Matthew 13.24-30

Who are you in this parable? When human beings hear a story, they have a tendency to imagine the story from the perspective of a particular character, the one they feel they can relate to the most, that they think they can understand. Usually, they want to be the hero. They view themselves as Jesus, as the storyteller, or as the Master who gives the wise advice.

In this analogy, are you wheat or are you a weed? How many think they’re wheat? Weeds? Some of you are lying. And some of you are just wrong.

Humans, you see, are terrible judges of character. We can’t even judge ourselves well. I’ve got decks of therapy cards featuring what are called cognitive distortions or what Albert Ellis would have referred to as irrational thoughts. We’re not supposed to call them that anymore though, because people don’t like it when you tell them they’re being irrational. Yet we consistently engage in mind-reading, “Shoulds” overgeneralizations, catastrophizing, and all-or-nothing thinking all the time.

The wheat and the weeds are growing alongside one another, their roots intertwined. To uproot one is to pull up the other. Not what we want to hear is it?

First of all, we want to blame the devil for missing weeds in with the wheat seeds. But until they grow and mature in what they are to become, what fruit they will bear, we can’t tell them apart. I challenge you today though, can you tell the difference between wheat and weed?

How do you define what a weed is? Are weeds the things you do not like, the things you do not understand, the things that make you uncomfortable? That’s awfully egocentric isn’t it? Who am I to determine what is good and what is not? This one is called personalization. The assumption that everything is about me. That apparently I am so important that the rest of the world takes time out of their busy days to focus on judging me.

I grew up an absolutely deplorable public speaker. I would get so nervous my hands would shake, my voice would falter and crack, my mind would go blank. All the way up until my senior year of college. To graduate I had to give a public presentation of my research project. First, I had to present it to a small group of faculty who were supposed to help me refine it. It was bad. Between the mumbling, the shuffling and dropping of papers, feeling like I hadn’t the slightest idea what was on my own slides, it was a nightmare. I was there to be judged.

Then, I had to present it in front of a room full of students, faculty, and my family. I remembered how poorly the rehearsal had gone and I could barely make my way to the front of the room. I thought I was going to pee my pants. I looked up into the blindingly bright projector lights and then I looked to the side and there sat my dad, smiling at me. We had done the project together. He designed and we built by hand 100 small animal live traps. He helped me lay out fields and analyze the data.

I took in a breath. Not sure how long it had been since I breathed, I was a bit light-headed at that point, I smiled back him, and then… I told the story. My mentor was floored. No stuttering. No mistakes. I was loud. I was confident. I had found my voice.

Turns out, it was the judging that scared me. All I had to do was not care about what anyone in that room that might be critical of me thought. The truth of the matter was almost all of them were terrified students just like me that had to present that day. They were barely paying attention to me at all let alone judging me. But for whatever reason, I once though they were. The only opinion that mattered was already proud of me before I had even stepped up to the podium.

Weeds it turns out are that challenging if we leave them be. They can actually help us grow and develop. Think about all the people in your life that made your life difficult. Think about the ones that challenged you in ways you did not appreciate at the time. Then think about how much you learned from all those experiences that you would never wish upon anyone else but that made you who you are today.

I had a speech impediment when I was really young. I went through years and years of speech therapy. I had been embarrassed by countless teachers who could not understand me when I read aloud or even worse were spelling bees but I could not say the letter r. They would make me repeat things in front of the classroom over and over again until I grew frustrated and started crying.

Several teachers tried to remove me from their classrooms because they thought I couldn’t read or had a learning disability. I did not speak to other children. I did not ask questions in class. And often would refuse to read aloud. I was deemed a weed because I was different. I deemed them weeds because I did not appreciate how they treated me. If we went by our judgment, everyone is a weed but ourselves.

Humans are quick to judge things that make them uncomfortable or they don’t understand. They want them removed from their presence as quickly as possible. In this parable, we are not Jesus, we are not narrating, we are not the Master, we are the slaves who blame someone else for causing what we have deemed is a problem. We are the ones who judge quickly and harshly without taking notice of the damage we cause ourselves in doing so.

The weeds and the wheat grow together until the harvest because we don’t know which one we are until the end. And in the end, it will not be us that does the judging or decides which crop is of value and which will be burned. Wheat cannot be distinguished from weed until it grows.

Wheat is not determined by how pretty it is, or how tall it is, or whether or not it has thistles. What God deems wheat is judged by God’s standards not ours. While I’m not a fan of prickly thorny things in my yard or garden, I cannot deny how much more useful they are for the wildlife than my nice soft grass is that I want to grow thistle-free.

We, the church have damaged ourselves by trying to uproot that which have deemed weeds. We have passed judgment on those who live lifestyles we do not agree with. We have shouted WEED! at far too many over the last century. In removing those “sinners,” we have uprooted ourselves.

It’s not easy to stop caring about what people say about us. Those crazy people who thought I was quiet or stupid were unpleasantly surprised when they found out what I could do. I had a twelfth-grade reading level in first grade if you’re curious. Reading was never the issue, just saying one letter out loud. But that one letter, and the social stigma that came with it kept me from making friends or participating in group settings for a long, long time. It still has consequences for me as an adult. But, I’m not a weed.

Turns out, I’m a phenomenal public speaker. God gave me a voice that will cut through a room. It is about me. But it’s not all about me. I don’t get to be the judge of anyone, not even myself. God decides what I do and what I become, if I let Them. I had no intentions of ever becoming someone who talked for a living but here I am. What once was thought of as a weed but was given a chance to grow alongside what was thought of as wheat, doing something I never imagined myself doing.

Humans are labelers. We are quick to judge and stick a tag on things. This might have something to do with the very first thing Adam was asked to do was label all the animals of the world. The problem is that rather than using these labels to build relationships, we have used them to tear others down. Labels become judgment not a means of learning.

We shout WEED! Often mislabeling, misidentifying, overgeneralizing, and catastrophizing the role of others in our lives. We fail to realize that by negatively labeling others, we become weeds ourselves.

God has commanded us to love; well, first, love God. But second and just as importantly, to love our neighbor and love ourselves. To do that, we can’t just label anyone different than ourselves a weed. And we probably shouldn’t just assume that we’re wheat either; we’re likely just a different kind of weed, like crabgrass. Perhaps not as overtly violent as a thistle, but quietly and beneath the surface, choking out all the life around us.

The story behind the parable of the wheat and the weeds is that we grow together. Usefulness, in the eyes of God, is not always readily apparent. That which challenges us helps us to grow stronger, but that’s not it’s only purpose. Those challengers have their own growing and learning to do as well. May one day we all step back and see the story from the narrator’s perspective. To see the usefulness in all characters, not just the hero, not just the powerful, not just the naysayers, but to see all characters as children of God. Wheat.