When the Weeds Win

Propers: The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 11), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

My lawn is mostly dandelions at this point, though the thistles have established some strong forward bases along the perimeter. In the exurbs, where I grew up, this would’ve been anathema to many of my neighbors. Lawns were intended to be perfectly uniform and green. Dandelions would be hunted down with extreme prejudice.

Our neighborhood had an unspoken but universally agreed-upon war against the wild. A weed in one man’s lawn would soon spread next door, then down the street. And if we let in the weeds, then what next? Raccoons? Bears? Rattlesnakes? Zero tolerance had to be the policy. The suburban lawn was the last bastion betwixt civilization and barbarism. Nowadays, looking back, I find it hard to imagine a greater exercise in futility.

For us, the weeds have won. And it’s surprisingly lovely. In May the dandelions blossom butter-yellow beneath the late spring sun. Then they close up again to puff out white, in what our daughters delight to call “wish flowers.” They dance upon the breeze, a sort of midsummer snow, and spread their progeny throughout our 5.2 acres, that we might have an even greater crop of yellow next year. After that come the whites of clover, the blues and golds of groundcovers, and even the bold thorny purples of a towering thistle or two.

It’s beautiful, really. The colors undulate through the seasons. And our neighbors here, far from waging a futile war against wildflowers, delight in reminding us that dandelion leaves make for a delicious salad, with bacon dressing, and that local wines may be vinted from the flaxen blossoms. It is to this invasive natural beauty that Jesus alludes in His parable this morning. The Kingdom of God, He proclaims, is like unto thistles and dandelions in a field.

In our Scripture readings this morning, the prophet Ezekiel speaks of the great cedars of Lebanon, a country neighboring Israel, known for its tall and towering trees. Ezekiel is writing some six centuries before Christ, at a time when his country is in peril. The sprawling empire of Babylon has come calling, and already carried off many of the most prominent members of the community. Ezekiel is one of them. He is amongst the first of the Israelites to be taken forcibly into Exile.

And his visions reveal that he will be far from the last. He likens the nation of Israel to a cedar of Lebanon, tall, stately and strong. Think of the massive Norway spruce that our Scandinavian cousins donate to Rockefeller Plaza each Christmas. But this tree is destined to fall. The Babylonians shall make sure of that. Yet God proclaims that even when all shall seem lost, even when land and temple and hope have been ripped away, God Himself will take a sprig from the top of that lofty cedar and plant it on a mountain, that it might grow and flourish and provide shelter for all who are in need.

This is a prophecy of new life, of death and resurrection. Israel shall fall. The Kingdom of Judah shall fall. Yet the work of God goes on. The people of God survive. And what seems the end, what seems the final loss, is only a new beginning, a new planting, a new season for us to arise even greater than before. Ezekiel prophesies this before the cataclysm, before the fall, so that God’s people may know that this tragedy is not their end, but a glorious new birth unlike anything they have heretofore imagined.

Planting and harvest. Death and resurrection. These themes are brought to fruition in Christ, but they’re present throughout the Bible, in Testaments both New and Old. You think you’re dying. You think it’s over. But God’s plans for you have only just begun.

Half a millennium after Ezekiel, Jesus picks up on this theme, in His parable of the mustard seed. But here he upends our expectations. There is humor in this parable, satire even. No longer is the Kingdom a sprig of cedar destined to regrow. Now the Kingdom is something smaller, something wilder, something infinitely more common yet well-nigh impossible to kill. The Kingdom is mustard. The Kingdom is a weed.

Mustard seeds are, yes, ridiculously small, and they get everywhere. It was actually against Jewish law in first century Judea to plant mustard in your garden—for the same reason that no neighbor in Pennsylvania wanted to see a dandelion in anyone’s lawn. Once it’s in there, it’s not coming out. Mustard is wild. Mustard is infectious. It doesn’t stay where you want it to stay nor go where you want it to go. It spreads; it creeps; it takes over the whole garden.

It’s small and lowly and humble, but if you let it go it can heap up into quite a plant. Think of lilac bushes that have been allowed to run wild. They can get pretty unruly. But, oh, that heavenly scent is worth it as you’re walking down the street. Mustard too had medicinal properties. Like dandelions, it was good for more than a few things. So here Jesus likens the Kingdom of God to something humble, common, helpful, lowly, unruly, unstoppable, and ultimately quite large when attempts to hack it back have been abandoned.

The little. The lowly. The unwanted. The unbeatable. And so the meek, it seems, shall inherit the earth after all.

We live in an age of bad news for the Church. Traditional denominations, long the mainstays and moderators of society, wane dramatically. Politics, professions, and purchases have taken the place of religion in society. Our culture offers us merely sexuality and shopping as the only viable routes to transcendence. Gone are concerns of goodness, truth, and beauty. In the immortal words of Nirvana, “Life is stupid and contagious. Here we are now; entertain us.”

And so we might seek to despair of our faith, of our community, of the hope we have in Christ. But this is not the end. It never really is. Every seedtime leads to harvest, every death to resurrection. We are in no more dire straits than Ezekiel facing Babylon, nor Christ facing Rome. Our society is in upheaval, yes. Institutions, narratives, values which have brought us to the heights of prosperity seem to crumble all about us. But that’s the Cross. That’s where God meets us—in brokenness, woundedness, dying and death. That’s where He raises us. That’s where He makes us new in Him.

We are the weeds of the world, dear Christians. Unwanted, overlooked, hacked back and attacked. Sinful, yes. Prideful, yes. Much of what befalls us is our own just desserts. But Jesus came for sinners. Jesus came to raise the dead. We shall spread. We shall grow. We shall sprout up in the unlikeliest of places. We shall defy all expectations, most especially our own. And in the end we shall spread the blessings that Christ has given to us now to all the world, to all the peoples, most of all to those who hate us.

And we will do this in small ways, humble ways: feeding the poor, clothing the naked, baptizing our children, reading the Scriptures, gathering together to hear God’s Word preached and partaking in the Sacraments of the Font and of the Altar. No seed is too small to put forth a wild and holy plant.

Nations rise and nations fall, but Christ is still Risen and God still strong to save. And the Kingdom shall come, as we always knew it would, because the Kingdom is the Risen Christ on earth. And you absolutely cannot keep Him down; Lord knows we’ve tried. He rises like the mustard. He rises like the thistle. He rises like the dandelion. And every time we think He’s dead, He rises in greater beauty with more children than before.

Behold the Kingdom of God! King of All the Thistles. King of All the Earth.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.