Today was a milestone for me. Nearing the very end of my internship at Bethany, this morning was the first time that I helped to lead worship without my colleagues Pastors Ron and Ruth Ann. It was a crazy realization to discover that I was the one who knew what was going on in worship this morning! I went from being "the intern"--without a clue, just 11 short months ago, to being people's "pastor" this morning in the absence of the rest of our regular leadership team.
What a great capstone to the year. What a way to gauge all that I've learned. What a perspective this gives me to look back on the road I've traveled and how far I've come. What a morning!
I'm so thankful to have had this year to learn and grow with the guidance of mentors like Ron and Ruth Ann and in the midst of such a supportive and uplifting congregation and staff. The only downside is saying 'goodbye.' But I still have 2 weeks until I have to do that officially.
For now, here's the sermon I preached this morning, on gardening with Mom, holding back judgment, American Pickers, and our patient, hopeful God of transformations.
“From Weeds to Wheat”
Sermon by Jessica Harris Daum
on Matthew 13:24-30; 36-43--The Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat
Preached July 17 at Bethany Lutheran Church, Cherry Hills Village, CO
President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.”
I feel at least a bit unqualified to be preaching to you about growing things this morning. You’d think that being a North Dakota Girl, I might know a bit about farming. But the truth is, I grew up in the city. Even though that city was surrounded by farm fields--fields that served as the “bread basket of the world” as North Dakota is the country’s leading producer of cereal grain crops like wheat. Yet, while I have seen more wheat fields than most and understand and appreciate their importance, I never really had the chance to enter them and learn about the art of farming that rich, black, Red River Valley soil.
What’s worse is I can’t even keep a house plant alive. I certainly don’t have a green thumb.
But even I know one thing: weeding your garden or your field is an important thing to do. I know this because of the number of times my mom has given me a pair of gloves, a kneeling pad, and some metal gardening tool of which I don’t know the name and pointed me to a patch of garden with one mission: remove the weeds.
The job of weeding goes on all summer long at my parents’ cabin. My mom will use any help she can get when it comes to weeding the gardens that snake up and down the hill. As evidence take the fact that she would put me to work, with my zero knowledge in horticulture.
Weeding is a tough job. Not just because of the physical labor involved, but also because it can be hard to tell which things need to be plucked up, and which ones are about to bloom into some wonderful, rare flower or bear some unexpected fruit.
This week I’ve gathered a number of definitions for the word “weed.”
Some say, “a weed is a plant for which we have yet to find the use.” In other words, it is an undiscovered treasure. Plenty of people have found good uses for plants once, or even still, considered to be weeds. For example: dandelions fashioned into a beautiful crown, or thistles that can be turned into thistle wine, or common milkweed--a large food source for the Monarch butterfly. I think that a plant we haven’t found a use for yet is a pretty optimistic definition of weeds. In fact I like it. But some people aren’t the biggest fans of their neighbors who use this definition in tending their yards.
Some say, “a weed is a plant that’s growing where you don’t want it.” I know some people with this definition of weeds. Some of whom make beautiful use of so-called “weeds” by allowing them to grow in parts of their garden. Others of whom use this definition to indiscriminately remove plants, even useful and beautiful ones, at the direction of their whim. My mom doesn’t like these sort of people weeding in her garden.
Since I’m back on the subject of my mom’s garden, there’s something important to note. My mom inherited the many gardens around the cabin from the previous owner. And prior to this inheritance, she had the brown thumb that you can find in her offspring. Weeding in the garden the first summer of the cabin was an experiment in patience. She and I had very little knowledge of what the plants were that were poking out of the spring ground. I would point and ask, “weed?” And she would page through her Minnesota Gardens book and sometimes answer “Yes! Pull it!” Then sometimes she’d find the picture of the little green sprout and share her discovery with joy, “No, that’s (some scientific plant name), it’ll have big pink flowers in July.” Most often she’d look up from her book, squint at me, and say, “Let’s leave it and wait and see.”
I think this is what God, the great gardener says when he looks at the sprigs and sprouts that poke up out of the dirt of this world. “Let’s leave it and wait and see.”
At this point, I’ve reached the very end of my little knowledge about plants. And I’m also doubting that very many of you have farming experience outside of your backyard garden. Assumptions are rarely good though, so let me check mine. By a raise of hands, how many of you would say that you have an agricultural background. As people who live in a mostly urban or suburban world, these farming parables of Jesus can sometimes miss the mark for us. So, I’m wondering if you might grant me permission to share my own parable with you: The Parable of the Junk Drawer.
First of all, let me be sure that this one will hit home for us. By a raise of hands, how many of you are the proud owner of a junk drawer....or an attic...or a basement, garage, or storage unit full of stuff? Okay, looks like we’re on the right track, so here we go...
I put before you another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who put important things in a drawer; but while everybody was busy doing other things, their children, (or spouse, or alternate personality) came and put junk in there, and then went away. So when the drawer began to fill up and somebody opened it to find their important item, the junk appeared as well. And the obedient children (or helpful spouse, or alternate personality) of the householder came and said to him (or her), “Master (your children or spouse call you that right?), did you not put important things in your drawer? Where, then, did this junk come from?! He answered, “An enemy has done this.” The slaves (errr, I mean obedient children, helpful spouse, or alternate personality) said to him, “Then do you want us to go and sort out that junk and give it to Good Will?” But he replied, “No; for in sorting out the junk you would end up getting rid of some of the important things as well. Let both of them remain in the drawer as long as we live here;; and someday when we move, while we’re packing I will tell the movers, Collect the junk first and throw it away, but the important stuff mark “handle with care” and ship to my new home.”
We all have a junk drawer, or closet, or room, or level of our home...but most of us don’t intend for it to be that way. We don’t say “let the junk and the good stuff remain in the drawer together as long as we live here, for in sorting out the junk we might get rid of something good.” That’s called hoarding, and it’s a diagnosable, treatable disorder that people would rather not have. Instead we have junk drawers that accumulate over time against our best struggles against them and our many good intentions to clean them out. If a member of our household should volunteer to sort out the junk, most of us would gladly take them up on the offer.
I’ve been watching the show “American Pickers” lately, and I think it has inspired this new parable. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s a show about a couple of guys who love to dig through junk piles, and garages, and basements, and barns--all in search of the diamond in the rough. They drive around and keep an eye out for the yard with six old cars in it or the old barn with gasoline signs hanging haphazardly from it. Then they pull in, meet the owner, and ask if they can dig through their trash to find a hidden treasure. In the show’s opening, one of the Pickers Mike says, “Where other people see junk, we see dollar signs.”
It seems to me that the same couple of definitions of “weeds” I’ve mentioned can function to describe people’s understanding of “junk” as well. As Trey and I sort out our stuff to get ready for our trip back to MN, we tend to be defining junk as stuff that is growing where we don’t want it. Or rather, stuff that we no longer need or want...really stuff we don’t have room for anymore. Most of the people that the Pickers visit look at junk and see something that hasn’t reached it’s full potential. To them, junk is a thing for which we have yet to find a use. One woman explained as she showed the Pickers around her “junky” garage, “My father wasn’t a junk man really. He was just a depression era man who saw a potential use in everything.”
As I’ve watched this show I am taken, not by the entrepreneurial spirit of the “Pickers,” though they do love to turn a profit on the things that they find, but I’ve been moved by the way their eyes sprakle when they pull a 1920s tin toy out of a pile of old newpapers. The way that their spirits light up as they tell the story of a high-wheel bicycle that is rusting among the carcasses of junked autos. The way they shout as an old Studebaker is brought out of a garage and into the sunlight for the first time in 30 years. These guys delight in finding the treasure among the junk. Even more so, they delight in turning junk into treasure. Most of us don’t have the gift of seeing things this way. But I believe this is how God looks at us. With a passionate gleam in his eye, God looks at each of us and sees not the rusty exterior or the space we take up, but sees instead the shiny self we will be when he’s through restoring us. God sees in us great potential, and is as excited as a Picker at the opportunity to reclaim us and remake us.
The landowner who turns down the opportunity to have his field weeded is bizarre. Any other landowner would not only take his workers up on the offer, he wouldn’t have been waiting for the offer at all, but instead he would have been scolding his neglectful employees who hadn’t already taken up the obvious and necessary task.
Last week Pastor Ruth Ann showed us how the parable of the seeds sown on the path, and rocky ground, among thorns, and in good soil tells us less about the type of ground and more about the sower. I believe the same is true for us with the weeds and wheat this week. Jesus lays out for us a story that is Good News for you and me. Not a story of the fiery fate of those who turn out to be weeds in the end, but the story of our God who is an extra-ordinary farmer. A farmer with the generosity, joy, and audacity to throw seeds “willy-nilly” and see what might come up. A farmer with the patience and hope to “wait and see” when it comes to the weeds growing among the wheat.
Horticulturally speaking, weeds cannot become wheat. Theologically speaking, that’s exactly what we are: people who have been changed from weeds to wheat. Changed from junk to treasure. Changed from people without a purpose to the Children of God, workers in the Kingdom, and heirs with Christ in all that God has to offer, including eternal life.
If the workers had been allowed to weed us out, we would have been in the Good Will box along with all of humanity. But the Good News from Jesus today is this: God is not an ordinary gardener. We are not ordinary plants. Instead we are seeds sown in the spirit, genetically altered sprouts infused with the DNA of Christ, and one day we will grow to mature plants, created in the image of our God who loves to perform horticultural miracles in us each day.
Thanks be to God for that. Amen.
As I said in a previous post, this past Sunday, I preached and helped to lead worship in the absence of my supervisor and our associate pastor. Leading worship often calls for me to draw upon all of the improvising skills I have. Luckily, I took a SPA (summer performing arts) course in improv one summer in high school...so I am abounding in improvising skill. At least I'm abounding in hyperbole skill.
