8th Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 13:24-30
[Jesus] put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in their field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So, when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to them, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ They answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to them, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But they replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
Weed Seed
In the time before,
When children were playing in the shadow a seemingly benevolent tyrant king,
And their mother was too afraid to do anything about it,
The Creator of all the world decided to bestow unto us a gift,
The gift of indestructible resilience in the face of insurmountable odds,
And now that tyrant has decided to become a father,
And although it is far too late to erase the damage done through years of negligent abuse,
And the fragile earth has been unmercifully scorched almost beyond repair,
My siblings and I have decided,
That although our gardens may be too infertile to bear fruit,
We will collect all the seeds of our experience and see what we can grow.
And what came up,
Was weeds,
But what is a weed but a plant growing where someone decided they didn’t want it?
So we have to decided to want them,
We have decided to embrace them all,
Making our gardens lush and beautiful,
Where my mother’s pink flamingos and windmill sunflowers have a place to call home,
And my father is free to harvest his kumquats, and loquats, and jujubes,
Where a sparkling musical waterfall that mists when the wind blows,
Splashes gracefully into a colorful koi pond that,
Flashes,
In the sunlight,
And while we are all working in the garden,
Trying to grow as much as we can,
There is still the inevitable weed that needs to be pulled.
Not the weeds that we have embraced as our own,
No!
These are the overbearing kind of weeds that grow way too big!
Greedy!
Hogging up the sunlight,
With their long sharp thorns and serrated leaves,
With sticky brown sap and bright red fruit,
That looks pretty,
But is far too bitter to eat.
These are the weeds that need to be pulled.
These are the weeds that threaten to overrun the garden,
So with heavy gray suede garden gloves,
We grab these at the base and we pull,
But the roots of these weeds are deep,
And if you leave even the smallest bit of root in the ground,
The weeds will come back bigger,
Threatening the serenity our sacred space,
But as long as we are diligent,
The gardens remain lush and vibrant,
And the views from the house will be stunning and beautiful,
And even though sometimes,
The house itself is just a bit too dark,
And even though sometimes the house is just a bit too quiet,
And even though sometimes you can sometimes hear the echoes of the past threatening to overcome your fragile sensibilities with overwhelming force,
You can always escape to the garden,
Where the sunshine falls and wipes out all of the shadows,
Even the seemingly benevolent tyrant ones,
And you can like your weeds,
And you can eat red fruit,
And you can hold your stomach and grimace through the pain,
Because,
Even if the nourishment is poisonous,
It’s better than starving to death.
And since the fruit that doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,
Since we have somehow managed to eat it and survive,
My siblings and I have made a pact,
That we will one day raise our own generation of gardeners,
And their gardens will be lush and beautiful,
Filled with fruit trees, vegetables and flowers,
Not weeds,
And our mother will no longer remain silent,
But her laughter and singing will,
Fill the gardens of her grandchildren,
And,
Even though we have to eat red fruit to ensure this future,
Even though our hands will be stained brown by sticky sap,
And bloodied by sharp thorns,
We will eat the fruit,
So that they will never know the taste of bitterness in their mouths,
And we will stain our hands,
So that they will never know the chill,
Of a shadow,
Of a seemingly benevolent tyrant king falling over them,
And we will bloody ourselves,
So that they will never have to plant weed seed for lack of anything better to plant,
Because we will have eaten all the bitter red fruit,
And we will grimace through the pain for them,
And we will not leave even a single,
Sticky red weed seed to threaten the serenity of our sacred space,
And we will bask in the sunlight.
The Wheat and the Weeds
The title of that poem is Weed Seed. I wrote it almost fifteen years ago when I was part of a spoken word poetry group in LA, called the Poet’s Jazz House. We met every Thursday night, and I would drive down there after work. It would take almost two hours because of rush hour traffic. There was a sign-up sheet that the MC would call out names from, and we would listen to each other’s poems, and snap our fingers at the end of each one. Sometimes we would go until two o’clock in the morning, and I would still have to make the drive back, after that, but at least the traffic was usually not so bad that late at night.
Writing poems isn’t easy, and so we would hear a lot of the same ones over and over again, because, you know, we just couldn’t produce a new poem every week. But, we never got tired of them. It was like rewatching a favorite TV show or movie. The repetition was comforting; you felt like you belonged because you knew the poems, as well as the people.
Weed Seed was one that I performed often. It’s probably the one that I’m the most proud of, not just the poem itself, but because of what it means. It’s about my siblings and I surviving. It’s about how difficult our lives were, and how we survived in spite of that, how our family survived in spite of that. Not only survived, but thrived. It’s about us making sure that things would be better for the next generation, that they wouldn’t have to struggle the way that we did.
Only, the poem stopped being true when my brother died. This is first time in four years that I have shared that poem, because I felt like the truth of it had been compromised. And, what is poetry for if not an attempt to present the truth.
I spoke with the woman who started Poet’s Jazz House about this; she has the coolest name: Tuesday Conner. She’s this big beautiful black woman with a melodic voice and dreadlocks, and I have no idea how many times she has watched me perform Weed Seed. I didn’t know what to do with this poem whose truth had been ripped out of it. Through our conversation, she helped me to understand that the poem was true when I wrote it, and because of that it will always be true, in a way. That even though my brother was no longer alive, he did survive for a time, and that is important, and worth remembering.
When I read the gospel reading for today, I couldn’t help but think about this poem. The word “weed” is used five times in these twelve verses, and the word “seed” appears twice. This scipture is often interpreted as the weeds and the wheat representing different groups of people, but as I reflected on it with my poem in the back of my mind, I realized that it could be about anything that we want to categorize into two distinct groups, especially when we want to apply moral judgement, where one group is good and the other group is bad. But, Jesus tells us not to be so hasty, that we need to let the weeds and the wheat grow together, because to destroy one could mean the destruction of the other. And in the end, both groups were useful: wheat for food, and weeds for fuel.
Weeds teach us patience and humility. Weeds teach us courage and persistence. We would not be the people that we are today without the weeds in our lives. I will never tell you that God introduces hardship into your lives to test you and teach you, because I do not believe that God is a source of suffering. But, suffering is a part of life, and you better believe that God will use every single thing in our lives, every single thing that happens to us, every moment, good or bad, to help us and teach us, to transform us and the world, to manifest the realm of God in the world.
We will always wish for our lives to be better, wish that things could be easier, rail against God when things are hard, when are angry, or scared, or sad. So, whenever you find yourself in a difficult situation, remember the wheat and the weeds. They must grow together, because that is the nature of life. But, always remember that God is there in it all, growing the wheat to feed us, and burning the weeds, to keep us warm.
Amen.
~ Rev. Charles Wei
