"Wicked Weeds" | Pentecost 11a | July 19th, 2020 | The Rev. Deacon Heidi Thorsen

Proper 11a

Isaiah 44:6-8 / Psalm 86:11-17 / Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

July 19, 2020

Between the words that I speak and the words that are heard, may God’s spirit be present. Amen.

“Men to the left! Women to the right!”

So begins a difficult passage from Elie Wiesel’s holocaust narrative, Night. In this passage, Wiesel describes his arrival at the concentration camp, Auschwitz. It is a difficult passage, but it carries a message that we should never forget. I’d like to begin my sermon today, and our reflection on this week’s gospel passage, the parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, with this excerpt. Wiesel writes:

“Men to the left! Women to the right!”

Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short, simple words. Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother. I had not had time to think, but I already felt the pressure of my father’s hand: we were alone. For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and sisters moving away to the right. Tzipora held Mother’s hand. I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister’s fair hair, as though to protect her, while I walked on with my father and the other men. And I did not know that in that place at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever. I went on walking. My father held on to my hand.

Wiesel and his father continue forward. In a covert moment of solidarity, one of the fellow prisoners tells Wiesel to lie about his age; and say he’s older than he is. They practice the answers they will give to the guards, who hold a baton and point people to the left or the right. The narrative continues:

The baton moved to the left. I took half a step forward. I wanted to see first where they were sending my father. If he went to the right, I would go after him.

The baton once again pointed to the left for him too. A weight was lifted from my heart. 

We did not yet know which was the better side, right or left; which road led to prison and which to the crematory. But for the moment I was happy; I was near my father. Our procession continued to move slowly forward.

Here ends the lesson.

The Holocaust, the systematic killing of Jews in Europe at the hand of the Nazis, took place less than a hundred years ago. Less than a hundred years ago, over a million people were killed in Auschwitz alone. Among them were Jews, non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and queer people whose gender identity did not meet the standard of the Nazi regime. All of them  were killed because they were sorted into a category of “not good enough.” Their bodies were buried or burned into ashes, covering up the evidence of the evil that happens when we fail to see other people as fully human.

Now today is a hot Sunday in July. I’m sure you didn’t tune into church this morning wanting to talk about the Holocaust. It’s likely you didn’t tune into church this morning expecting a sermon on evil, or sin. And yet evil and sin don’t go away when the weather is warm, and the sun shines bright. Our gospel passage for this week, the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, reminds us that evil is all around us. It grows in the same field that we are growing in. And oftentimes evil looks a lot like good; and right looks a lot like wrong; and we live our lives in ignorance of the great potential for harm that is growing up all around us.

Take, for example, the weeds. It is important to note that the weeds in this parable are not just any kind of weed. The word in the original greek is zizania, referring to a particular type of weed that looks a lot like wheat until it has grown into a mature plant. However, if you eat zizania it causes vomiting, nausea, convulsions, and even death. When the crop is still young, you might look out over the field and see only wheat. And yet appearances can be misleading, and things that are seemingly normal have the great potential to do harm.

If only evil looked evil. If only weeds looked like weeds, and grain looked like grain. And yet, one of the purposes of this parable is to show that good and evil are not so clear cut. We like to think of evil as clearly recognizable. The nemesis in a James Bond film. The villain in a Disney movie. A man who takes up a gun and shoots at a church, or a mosque, or a crowd, or a club. And yet most of the time evil is much more subtle than that. Our inclination to see evil only in its most overt forms prevents us from seeing the seeds of sin that are right in front of our eyes. For example, we think of the Nazi regime as one epitome of evil. We read narratives of the Holocaust, like Elie Wiesel’s Night, and we know, at the bottom of our hearts, that the systematic killing of millions of people is utterly evil, and wrong. We tend to think of the Nazis as psychopaths; aberrations on a generally good record of history. However, trials of Nazi officers following the Holocaust show the exact opposite to be true. Many of the people who aided and abetted the killing of millions under the Nazi regime were everyday people simply following orders, or obeying laws in the land where they lived. This is what German philosopher Hannah Arendt calls “the banality of evil,” or in other words, the everyday nature of evil. Arendt writes in detail about the trial of the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann in 1962. Arendt writes, “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.” Elsewhere, Arendt writes, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

Now wait, you might be saying. Isn’t the parable all about good and evil people, the wheat and the weeds? Jesus himself explains that the wheat represents the “children of the kingdom,” and the weeds represent the “children of the devil.” Are these not good, and bad people?

Well. Jesus does identify the wheat and the weeds in this way. Nevertheless this is a parable, and even Jesus’ explanation of it leaves room for interpretation. The word here for “children,” huioi, meaning literally sons, appears throughout the New Testament in both literal and more figurative senses, denoting relationship. And so, while Jesus may be thinking about specific people when he talks about “children of the devil,” it is equally possible that this term simply refers to the symbolic spreading of evil in the world.

However you read it - literally or figuratively - one thing is clear: our job, as human beings, is not to sort out the weeds from the wheat. That task takes place only at the harvest and it is angels who are doing it, not humans. We should never be in the place of sorting people into categories: you are good, you are not. In fact, the passage that I read at the very beginning of this sermon, from Elie Wiesel’s Night, is a perfect example of how the impulse to sort people into categories is, itself, so very wrong.

It is not our job to sort people into permanent, impermeable categories. And yet we do it all the time. Almost every day we assess and disregard people based on labels: liberal or conservative; Republican or Democrat; Christian or non-believer, us or them. It might seem like a simple thing, compared to the SS officer who points people towards the workhouse or the crematory. But even if it looks like wheat, like the zizania weeds in the parable, this kind of rigid separation is still a kind of poison. As a country we are more polarized than we have ever been. However, our calling as Christians is not to divide and dehumanize. Our calling as Christians is to grow - and to grow together.

Now this calling to recognize our common humanity doesn’t mean that we are all the same. Of course we are different, distinct - and that difference is good! I think of the parable of the mustard seed, which Jesus shares with the disciples literally between the telling of the parable of the Wheat and the Weeds and the explanation of the parable, if you look and see the verses that were left out in the excerpt for our gospel passage for today. In this shorter parable, Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven as a mustard seed - a tiny seed that grows into a tree so large that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches. And when I think of the birds of the air, I think of diversity: I think of warblers, and wood thrushes, and chickadees, and all other kinds of birds that pass through our corner of the world here, in Connecticut. Difference is divine. And while we should never be in the position of sorting people into rigid categories, it would also be a mistake to ignore the differences that exist in the world - differences that we can celebrate, and work with, and work through.

The Parable of the Wheat and the weeds reminds us of several things. First, evil is real, and sometimes it is all too hard to recognize. Second, while it is important to see and name evil in the world, it is not our job to separate people into the categories of good and evil. None of us is wholly good or wholly evil. When we split people into rigid categories, we lose our ability to relate to each other across lives of difference. We lose our ability to do what this parable invites us to do, which is simply to grow. To grow together. And finally the parable tells us this: that one day, the harvest will come. And God will collect and remove all causes of sin, and all things that make evil in the world.

Until that day of judgment, let us be wise. Let us be faithful. Let us see how the potential to do great harm is growing up all around us, and sometimes even inside of us. And let us live out these words of our baptismal covenant: “Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?”

We will, with God’s help.

Amen.