God's Got This

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Do you look around some days and wonder how on earth it got this bad?

I hear the news this week, and wonder how one woman just trying to help someone else can be killed by another person who is in the business of helping other people. I look at TV and the internet and see greed and selfishness and being nasty to one another on TV being rewarded, and I’m frustrated and exhausted. How do violence, cruelty, and hatred thrive, in a world full of basically good people and good intentions?

Do you ever feel like that?

Do you ever wonder what God is thinking, or what we’re doing so wrong, that all this keeps happening?

If you’ve wondered that, occasionally or often, Jesus has an answer for you today.

“An enemy has done this.”

Great. Not my fault!

Wait - No, not great. An enemy has sown the seeds of destruction? That’s terrible, Jesus! What are you going to do about that? What are we going to do about it??

Think about it – what do you think God is doing about this, right now?

If your answer was “Nothing,” then you were listening well to the gospel parable, to the story Jesus tells today: A story in which the master of a good field has a very hands off attitude toward the seeds of destruction, the weeds which some enemy has sown to threaten a good and healthy crop.

“Leave it alone,” he says to the workers, whose first impulse is to go tear the weeds from the ground, to root out the pain and the frustration and the mess that gets in the way of the good we’ve worked so hard to plant.

“Leave it alone, let it grow until the harvest. Ripping out the weeds could rip the good wheat, too. Just leave it be, and when the time comes, I will send those whose business it is to sort the good harvest from the bad, and burn the bad.”

Leave it alone. God’s got this.

There’s evidence all around us – on the news, on the internet, in daily life – evidence of the seeds of destruction, growing and thriving. Evil is real – not just in the movies, where it can be defeated in 120-odd minutes plus credits – but in our daily, personal, and community life: weeds that crowd you, that darken the good in us, that compete for our resources and attention, drawing us away from God.

It’s why we ask candidates for baptism three separate times and ways if they will resist evil – renouncing all that corrupts and destroys the creatures of God, the desires that draw us from the love of God.  And it’s why we promise that when – not if, but when we fall into sin, we’ll repent, and return to God.

Some of the evil around us is obvious: Selfish pride, wanton cruelty, the kind of lust or envy or indolence that I can tell is wrong, but it’s easy to find excuses for anyway.

Some of it’s well disguised: Sometimes greed looks exactly like a fight for freedom, or pride and arrogance looks like generosity, and you can’t tell until you see the long term results. Sometimes cruelty masquerades as comedy, until you see the wounds. Some hatreds sneak in to our hearts through an honest need to protect ourselves, or someone else.

Knowing evil is real, seeing it everywhere, but not knowing how to uproot evil, and wondering why God won’t solve it and save us now, can exhaust and frustrate us, making it easy to give in to the temptation to collaborate with the little evils (if there’s nothing you can do to make them go away…) or to give up trying in the face of the big ones.

That’s why Jesus is telling the disciples, telling us today: God’s got this.

Evil is a part of life, yes. It grows alongside the good, but it does not win in the end. The weeds can’t stop God from harvesting the wheat, from using all that is good among us to strengthen and sustain the world. The end result will not be changed, or harmed.

Evil among us – even within us – cannot destroy what God has planted.

And when we know that, it can set us free.

It can set us free from the anxiety and frustration that come from trying to purge our lives of every evil influence, every problematic person; trying to save our community from every “un-Christian” program or thing or individual who distracts you from the worship of God. It's impossible to do that - you know if you've tried.

So know that God has got this. And for the sake of God’s plan, for the sake of our souls, we don’t have to do all that purging and defending that wear us out and frustrate us. We just have to live with it. Just live with the weeds, with evil, with the seeds of destruction.

That’s not going to be easy. I wish it were, but it isn’t.

Knowing God’s got this is meant to set us free, but not free to give in to evil, or even to the petty sins – the weedy little hypocrisies and injustices, trivial negligence and dishonesty and envy – that are the daily stuff of life on TV and the internet, in offices and shopping carts and shore traffic.

Instead, we are called, like the servants in Jesus’ story, to nurture what is good, to spend our effort and attention to tend the seeds of love, joy, and peace; patience, kindness, and gentleness, that are God’s intended harvest, and not worry about it if, in the process, some of the sunshine and water also feeds the weeds.

I believe that Jesus is telling us God’s got this so that we’ll be free of the tendrils of weariness and fear and pessimism that give those weedy little evils everything they need to grow and choke us out.

If God’s got this, then we get to live in hope and trust and joy even while we are shoulder to shoulder with what’s wrong with the world.

If God’s got this, if the presence of evil in our world and lives has no claim on God’s future, that is our strength to resist the pull of the weeds,

to laugh off the fears and anxieties that root the weeds,

to stretch and grow in trust when selfishness wants to keep us small,

to soak up the light of hope in spite of all the gloomy shade that evil throws.

You and I are called to look around, and see what’s wrong in the world and respond with patience and generosity, confidence and grace, no matter how bizarre that seems in the weedy circumstances.

We promise to do this in baptism, too. To love and serve, to spread the good news through our lives, to seek justice and peace, and to put the love of God above all. We are called to grow as only we can grow, to bear good fruit no matter what happens, because God has got this, and the weeds will never matter in the end.