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
