Sunday Sermon: Wheat & Weeds

Why does the bible talk so much about God's wrath? Isn't he a loving God?

Drawing on the parables of Jesus, this sermon explores the connection between love and judgment. As it turns out, they aren't quite as opposites as you might expect!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Please be seated. So we come to church, I think, to ask the big questions in life. Where am I going? Who am I? Who is God? So on and so on. So here's a big question for you this morning. What do you call it when weeds take over your garden completely? Disaster. It's a coup de grass. Oh, I know. That's awful, isn't it? A coup de grasse. Any francophones in here that I'm offending? No? Okay. So there's a grass and weed themed joke for you. Because this week Jesus is talking about the wheat and the weeds. Now, for two weeks running, Jesus has explained the parables very thoroughly for us, hasn't he? It almost makes the preacher's job obsolete. For a quick recap, we have our wheat field that wheat has been put in. The sower who sowed the wheat was Jesus. The field is the world. The good seed is the good people. The weeds are the evil people, wherever they are. The enemy is the devil. The harvest is the final judgment. And the reapers are angels coming to enact the final judgment. And the fire which the weeds are thrown into is the fires of hell. Really nice, happy, you know, light stuff, right? Not what I want to be hearing about when it's 30 degrees out there and smoky and already practically feels like hell, doesn't it? Um, so I don't think this is a particularly lovely story. Uh and I have to say, when I was thinking growing up about what I wanted to be, never once did I think to myself, you know, I really want to go out there and I want to preach fire and brimstone to nice people. And, you know, tell them they're going to hell, and everyone they know is going to hell, and you're all damned. No, that was not my dream. I wanted to be a lot of things, an aerospace engineer, history teacher, uh, you know, just sleep all the time. All have been dreams of mine, but fire and brimstone preacher, not one of them. And I would bet very few of you want to hear about fire and brimstone. It's just not something that connects with us culturally, is it? Uh, this idea of final judgment, of wrath, of hell. Uh we don't like that. You know, if people talk about God to you, they'll often say, Oh, yes, I believe in God. Uh, I believe in a God who is love. God is love, right? Have we all heard that before? Uh I remember the first time I heard that when I was coming into the church. I thought it was just the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard, this idea that God was love. We like that. We don't like judgment. But here's the argument I want to make for you this morning. If you want to take the Bible seriously, which I think you should take the Bible seriously, I take the Bible seriously at least, you have to be honest with yourself that the Bible says God is merciful and loving, and God is a God of judgment and wrath. There's no getting around that if you want to take your Bible seriously. You might want to throw out that second bit about wrath and judgment. Honestly, I'm with you there. I don't quite like it. But it's here in this text this morning, with the wheat and the weeds. It is very clear, and it's all over the Bible. So I'm gonna do two things this morning. I want to make an argument from reason as to why a loving God has to also be a God of wrath and judgment, and then tell you, you know, so what? What do I do with this information? And by the way, how is it good news? Because, like I said, there's always good news in the scripture. If you've heard a sermon and there isn't good news in it yet, well, it's not a very good sermon. So part one, why is judgment necessary? And I would do that by reframing this. We don't like judgment, but who in here likes justice? Is there anyone in here who does not like justice? Any fans of injustice in here? Tim, do you want injustice in the world? No? You I you seem like you are a justice fan, all things considered. We want wrongs righted. We want evil set right, or at least we want evil to stop. We can run down examples. Genocide, everyone agrees genocide is a bad thing. Sexism, the denigration of women, the idea that they are lesser than men in some way. We don't just dislike that. It's not, I like vanilla ice cream, you like chocolate ice cream, you like sexism, I don't like sexism. No, it's wrong. Full stop. Uh we could go to a local example. You know, I've been hearing about this a lot since I came to Fort Smith. The residential school system in this country was wrong. It was evil. The church perpetuated it, and it was an improper thing to do. It was a strong group of people trying to force their culture on a weak group of people. We don't just dislike these things. We don't just think injustices are, eh, not really my thing. We think they are evil, and they demand judgment. If you want justice, which we all want justice, right, we have to judge things as right or wrong, good or evil. It's part and parcel with justice. And we know God is a God of justice. So, moving from there, let's bring love into the equation, right? Because we all agree God is this God of love. Now, if you love someone, think of someone you love, a spouse, a child, uh, your favorite cashier at Kaisers, whoever that may be. Uh, if you love someone, you cannot be neutral about an injustice done to them. You just can't. It's impossible. If you're neutral about an injustice happening to someone, you don't actually love them. There are people in the world I don't love. I probably should, but in my weakness, there are people I don't love, and I feel pretty ambivalent about what happens to them on my bad days. But if you care about someone, you have to. Let's use the analogy of uh imagine if you're a parent. Many of you in this room are parents, right? I assume. If your child gets into something bad, let's say they fall in with a bad group who are leading them down a bad road, or let's say they get into drugs or alcohol, which is a common story in the world, unfortunately. If your child is out drinking or doing drugs, are you going to say, meh, whatever. If he wants to, you know, get plastered every night, that's his thing. He can do it if he wants. No, that would be ridiculous. You will hate the thing that is destroying your child. You'll hate that drug. You'll hate that drink. You'll hate the bad crowd, the relationship that your child is in that is destroying your child. And that, the point here, is that indifference is the opposite of love. Anger is not the opposite of love. Wrath is not the opposite of love. Wrath is love in motion against the things that threaten what we love. If you don't love something, you feel, meh, it could go either way about it. So let's see when we apply this to God. God works in a very similar way to what we do here. If God sees something that is hurting us, that's harming us, that uh uh is taking away what it means to be fully us, he has to judge that negatively and to hate it. We look at this garden analogy, or this wheat and this weeds. Uh, God is looking out at his wheat field that he likes quite a bit, and he sees these weeds that are destroying the wheat, and he has to hate the weeds. Now, I've been looking after the Solberg's garden this summer. Uh, honestly, I feel quite indifferent towards the garden because I'm not much of a gardener. But I get the feeling the Solbergs love their garden. If any of you have gardens, you probably like them too. Uh and you go in and you take the weeds out because they're going to destroy your vegetables, your fruits, your flowers, whatever you're growing. You're not weeding just out of hatred for the weeds, but because you love the vegetables. And so it is with God, who looks down at his garden, the earth, and has to remove weeds that threaten the wheat. Now, by the way, an interesting thing in this text here, I think, is that a lot of us have a big problem with judgment because of our negative human experiences of judgment. And to be clear, humans are very bad judges. We're bad judges of character. We tend to be bad at judging what's right and wrong. And that's why this parable makes it clear that judgment does not belong to us. Judgment belongs to the angels, the agents of God, the reapers, at the end of time. This job was never meant for us because we are rather fallible judges. Now, the gardeners among you might appreciate this. If you look at the Greek text for this reading, the word that we're translating as wheat here, or as weed here, the word for wheat, is not just a general weed, general weed. The word is zizanion in Greek, which translates to a very specific weed called darnell. Darnell looks exactly like wheat. To the human eye, you can't tell them apart at all, which makes the point here. We are not the ones called to look around and say, you're good, you're wrong, you're you're right, you're incorrect. We need someone who knows a lot more than us to come down and set things straight. So, so what? Right? I've been going on about judgment and God and wrath and hatred and everything for a while. Heavy stuff, right? What does this mean for your lives? For one, as I was just hinting at, you are not the judge. You have to keep that in mind as you move through this world. I am not the judge. We are not the judges. We are just called to live in this world, to love people who are put in front of us regardless. Watch what you do when you're tempted to take up judgment anyway. Be careful that you don't fall into resentment, defiling people away as weeds who you find difficult, or uh avoiding neighbors or hating neighbors who you think are just difficult, bad people. Not judging other people is not just a good idea. It's a gospel imperative here in the scriptures. We have to approach everyone as our equals. So next time you're thinking about dealing with someone who's a real pain, remember the line between wheat and weed is really quite thin, and you might not be able to tell it as well as you'd like. What should you do, number two, is keep in mind this very subtle line or this connection between judgment and love. You have to hold these two things in tension when you're reading your Bible. You have to understand that kindness and wrath, acceptance and judgment are intention. And you can't overweight one or the other. You know, if you go around all the time thinking, oh, God is a God of love, he accepts me, so on and so on, you'll have one set of problems. And if you go around all the time saying, oh, God is a God of judgment, he's here to smite the people who are evil, usually the people I don't like, right? For me, that's Dallas Cowboys fans. God has it out for those people, let me tell you. He likes the Eagles. Um, you will end up a separate kind of problem. Think of a child who only ever gets affirmation and kind words and candy from their parents. How's that child gonna grow up? They'll probably be a spoiled child, right? And we don't want to be spoiled children. Now think of a child who only ever gets discipline and cruel words and reprimands from their parents. You're going to get an abused child there. And those are both things we do not want to be in our relationship with God. You have to go down that middle ground of receiving love and affirmation and warmth and receiving discipline and correction and guardrails on our lives. And that's how we're meant to be with God when we read the scriptures. And now, one last thing, the good news, because like I said, there always has to be good news. Uh, judgment is a scary thing. I don't like it. You probably don't like it, because if I'm honest with myself, there's lots of things in me I don't want judged. Uh we spend a lot of our lives trying to avoid the experience of being judged, right? It's an awful, uncomfortable experience. Uh, and none of us could stand up to God's perfect judgment because we are human beings. We're imperfect. That's just how we are. But there is one person in history who could stand up to God's judgment, and that was Jesus Christ, the perfect man who's without sin, who never did anything wrong, and who, rather than live a life of ease and contentment, took the penalty for our wrongs into himself. Jesus, despite his perfection, went up onto the cross and took the penalty for our sins into his body and paid for all our imperfections with his blood. So on the last day, at that final judgment, when the angels and the reapers are coming and the weeds are being thrown into the fiery furnace where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth, remember that you're not the one being judged. On judgment day, we don't have to account for ourselves because Christ covers us in that judgment. He's the one who's made an account for us. He's the one whose score will be looked at. If you ask me that the God of the universe, rather than judge you, has taken it upon himself to take that judgment, I would say that's good news. Which, like I said, always has to be in the sermon. Now, it is hot as heck in here, isn't it? Really? I mean, gosh, what a day to be talking about hell. So let's continue with our service. So what's next? I've lost my order of service. Oh, the Apostles Creed. Please stand and join me in saying the Apostles' Creed on page twenty of the prayer book.