The Field and the Fire

When my son Amos—who is now a strapping 23-year-old—was about 10, he developed this annoying habit of following us from room to room and turning out any lights we had left on. Probably it was something he learned in school. He was right, of course: we should all turn out all the lights we aren’t using. And limit our water use and practice good stewardship in all areas of our life. But it’s a bit unnerving when your children become the prophets.

Amos was unusually anxious about it, though, sometimes coming to tears if he found too many lights left on in the house. So one evening when as he was falling asleep, I asked him why such concern over the lights. “If we spend all of our money on electricity,” Amos said, “there won’t be anything left for my inheritance.”

“If we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ,” wrote St. Paul. I am struck by how much of the language of economics enters into our second lesson today: we are debtors to the Spirit, and heirs of God. Surprising metaphors, given that the Bible generally doesn’t take kindly to debt. Nevertheless, financial transactions are a powerful symbol of our mutuality; of the intertwined and interdependent nature of our community.

The truth of the matter is that we are indebted to others and we are endowed by others. Our foremothers and forefathers gave us our traditions, and God alone is the source of all the resources we enjoy. So Amos was perhaps more right than he imagined. When we squander energy, we are using up the inheritance bequeathed to the whole human community in creation.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul used the language of economics to highlight our interdependence. He makes it clear that the spiritual inheritance from God through Christ comes at a cost. “If, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” In the resurrection of Christ we have glimpsed our inheritance: death overcome and all creation made whole. So even our suffering—our pain and groaning, as Paul describes it—has already been redeemed by Christ.

I believe that’s true, from the bottom of my heart. And at the same time, I confess that this has been a week of some painful groaning for me. I continue to grieve the plight of the child refugees on our borders, I am horrified by a war in which the children of Gaza become collateral damage simply by playing soccer on the beach, and we have all been shocked by the untimely death of almost 300 civilian air travelers shot down over the Ukraine.

These are scary times, tragic times. And in times like these, our first question is often “who did it?” Who is responsible for all this suffering, groaning, pain and bondage that we live amidst? As if by knowing who the bad guys are, we could somehow make the pain go away. In the case of the Malaysian airline tragedy, we’ll probably know who fired the missile soon: as one commentator observed, this is a part of the world that it closely observed by intelligence-gathering apparatus. If the war in the Ukraine were, say, a field of wheat, we’d know who the weeds were, right?

Or maybe not. In the case of the 57,000 children waiting in makeshift immigration detention, or the escalating violence in Israel-Palestine, culpability may not be so clear. If we look to the roots of these tragedies—and frankly to the roots of most of the persistent conflicts in the world—the wheat and the weeds have grown up together. Good intentions and selfish ones, aggression and self defense are hopelessly intertwined.

When we know things are going wrong and we want them to be right, its especially tempting to read our gospel lesson primarily as parable of judgment. As a story about the good and bad, about who escapes and who burns. But if you look at Jesus’ kingdom parables, its striking how many are rooted in images of things that live and grow and change. The kingdom is like a seed, like a tree, like yeast. Which leads me to wonder if this is best understood as a story about what burns in the fire at the end, or about what grows in the field in the meantime, and how.

Neither the earth of God’s good creating, nor the kingdom that Jesus described using earthly metaphors, is a machine set to make good products and bad ones. Rather, it is like an ecosystem. And the roots of all that is good and evil in our world are so deeply intertwined that we cannot eradicate the one without fatally damaging the other. We have to wait, as we would for any inheritance. “No,” says Jesus to the slaves anxious to eliminate the risk, “for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together.”

As disciples of Jesus, it appears that we are not commissioned to judge the other species growing in the wheat field of God’s kingdom. If we want to be the like the wheat in this parable, we have just one job, and that is to grow. We must grow even in the midst of bad news, we must grow even alongside bad people. This is a very costly form of discipleship because it means that we have to live without certainty in scary times, and we will have to live alongside people who suffer. Indeed, we will suffer ourselves and likely cause our neighbors to suffer, because our roots are so very intertwined.

At times this doesn’t seem good enough. I am weary of bad news and frightened of people with bad motivations. That’s the problem with living in the hope of a promised inheritance, isn’t it? We look at the world around us and we fear that it could be squandered or used up. Maybe it would be smarter to clear out the weeds right now, because none of us want to feel like Amos, frightened into sleeplessness at the thought that there might not be anything left at the end of the growing season. Yet this parable insists that wait and see what grows, while ourselves grow in faith.

Which brings me to the most intriguing character in this parable. What kind of a householder would remain so calm in the face of a wheat field known to be infested with a noxious weed? Perhaps the one who was there from the beginning, shaping human beings from the soil. The one who has no fear of the bad seed because he has already seen the abundance of the harvest at the end of time. The one who has already been to the place of judgment’s fire and has not been burned. The one who gives the bread and the one who is himself the bread.

Its hard to practice patience and hope in the midst of fear, but God has not left us to figure it out alone. Come, brothers and sisters, to the table where we foretaste our inheritance. Let Jesus Christ himself nourish our hope, as we grow in his likeness.