all the sensations that we experience around freshly baked bread! We are transformed, bread for the world.

I think there is something that sets us, the gathered people of God, apart: It’s not being better or right or superior to others in the world. That gets us back into Star Wars theology.

What sets us the gathered, apart is that we get to see a glimpse of God in our gathering. We get a small taste of what the whole world has to look forward to! We in our assembly, called together by the Holy Spirit, get to see what salvation looks like! All are fed, all are welcomed, all are important, all are splashed with the waters of baptism, all are offered forgiveness, all are offered a sign of peace, all are gifted with the presence of Christ in our midst. That’s what the end times will look like, and that’s what we get a flash glimpse of in our gathering, even if sometimes it’s an imperfect gathering. We are rehearsing God’s realm. We pray it: “on earth as it is in heaven.” I think it would be appropriate to call what we do here “a barn dance”, “a Eucharistic hoe-down”. As my old friend and mentor Fred Danker (NT scholar from St. Louis) once said to me Christ does the gathering and the weeding, we just get to “be church”!

And now we get to go share that dance with the world. Which is a very difficult task – to share God’s realm, God’s vision, God’s welcome with all the world. And so we crawl back to the barn, or rather we allow God to gather us back into the barn, week after week, to be sifted and transformed again and again into bread.

Followers of Jesus: The weeds have been removed, the vision has been offered, the Water has been splashed and has cleansed and refreshed, the Table has been set. “Come,” Jesus says, “join the living. Dance in the barn, nourish the field, shine like the sun.” AMEN.