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Keeping Faith in a Sabotaging World |
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Written by Everett J. Bassett
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Sunday, 27 August 2006 |
Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43
In 1854, the people of London were deathly and rightfully afraid of cholera - there had been many deaths by the dreaded disease. Doctors tried all sorts of measures to cut down on the epidemic, to no avail. Then, a doctor named John Snow had a unique idea - draw a map. He began to map out the incidences of death. That simple act revealed a stunning bit of information. Amazingly, the spread of the disease centered around one water pump. Dr. Snow had found the source of the poison, and when people stopped drinking out of that pump, it was instrumental in stopping the epidemic. Two research groups have recently begun projects to trace certain kinds of cancer the same way - find the geographic source of the disease, and maybe we can stop some deaths.
Wouldn't it be something if the source of evil was always that obvious? There's an epidemic of evil, and it is corrupting and killing people. And we map it out, and we trace it back to one pump. Just destroy that pump, and we eliminate that evil strain.
There is a strong fantasy about such a strategy that goes all through our society. If we eliminate that evil friend, then my child will be good. If we lock up that group, we'll all be safe. If we topple that dictator, then his people will embrace freedom. If we stiffen sentences on pushers and users, we'll win the war on drugs.
All of these strategies fall short for several reasons, but a big one is that they are built on one huge fallacy about the nature of this world that we live in - and that is, that this is a black and white world, where you can tell the good guys from the bad guys. When I was a boy watching Westerns on television, it was simple - good guys wore white hats and shot straight; bad guys wore black hats and couldn't fire a bullet into the broad side of a barn. Not anymore. Every once in a while, Sharon and I get a DVD of a season of the TV action program 24. It is great fun to watch. And one of the things they have managed to do by clever writing, is totally change the orientation of the plot in the middle of the story - so suddenly you find out that the person you were rooting for is actually the villain - and the person you were vilifying turns out to be the one who is trying to save the world as we know it from deadly destruction. Of course, that is still Hollywood, and the bad guys still can't shoot straight - but it is closer to reality than the old white hat- black hat way. Because the fact is, life is not so clearcut that we can simply tell who's good from who's evil. Most everybody has both in them.
This fact makes it very difficult to justify capital punishment. We have people who
are on death row, or who have been executed for a crime. They were tried in court, and found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And now, thanks to the miracle of modem science, we are able to do DNA testing, and test that human judgment that said, This person is guilty. And we find that in many cases, the judgment was wrong. Even with all the evidence, even with the integrity of a courtroom and a judge and a jury, we can't be sure about our judgments of human character and human behavior. We get it wrong.
So Jesus told a story. A farmer went out into his field, said Jesus, and planted good seed. Then, that night under cover, an enemy came in and sowed weeds among the seeds. So, the grain and the weeds appeared together. The man's slaves came to him and reported this, and offered to go in and remove all the weeds. But the farmer recognized a great truth in his field, and in this world - and that is, that the wheat and the weeds are intertwined. They can't always be told apart; they intermingle all the way down to the roots. If you destroy one, you destroy the other - bad and good together.
Now, we picture something very different - in fact, when Jesus explained his story, it
was very different. He then talked about a day when the wheat will be separated from the weeds, and there will be this clear judgment of good and evil.
It's kind of like the story of the two boys who stole a bunch of pecans off a neighbor's tree, and ran behind the cemetery fence to divide them up. They sat there saying, "One for you; one for me; one for you; one for me," and so on. In their excitement, occasionally a pecan would fall to the ground and roll down to the fence. Another boy was riding his bicycle on the other side of the fence, and he heard this, "One for you; one for me," from the cemetery. Terrified, he rode his bike to his old uncle's house and said, "Uncle, come quick. The Lord and Satan are down there dividing up souls in the cemetery." The uncle made fun of the boy, but the boy persisted, and finally the uncle hobbled down with the boy to the cemetery fence. Sure enough, there were the voices coming from the cemetery - One for you; one for me. The uncle looked at the boy wide- eyed, and then started to look through the boards to see what the Lord and Satan looked like, when suddenly the voice inside said, "Okay, that's the last of them. Now let's get those two nuts by the fence, and we'll be done." They say the boy and his uncle didn't stop running for miles.
That's the way we picture it, isn't it? God and Satan dividing up souls. Or, more
likely, God judging who's in, and who's out. There are plenty of times that a scene like that is described in the Bible - God rewarding the good, and throwing the evil into the fire. That doesn't make sense to me, because my observation is that people simply can't be divided that way. But who am I to say? What I can say is this - perhaps God does have some way to see into the human heart and sort out the good and the evil there, and pronounce one person as good and another person as rotten. God may be able to do that. But I can't; and you can't. We think we can; we think there are some things that are obvious. We see a young man smashing a car window; and we see an honor student everybody looks up to. And we think we know who's good and who's evil in that scenario. But we don't; because there are wheat and weeds in both of those young people. They are intertwined; they are indistinguishable. And the fact is, two years from now we might find the honor student doing something terrible, and the boy who smashed the window contributing something great to society.
How can we deign to judge others, when even in ourselves we can't sort the wheat from the weeds? One minute you have a compassionate thought, and the next minute some insecurity or judgment or malice has snuck in there. One minute you are engaged in innocent conversation, and the next minute you are enjoying some bit of juicy gossip, and later you realize how easily you fell into that trap.
It should give us all great pause to realize that throughout the course of his ministry, Jesus found virtue among the so-called sinful, and found evil among the so-called righteous. Every one of us should remember that the next time we are ready to judge or condemn someone else.
Master, do you want us to yank out the weeds and destroy them? No, you can't destroy the weeds without destroying the good around them. Let the wheat and the weeds grow together, and God will sort it out when the time comes to do that.
What makes this hard is that enemies are real. Last week I talked about keeping the faith in a world that competes with the church for time, energy, and resources. But in this morning's parable, we are faced with the fact that there are not only forces that compete, there are enemies that sabotage. There are people and groups that want to do harm. As we approach the fifth anniversary of the 9-11 attack, we can recall so well the stark realization that there were people who hated America so much that they would do such a thing. That was a wake-up call to a lot of people, and it still is.
So what did we do? We painted a black-and-white world. We said, You're for us or against us. There are good people, and there are evil people, and we can tell who is who. And we did a lot of good things after 9-11, but creating that black-and-white climate was not one of them. Because in such a climate, bad judgments are made. Good people do bad things. Innocent people get hurt. The wheat is destroyed with the weeds.
Let me just give a small example. This week I was driving, and surfing on the radio, and I came to a popular political talk show. The host of the show was making fun of Arab wedding customs. Now why in the world would someone do that? Make fun of the wedding customs of another culture? The context of the jokes was an attempt to ridicule Hezbollah, the Arab group that recently bombed Israel - an evil act of war. So here's what happens in a black-and-white world: criticizing the violent acts of the Arabic group, Hezbollah evolves into ridiculing the wedding customs of the whole Arabic people. It gets out of perspective. We get so upset at people who would do harm, that we become people who do harm to others. What's the old saying: choose your enemies carefully, because sooner or later, you will be imitating them. This, I believe, is what Jesus wants to warn us about.
Jesus fully acknowledged that there are real enemies in this world. There are people who want to sabotage everything that is good and noble. But then Jesus said something about enemies that is the last thing we want to hear - he tells us to love them. Does that mean we don't defend ourselves? I don't believe so. Does it mean we don't confront evil? I don't believe so. What it does mean is that we remember the parable of the wheat and the weeds. It means that we are constantly vigilant for the trappings of self- righteousness and judgmentalism in ourselves. We are constantly committed to respond to evil actions, but without attacking the innocent. And we are respectful of the fact that people are much more complex than simply This one's good; This one's bad. That's an inconvenient truth when you just want to wipe out your enemy or gossip somebody to a pulp - but it is truth. And it's the truth that sets us free.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 05 February 2007 )
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