Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Matthew 13:24–30, 36–43

James was a member of the congregation I served in Atlanta.

St. John’s was filled with professors, physicians, and people connected to Emory University. James drove a truck. While many of us debated ideas, James quietly fixed things around the church that no one else had noticed were broken.

He wore a western string tie on Sundays, called his wife “my little lady,” and spoke with the kind of Southern accent that made you wonder what stories and assumptions he had carried with him all his life. He rebuilt old cars in his driveway.

When the congregation called a gay pastor, James wasn’t sure what to think. It didn’t fit with what he had always believed. He might have left, as others did. Instead, after I visited his wife in the hospital, she invited me over for sweet tea at their home. She loved that visit, and James loved her. So we just kept sharing church.

Years later, when my relationship with Darin became public and the controversy surrounding LGBTQ pastors was growing in the church, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution interviewed members of the congregation. We had people who could explain our theology with precision. We had talking points and communication plans.

Instead, they quoted James.

Drawing from the language he knew best, he said, “With Pastor Bradley, we got a Cadillac. Only it has a bent fender.”

I’ll admit, when I first read it, I winced. It sounded too much like, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”

Some people worried that James had become the public voice of the congregation. We needed to be more careful, they thought, about who represented the church.

James never completely abandoned the image. But over time he began adding something else.

“I’ve got a bent fender too,” he’d say. “We all do.”

The remarkable thing wasn’t that James suddenly figured everything out. The remarkable thing was that he didn’t pull me out of his field before God had finished growing something new in him.

And the congregation didn’t pull him out of theirs either.

The sun shone, and the rain fell. Over the years we stood together at the grave of his son after he died by suicide. I witnessed the promises he made to a new love that arrived unexpectedly after the death of his “little lady.” Later I sat with him again when that relationship ended in heartbreak.

Looking back now, I don’t remember the bent fender nearly as much as I remember the harvest that grew from a relationship neither of us fully understood when it began. By the time I left Atlanta, he described me as one of “my most favoratist people.” And, for me, he was one of the hardest people to leave.

In today’s parable the servants walk into the field and immediately notice the weeds. That’s all they can see. “Do you want us to pull them?” they ask. It sounds like common sense.

It sounds efficient.

It sounds responsible.

But the landowner sees something they do not.

He sees wheat.

More importantly, he sees a harvest that is still becoming itself.

“If you pull the weeds now,” he says, “you may uproot the wheat along with them.”

I’ve often heard this parable preached as a lesson about judgment: don’t decide who’s in and who’s out because that’s God’s job. There’s certainly truth in that.

But I wonder if Jesus is saying something even more practical.

Maybe the greatest threat to the harvest isn’t simply the weeds.

Maybe it’s becoming so focused on the weeds that we stop tending the wheat.

That sounds uncomfortably familiar.

We live in an age that trains us to notice weeds.

Every algorithm rewards outrage.

Every news cycle asks us to identify the latest enemy.

Every political conversation invites us to divide the world into the righteous and the wicked.

It doesn’t take long before every dinner conversation circles back to what is wrong with the world.

We become expert weed spotters.

And after a while, that’s all we can see.

The danger isn’t that evil isn’t real.

The danger is that our attention becomes captive to it.

The poet Mary Oliver once wrote:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.[1]

I love those words because they suggest that paying attention and being astonished are not the same thing.

Human beings have this great capacity to pay attention.

We’re just not always paying attention to the same things God is.

This summer I’ve had two bingo cards sitting on my desk.One came from Gloria Dei’s Racial Justice Committee. It invites us to notice signs of justice, compassion, and hope in our community. Last weekend, while showing a friend around the Twin Cities, we followed one of its suggestions and ate lunch at All Square. It’s a grilled cheese restaurant with a mission of helping people returning from incarceration rebuild their lives.

For me, it’s truly a gospel word that a grilled cheese sandwich can become part of God’s justice. I’m down for that.

The second bingo card is called Chasing Wonder.

Its introduction says, “Grab your camera. Start chasing God’s beauty. Joy. Justice. Hope. Humor.” Literally, you choose what you are looking for.

The funny thing is that I had forgotten about that bingo card, only finding it because I was procrastinating from writing this sermon. It had slipped underneath a stack of bills, magazines, and junk mail. I hadn’t thought about it in weeks.

Of course, I pulled it back out. When you have to write a sermon, you’ll pay attention to anything that appears because it just might be something you can use. You never know just what might carry the harvest you need.

It struck me that perhaps wonder doesn’t disappear. It simply gets buried beneath all the clutter competing for our attention. These parables about growth and fields and harvest have a way of pulling the wonder card back into view.

Jesus isn’t asking us to ignore injustice. Or our inner struggles and tenacious addictions.

He’s certainly not asking us to pretend there aren’t weeds.

There are weeds.

There are destructive ideas.

There are systems that crush people.

There are moments when courage requires confronting evil directly.

There are things growing within ourselves, if left unattended, will ruin the harvest.

But Jesus also knows something about the human heart.

Whatever we continually attend to eventually shapes us.

If all I ever notice is what is broken, something inside me begins to break too.

If I become consumed by outrage, even righteous outrage, compassion slowly withers.

Wonder dries up.

Joy becomes suspicious.

Hope feels naïve.

The fruits of the Spirit never quite ripen.

Perhaps that is the enemy’s cleverest strategy—not merely to plant weeds, but to keep us staring at them.

Meanwhile, God keeps tending the harvest.

God keeps sending sun and rain.

God keeps nourishing roots we cannot see.

God waits.

Not because God cannot tell the difference between wheat and weeds.

But because God sees possibilities hidden from everyone else.

James wasn’t finished becoming James.

I wasn’t finished becoming me.

You are not finished becoming you.

The church is not finished becoming the church.

And this weary, divided world is not finished becoming the world God intends.

Paul says that all creation is groaning like a woman in labor.

Labor is painful.

But labor is not death.

It is the promise that something new is coming into the world.

So perhaps the invitation of this parable is wonderfully simple.

Pay attention.

Yes, notice the weeds.

But don’t stop there.

Pay even closer attention to the harvest God is quietly growing all around you.

Trust that grace is deeper than fear.

Trust that love is stronger than outrage.

Trust that God is growing something more beautiful than we can yet imagine.

Trust that a tiny bite of bread holds the full harvest,

and a cup of wine reflects everything that is yet to come.

And above all,

trust the Farmer.

Amen.

[1] Mary Oliver, Sometimes, https://readalittlepoetry.com/2014/09/10/sometimes-by-mary-oliver/.