So, when I was younger, I worked at a local grocery store off and on. I was a stock boy, mainly behind the scenes, running out to fill up this and that. One day, the produce section was short-handed, so I was filling in, helping put things out. It was high summer so the collard greens were plentiful and going like hotcakes. People snatching and grabbing. I could hardly keep up.
Then it happened. I opened up a case and stuck my hand down in the greens to pull a bunch of them out...and I cut my finger on something. I rooted around and found the culprit. A piece of green glass, like a Sprite bottle (that was back when we used glass for sodas, or Cokes, as we call all carbonated beverages down south).
I had a decision to make. I could toss the piece of glass, presuming it was an aberration, which it probably was. Or I could report it.
I was low enough on the career ladder that what happened next was not really mine to determine. Even so, it was the kind of moral decision which has stayed with me all these decades later.
So it was that I carried that piece of glass to the back room and showed it to the local back-country hellfire and brimstone minister, who also made extra money by working as the produce shift manager.
I can still see him looking over his glasses at me. What was he thinking? Surprise? Disappointment? Judgment? He turned and went in search of the store manager.
The manager came over, looked worried, then made the call. We pulled all the greens off the shelf. We took them into the back and threw them in the dumpster. Along with all the remaining cases of collards. Collards that were almost certainly perfectly fine. Collards that had done nothing but live into their collard-ness as best they could.
Was all this necessary? Probably.
Wasteful? Absolutely.
Were customers angry because they couldn't get the collards the weekly circular had promised? I was tasked to stand there and take it while they groused and complained, and I spent the better part of the rest of my shift writing rain checks so they would walk away happy.
And I have never forgotten it.
And for some reason it came to mind when I read this parable of Jesus, for in this vivid memory I am reminded that the perhaps policies of a corporation and the whims of customers are not the ways of God.
Now there is a lot I don't like about this parable.
For one, I cannot think of many people who are truly, fully, unquestionably ‘evil.’ Most of us, myself included, are a mix of good and bad, upstanding, stalwart, loving Christians and then so often not so much, kinda weedy.
So when I look at my reflection in the mirror and know that I am far, far from perfect, how could I, if given the task, come to the conclusion that another person's life falls so short – is so weedy – that it needs to be rooted up and ‘thrown into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth?’ This I do not get. I cannot imagine I ever will.
And yet here we are, in this parable, thinking about just these things. And it has struck me that lately, our nation has sure gotten a bit persnickety about how we manage our American garden. We are so quick to call everything weedy that isn't of our particular brand of seed.
We can't discuss things rationally anymore. We just shout “WEEDS!” and toss others into the fire. And shouting “Weeds!” takes so many forms. Rigged! Fascist! Communist! Illegal! Trans! Muslim! Poor! Mine! Mine! Mine!
We no longer explore differences of opinion in hopes that we might come up with a crop of solutions. Instead we run to the extremes of thought...attacking each other with the verbal Round-Up of memes and tropes, of slander and hatred and bigotry.
We no longer enter the public square filled with a smile and good will. Instead we go in fully packing, shouting poison, and killing whatever sprouts of love were waiting to spring up.
We winnow by plowing everything under regardless of its weediness, because our leaders have encouraged so many weeds that we don't have the time – or the bandwidth – to discern what really is a weed and what is really worth saving. Burn it all!
But I'm pretty sure this isn't God's hope for us. I, for one, prefer to think that, with God, this winnowing process is something that happens over a lifetime, not just with one harvest of disagreement or sin. I like to imagine God patiently sorting out the good and the bad in each of us, all of us, especially me, submitting ourselves to this often painful process in our own hearts.
Not deciding that I am a weed and you are not. But deciding that we are each gardens, a full garden in God’s Kingdom. And God spends my lifetime, picking out the weed in me and tossing it aside while cultivating the good seed in my soul.
Y'all, there is great comfort for me in this. God is not as hasty in God’s judgment as we are. And God waits until the harvest to sort it out. And God will not burn the whole garden of my life because of a few weeds. (Or a small piece of glass.)
Now I know I'm living in a land of farmers. And I know that anyone who has ever worked the earth — whether in your own little garden down on your knees, or from the high seat of a tractor or combine — everyone who has ever worked with the ground beneath us to provide the food we so enjoy, knows what it is to battle weeds.
But I've always sort of been on the side of the weeds in this parable. Maybe because I'm more weedy than most. So I wonder how our lives, our roots, are all caught up together – both the wheat and the weeds – in a way that asks us to live side by side until some later time?
How are we to stand together, learning from the love of those who love God by loving us, letting that love gently pull a weed up here and there in our hearts, and then turn to other weeds in love?
Nowadays we are swerving from crazy times to crazy times, and it seems like people are losing their minds. And I am so put out and want to stand and weed out the evil that seems to be taking us over.
But there is promise in this parable, and it is this: In the garden of our lives, there will be weeds, but with the Spirit of God doing the gardening, the good seed will overcome everything, and grow.