"Weedy Wheat: Wait for Winnowing"

Thresher's Reunion / Anniversary of 9-11

Sept. 8/02 Mt.13:24-30,36-43

Threshing Out the Evil and the Good

It's the "Threshers' Reunion" in Blyth this weekend. Threshing is about separating: knocking, sifting, and fanning out the chaff, straw, and weed seeds from the grain. Those who belong to Jesus are already "threshed" or separated from the rest of society in God's eyes: the apostles call us "saints", sanctified or set apart. Holiness through the new birth by God's Spirit makes us different, or ought to. 1Jn3(9) tells us, "No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God." By trusting in the Good News about Jesus we have something essentially fresh from above living in us; Peter says we have been "born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God." (1 Pet.1:23) God's done something mighty big in our lives. His Word and Spirit can continually what is best and perfect, just like Him; now if only the rest of the world would match up...

             God created the universe in six days, and pronounced it "very good". But then our forebears decided God's ways were too restricting, rebelled to follow their own human understanding and desires (with prompting from a troublesome trickster), and everything went sour. Thistles and pain started taking over. So today our world is a strange mixture of evil and good, beauty and bane. Accidents break limbs and send people to hospital. Cancers occur, get treated into remission, and come back. Relationships that ought to be close frazzle and fracture due to competing priorities and attractions. Evil creates a desert where once there was a garden.

             A year ago this coming week, the unthinkable crashed aside our personal problems as two jets took down the World Trade Centre and a third struck the Pentagon. Terror struck at the heart of our supposedly secure Western lifestyle; emblems of our financial and military security vanished before our eyes. Over the days and weeks following the statistics climbed to 2931 confirmed dead, 46 reported dead and 28 missing, for a total of 3005 victims. People all over the world were suddenly forced into spiritual alertness, wrestling with questions of good and evil and the meaning of life. Jim Cymbala, Pastor of the Brooklyn Tabernacle less than 4 miles from "ground zero", said: "there's never been a period of time like this in the history of this city, where you can talk about spiritual things, about God, about prayer. Even hard, cynical people realize you can be having a bagel and a cup of coffee in your office one morning and only have seconds to live. Life is like a vapour and you don't get to take a thing with you. God has used this situation to bring front and centre all the things that are on the back burner of people's minds that they hardly ever thought about."

             "9-11" intruded upon our the boundaries erected in our head between the "evil world" at bay "out there" and "the good life" comfort zone we had chosen to live in. We resisted this intrusion of madness and chaos into our ordered, busy but in-control life. We threw firemen, police, troops and weapons at it while we struggled to regain our equilibrium. Yet the spiritual questions the terrorism raised wouldn't go away. How could this happen/ Why did it happen? How should we respond? What's really at stake here? Would I want to have spent my life doing this if I were to die tomorrow, a year from now?

The Enemy's Incursion

Jesus offers a parable or story-picture in Matthew 13 relates to this messy intrusion of evil upon the neat and orderly lives we might have wished for. A farmer sows good seed. An enemy sneakily sows weeds amongst the wheat: "bearded darnel" that looks like wheat except with black, poisonous grain. The farmer's servants ask, "Sir, didn't you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?" Our best-laid plan's gone awry, hopelessly mucked up. The farmer replies, "An enemy did this."

             Have you been there? Is this your life this past week? Isn't this just like life? Sometimes the problem seems intended; other times the person who's causing the difficulty doesn't even realize they're doing it. But for whatever reason, your plans are down the tube. Interestingly, Jesus doesn't go into a long explanation of who the "enemy" is or how he came to be; evil just is. We know in our heads the stories of Satan's fall and man's fall, but when the crunch comes those facts don't seem very relevant to the crisis at hand. All we know is, we hurt. "Ouch, God! How could you do this - let this happen?" Evil's event always seems absurd when it happens, needless, senseless. (This week I wanted to cry out when I realized I'd deleted the last few week's pictures from the digital camera but the "dumb" computer program hadn't actually stored them...those images of Keith's departure back out west, Emily's leaving for 6 months, were gone forever! And those were just pictures -- nothing at all compared to life's real problems. If only we could plan our accidents better...)

             In the story, Jesus portrays our human situation as it is. He interprets in 37-39 that the sower of good seed is Himself, the Son of Man; the field is the world, the good and bad seeds are sons of the Kingdom vs sons of the evil one, and the enemy is the devil. No drawn-out explanation of evil's origin, it's just stated as a matter-of-fact. Jesus didn't sugar-coat existence or try to enchant us with fairy tales; He challenges us to come to grips with the fallen cosmos, complete with all its aches and ought-not-ness. It's futile trying to pin blame or explain why it's someone else's fault. The deed has happened; what are we going to do about it?

             "An enemy did this." That's that - recognize and accept the setback. Yet the farmer doesn't go off the deep end or get all excited. His tone is one of taking things in stride; somehow he's going to get through this, the servants needn't have a panic attack. The world is God's workbench, awaiting our becoming His tools in the repair or "make-do" process. God has a plan that won't ultimately be thwarted by the enemy's meanest pranks. When in John 9(2) the disciples query Jesus about a man born blind, His reply is that it's not a result of someone sinning, but so that God's work might be displayed in the person's life. Someone said, "Problems are opportunities in work clothes." The farmer isn't flustered, despite the setback.

Postponed Punishment

The servants are all eager to take matters into their own hands right away. "Do you want us to go and pull them up?" The farmer said no, lest the good plants be uprooted along with the weeds. The darnel's roots are extensive and stronger than the wheat. "Let both grow together until the harvest," he said - then the weeds would be tied in bundles for burning and the wheat gathered into his barn.

             Jesus gives the interpretation in 41-43: "The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father." (The Psalmist describes God as "dressed in a robe of light"; Adam and Eve saw more and became ashamed when their glory-covering dissolved in Eden (Gen.3); at the Mount of Transfiguration Jesus' clothes became dazzling white, and someday we will bear the likeness of the man from heaven just as we've borne the likeness of Adam - Ps.104:2 NLT; Gen.3:7; Mt.17:2; 1Cor.15:49) There will be a final threshing, a separation of the good and the bad, justice will be served. Evil will be punished and obedience rewarded. As Daniel 12(3) describes it, "Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever."

             But the main focus of the parable is on patience -- waiting until the harvest, tolerating the undesirable in the interim for the sake of the crop plants. The separation and threshing will come, but in the meantime, don't get over-excited. The Kingdom is about keeping on sowing, not jumping to judgmental conclusions ahead of time. Paul tells the Corinthians, "Judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes.He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts.At that time each will receive his praise from God." (1 Cor.4:5) Trying to eradicate evil completely on our own steam (or "mending creation" as another denomination put it) can inadvertently cause even more damage.

Patient Persuasion vs Jihad Jitters

When evil happens, especially terrorism by an identifiable source as in the World Trade Centre disaster, our initial knee-jerk response is, "Go get 'em!" (as we used to say to the dog on the farm, "Sik'm!") We want to tear all the weeds - or anything that looks remotely close to a weed - out of the ground immediately. Muslims all over the world, most of whom would denounce the 9-11 attacks, became victims of reprisals and discrimination. Romans 13(1-4) does say governing authorities are God's agents to punish wrongdoers, but if we're not careful, it's easy to go too far in the name of "defence" or revenge. Then conflict only escalates and we get sucked into a cycle of destruction far beyond the scale of the initial incident. Now that al-Qaeda forces have been cleared from Afghanistan, US President Bush has been seeking support from Congress and allies to push for a "change of regime" in Iraq. Other countries are stressing that the States should follow the diplomatic route through the United Nations. We don't want to be like the farmer who just because he had the biggest tractor and sprayer in the neighbourhood killed half the field with Roundup simply because of a few patches of milkweed!

             Face it - when it comes to revenge, righting a wrong perceived done to us, we're trigger-happy. "Let me at'm!' The first disciples were no different. In Luke 9(49-54) they tried to stop a man driving out demons in Jesus' name because he wasn't "one of us"; Jesus told them not to. Then when a Samaritan village refuses hospitality to this band of Jews en route to Jerusalem, James and John ask Jesus if they can call down fire from heaven to destroy the village (you can see why he nicknamed them "sons of thunder"). Again, he rebuked them. As in the parable of the weedy wheat, He encourages His followers to be patient, not to take judgment into their own hands, but trust in God to sort things out in the end. Don't be rambunctious to right the supposed wrong; the Cross dispenses grace. Wait for the harvest, keep persuading by sowing the Kingdom in the meantime.

             Terrorists foster talk of "Jihad" or "holy war" for the sake of advancing the cause of Islam. This is a big difference between the teaching of Mohammed and that of Jesus (although the church at its worst may have come close during the Crusades). You may hear advocates of Islam protest that it is a peace-loving religion. There are verses in the Koran (their scriptures) to support this, mainly from the early years of Mohammed before he left Mecca. But after the move to Medina, his tone changes. Needing some means of support, bands of warriors were sent out to raid trading caravans. Eventually he cursed Jews and Christians and sanctioned the spread of Islam by force. Communities were given the choice of converting or being put to death. When a village was captured, a fifth of the booty went to Allah and his Prophet, the rest to the warriors (booty including women and children). So the ranks of the army quickly swelled as jihad was the way to get ahead economically. The so-called "verse of the sword" in the Koran says, "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them and seize them, beleaguer them and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)." (Surah 9:5) Another says, "And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevails justice and faith in Allah altogether and everywhere." (Surah 8:39) Ibn Khaldun (A.D. 1332-1406), Islam’s great historian, sociologist and philosopher, summarized it this way: "In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the (Muslim) mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force."

             The approach of jihad is to uproot the weeds and make the field over into an Islamic state, by force if necessary. Jesus, however, forbids His followers from such pressure tactics. He is a Servant Lord, not domineering Warlord.

Fears Foster Foxhole Faith

Besides developing patience in us, evil's weeds in the world prick growth in our faith, as an irritating speck of sand in an oyster shell generates a beautiful pearl. Jim Cymbala of that New York church says, "David wrote, 'In the day of trouble I called upon the Lord.' Even though he was a man after God's own heart, before the day of trouble came, he wasn't calling on God that much. That's true of us. Trouble is one of God's servants to get people to think about things beyond the normal course of life and our daily routines. You know the old saying, There are no atheists in a foxhole. Well, between the anthrax scare and buildings and airplanes coming down and terrorist threats, the whole country has been turned into a foxhole. Everyone is unsure about things they've always counted on. The Bible tells us not to boast about tomorrow because we don't know what a day will bring. Well, who things like that? Not even most Christians! Now we're having to admit the existence of evil, and if there's evil then there must be good. Questions rise to the surface in times of stress, and I think there's a spiritual instinct that makes us look up and say, 'Oh, God, if You're there, I'm not sure who You are, but help me.'"

             Cymbala adds, "Christians face the temptation to be afraid, but that's the time God wants to bring us to a new level of faith, where we'll trust Him, pray more, spend more time in His Word to build up our faith and overcome fear. Faith is the antithesis of fear. We need to get back to basics, to set our minds on God and focus on things that are eternal. Paul certainly didn't face every day agitated that he might die. In fact he said, 'To live is Christ and to die is gain.' I think God is offering an opportunity for Christians and churches to get back to a Gospel that is less sophisticated and closer to the truth."

Time to Get On the Bus

While September 11 was a time of great tragedy, there were also stories of great bravery and amazing rescues. The brush with evil became an occasion for some to make a choice for eternity with Christ. Dawn Robinson, a member of the Brooklyn Tabernacle, worked on the 61st floor of the South Tower in the Trade Centre. After the first plane hit the north tower, there was a fire drill in the south tower, then an announcement informed people everything was under control and they could go back to work or take a coffee break. Something told Dawn though to leave the building immediately, so she turned and started down the stairwell with a few co-workers, including a friend that she'd been witnessing to. This friend had told her earlier, "I'm not ready to get on the bus yet," meaning that she wasn't ready to accept Christ. Suddenly the building shook violently - the second plane had crashed into the South Tower. People began flooding into the stairwell in terror. After struggling up a down escalator, Dawn made her way outside and began to run for her life. Within minutes the South Tower collapsed and she was gasping for breath in a suffocating giant white cloud. She and a friend jumped on to an abandoned city bus and waited in terror as the cloud passed by. The friend knelt on that bus and asked Christ into her life. Dawn eventually found her way to the church, covered with dust and shaking so badly she could hardly stand. But she was alive!

             Evil happens unexpectedly, certainly unwanted. But Jesus and the Kingdom are still sowing good seed, which will make us anew and give us His Spirit to cope when we turn our lives over to Him in our time of need. We can "get on the bus" with Him as driver and be calm no matter what happens, assured of our future beyond this life. We can wait with patience the final threshing, rooted safely in Him until then! Let's pray.