“Just love everyone, I will sort em out later.” - God

 

It would be nice to be able to root out evil.

This is at the heart of most human endeavors.

We want to create a world that is orderly and makes sense.

We hate a world that is messy, a world were both evil and good reside.

A world were things happen and we can’t easily decide who is the bad person and who is the good person.

A lot of movies divide up the world into good and bad.

The good person overcomes the bad person, and we cheer.

It gives us some comfort.

But real life is so messy.

It is so much harder to live in a world where sinner and saint live not just in different people, but within each of us.

Our parable for this morning shows us the messy world.

Where good crops and bad crops grow together.

They grow without our intention or knowing.

Like our guest preacher last week, I don’t know much about gardening and know even less about agriculture.

I am at heart a city person.

I prefer the comforts of city life.

I prefer concrete and a good restaurant to living in the open growing my own food.

But I was reading this week that the wheat and weeds are imperceivable from one another.

That if that type of weed showed up you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

They would look the same.

And so by trying to pluck up the weeds you would inevitably end up pluck up the wheat too.

 

The thing about humans is that our history is littered with people who have tried to bring order to our world.

Throughout time people have tried to pull up the weeds, to root out what they perceived as evil.

What I am about to say is going to sound weird, I ask you bear with me.

One of the ways to view the totalitarian regimes that arose in the aftermath of World War two were attempts to bring order to what appeared to be a chaotic world.

The world was changing rapidly.

It was bringing with it more and more industrialization.

And with it more and more social isolation, economic division, political ideology.

The rise of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin where because they offered people a simple explanation for their problems.

They offered simple solutions.

They offered utopian visions of what the world could be.

And in their minds, they offered a way to root out the evil around them and have a better world.

We all know how that story ended.

It ended in concentration camps, in a world war, in the loss of our individual expressions, in the loss of freedom.

Dietrich Bonhoffer talks about it in his book on community.

He says, ““God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious.

Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves.

They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly.”

He wrote those words as Hitler and Mussolini were consolidating their power.

He wrote them as people were losing their freedoms in the name of progress and a safer, more stable world.

It is a dangerous thing to root out evil.

To try and pull everything up in order to create the world you think is the “right one”.

Jesus this morning warns us against such things.

Jesus asks us to let God make those decisions, to let God be the judge.

Maybe even harder is to trust that God will do that.

That when the kingdom comes God will set things right, and that it is only God who can actually decide properly.

 

I know that temptation well.

I felt it this week.

On Thursday I was walking into our church building and noticed that our rainbow flag was missing.

I have to tell you that it went missing one other time.

At that time, it was clearly the wind that ripped it from the poll.

I found the flag down the street.

So, my first thought was maybe that happened again, there was a strong wind on Wednesday night.

But as I approached the pole, I noticed that the pole itself was bent.

The clips the hold the pole were still there, and there were some fragments on the ground.

I looked around the neighborhood to see if it was anywhere.

It was clearly missing.

This time it wasn’t the wind.

I couldn’t help but notice that this happened after our Reconciling in Christ Sunday last week.

It also happened after I posted a picture from that Sunday of myself, our guest preacher, and Acid Reigns.

It seems to be too much of a coincidence.

Someone was mad, someone didn’t like the message our congregation sent with that service.

And after all of that my first reaction was to think, “We need to get rid of this type of hate in our world.”

My first thought was to call the police, maybe put up a camera.

I was angry about it, disappointed.

But I let it settle in me.

I took a moment.

And honestly, I thought about this parable.

What would it look like for us to root out this evil?

What would we do in order to get rid of people that think the best way to handle our differences is fear and intimidation through vandalism?

 

If you saw the video I posted about this incident on my Facebook page you saw the conclusion I came to.
Whoever tore down our flag did us a favor.

The showed us that our intentional love of people in the LGBTQ+ community was exactly what we should be doing.

We heard a couple of weeks ago Jesus tell us in the sermon on the mount that those who are persecuted and reviled for the sake of Jesus are blessed.

We are blessed for loving our neighbors.

And further in the sermon on the mount that the answer to another’s violence and hatred is not to answer it in kind.

But that love is always the answer.

That when evil is done, we can’t just tear up the roots of the weeds because we will end up destroying the good in the attempt.

 

I don’t think Jesus is telling us to do nothing.

In fact, the opposite.

Do something drastic and not expected.

Instead of trying to root out evil, respond with love and compassion.

I know that is not the way we think about these things in our world today.
I know that is not going to be very popular answer.

What we need now and have always needed is more love and compassion.

I think it is the only way we are actually going to change things in the world, and in ourselves.

As Dr. King once said, "Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." 

My response was to dig deep for love and compassion even for the person who vandalized our flag.

Many people reached out to me to thank me or encourage me to keep going, for our congregation to keep going.

So many people agreed with me that we can’t respond to hate with hate.

 

And the response from people in our congregation, and some people in our community, was to offer to buy more flags.

To show that we were going to keep on loving people.

 

Nancy Zattler a while ago gifted our congregation with a rock that is engraved a quote from God, “Just love everyone, I will sort em out later.”

That rock is at the entrance of our church by the flowers.

That is exactly what Jesus is asking us to do this morning in our Gospel reading.

That is what we at Concordia Lutheran Church will continue to keep on doing.

Amen