Sermons

The Fruitful Tares

Preached by Ricardo Avila on 10th Sunday after Pentecost (Sunday, July 20, 2008)

Part One: Intro to Parable

In the parable of the wheat and the weeds, or “tares,” the owner of the field instructs his servants to let both grow together until the harvest, because in uprooting the tares some wheat might also be destroyed. The tares in question are called “bearded darnel,” a weed that grew in first-century Palestine. Since these tares look very much like wheat until they mature and show their seed, the servants’ haste to pluck them up is imprudent.

Like those servants, this parable advises us not to “weed out” people in our midst whom we perceive to be bad or evil, because our judgment is imperfect and we risk condemning those who are good or fruitful. Rather, we are told to wait until the harvest, or the “end of the age,” when Christ’s perfect judgment will uproot and cast out evil. God searches us out and knows us, from our sitting down to our rising up, and God alone can judge.

This might be the perfect time to bring up the Lambeth Conference and the attempt by some to uproot the Episcopal Church from the garden of Anglicanism, but I won’t. I will instead talk about something closer to home.

Part Two: Chaplaincy

I am learning about the kingdom of heaven at San Francisco General Hospital. As a chaplain intern this summer, I have spent time with people whom many would consider the “weeds” of society: illegal immigrants, drug addicts, alcoholics, domestic violence victims, and the homeless. But they have taught me first-hand the very thing Jesus speaks of in today’s parable: don’t judge others by their appearance. Leave that to God.

A man my age, an illegal immigrant, was assaulted by gang members and left with two broken legs and a broken arm. After telling me the frightening details of his ordeal and admitting that he’s too scared to leave his hospital room, he mentions that he prays for his attackers every day, hoping they can find a way out of that desperate lifestyle. Surprised and moved by his compassion for those young men, I tell him that I don’t think I could do the same. This man’s illegal status makes him a weed to some, a tare that’s taken root in our country. But his heart is pure wheat.

One woman, a schizophrenic addicted to drugs who is trying to maintain her sobriety, told me she used to have no faith. Now, however, faith is all she has to hold onto, and she prays constantly to God and to Jesus to help her overcome her addictions. She tells me she wishes she had a Bible to read every day so she could learn more about God. As I run down to the chaplain’s office to retrieve one for her, I consider that I have seven Bibles in my studio apartment, and that I haven’t opened any of them since the last paper I had to write at seminary in May. Not that I haven’t read any books on religion; but I haven’t needed God like my life depended on it in a long time, the way this woman sees God every day. Had I seen her on the street, I would have given her a wide berth and bemoaned the fact that our city has so many crazies, weeds springing forth from every crack in the sidewalk. Instead, her desperate need for God’s mercy reminded me how self-satisfied I can be, and how rote our faith can become when left unchallenged.

My visits with patients aren’t always Hallmark cards filled with life-lessons – plenty of people at SF General are angry, sullen, and unpleasant. But I’m learning to have compassion for those I have previously seen as “other.” Today’s parable sets up a duality between wheat and tare, good and evil, us and them, saved and damned. But in allowing the good to grow with the bad, I believe this parable calls us to live in the tension these dualities bring. “Us and them” is a safe and seemingly necessary way to see the world around us; but this parable instructs us to live as “we.” Because only God knows which of us are wheat and which are tares.

And this might be the perfect time to bring up the Lambeth Conference and the refusal of some Anglican bishops to see our communion as “we,” but I won’t. I will instead talk about something closer to home.

Part Three: The Wheat and Tares in Us

Another way to understand this parable is to see the wheat and the tares in ourselves. If the wheat in our soul is that spark of divinity that calls us to be our best selves, to live in relationship with God and our neighbor, then the tares in us are those habits, traits, and “old tapes” in our head that choke our growth and stifle our connection to others. For example, we may have learned to use pride as a shield against being ridiculed. We might beat up on ourselves today because we were told long ago that we were unloveable. We could be immersing ourselves in book learning as a way to avoid the rejection that can come when we reach out to others. Any number of tares may have grown up with the wheat in our heart, leaving us lonely and disconnected from others.

But like the servants in today’s parable, we can’t just pull out the weeds in our soul. These tares are a part of who we are, and to eradicate them is to wipe out our distinct selves. Instead, today’s gospel is asking us to tend our weeds, because they may in fact grow up to be wheat. In other words, we can’t know whether our loneliness, insecurity, fear, whatever, might one day be a means of connection…

You might talk to the stranger standing alone at coffee hour because you yourself have felt unseen. You might become a therapist because you have struggled with your own demons and want to help others. Or you might realize that someone is beating up on themselves because you do it, too, and your compassion for them could forge a bond. It happens all the time at the hospital, between the chaplains and the patients, and the tares in us enable us to tend to the wounds in others. It also happens here in church. After all, what else is Church of the Advent but a group of misfits who found one another?

Part Four: Conclusion

When I was a child and had stomach aches, my mother would make me a tea from a weed called hierba buena. This weed was used for healing.

The suffering we have endured may seem to choke us and keep us from living up to our potential, but we can never know whether those same experiences and personality traits will one day serve to make us God’s wheat.

The parable of the wheat and tares asks us not to judge others or ourselves as good or bad, for we do not see from God’s perspective. Our hope at the end of the age is that we will not be punished in a furnace of fire, but that God will separate out the weeds in us that may have once proved useful, bundling and tossing them into the fire in our stead, cleansing and forgiving us our iniquities, and making us whole and able to enter into the kingdom of Heaven, a harvest of wheat for eternity.

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