Wheat Or Weeds? A Homily for the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, and St Luke's, Creemore, on Sunday, 19 July, 2026, the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost.  Texts for this day:  Genesis 28:10-19A; Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. (Mt 13.26).

 

Do you talk to your plants?  What do you say to them?

I talk a bit to my plants because I feel affection for them.   I feel proud of the sunflowers that I started from seeds, and which are now as tall as I am, and I say “way to go!”.   I feel distressed when I see some wilted because I’ve neglected to water them and I say things like “have a drink, guys, you’ll feel better.  Sorry I forgot you”.  I see the black eyed susans about to open and I say “that’s it, almost time to shine”.

Maybe if I had planted a whole field, like the man in the parable from today’s gospel, I wouldn’t have time for such sentiment.    I’ve known farmers who were hard-eyed business people, just as capable of reading a spreadsheet as they could read the weather.    I’m just a guy with a little garden., and I grow plants not because I want to make money from a harvest, but simply because I love them.   And really, the parable isn’t about plants, it’s about us, and how the good and bad seed grows in all of us.  Because in the parable, the owner of the field represents God, and the plants represent us, and the hope of the gospel is in what God will do about the gardens of our own souls.

“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field”.  Whenever we hear Jesus talking about “the kingdom of heaven”, we know that he is trying to say something about how his father’s will and desire for us work.  Jesus tells his disciples that the parables are keys to understanding “the secrets of the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 14.10), but the parables aren’t that hard to understand. 

 Last Sunday we heard a parable where Jesus talked about a man scattering seed lavishly and he said that the seed was “the word of the kingdom”.   The parable points to the generosity of God.  The seed is distributed far and wide, in the same way that Jesus here speaks to such “great crowds” that he has to use a boat as a pulpit.  So the message wants to be broadcast as widely as the sower spreads the seeds.

If the seed is “the word of the kingdom”, then the plant that grows from the seed would seem to represent the values of the kingdom of God: God’s love, God’s justice, and mercy, put into action by those who love God, like those in the Beatitudes who “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Mt 5.6) and those who “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Mt 6.33).y to 

In last week’s gospel, the parable of the sower and the seed, the emphasis seemed to be on the quality of the soil.   Those who were indifferent to the kindgom of God, or who had short term enthusiasm, were rocky and poor soil, but those who truly hear and understand are good soil.   That explanation might make some of us feel pretty smug.   After all, we’re here in church, we give via PAR, we try to be good people, so we must be pretty good soil.   But .. if that’s so, where did the weeds come from?

“[W]hile everbody was alseep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away” (Mt 13.25).  So these weeds aren’t dandelions or all the other unwelcome plants that stubbornly return to our gardens year after year.   This weeds are sabotage.  They are hostile to the plants and they are hostile to the values of the kingdom of heaven.    In other words, we are back to Paul’s discussion of the pervasiveness of sin that we’ve been hearing recently in our second readings from Romans.

When I preached on Romans recently, I said that Paul’s description of sin is like a garden that becomes infested with weeds.   Some say weeds are just plants that are in the wrong place, but weeds can also infest and starve those plants that we’ve nurtured, watered, and talked to.  I once saw an experienced gardener almost reduced to tears when she realized that her newly designed beds were being choked with bindweed, a particularly aggressive weed.   

It’s hard to pull up bindweed without damaging the plants we want to keep.  In today’s parable, some commentators identify the weeds as darnell, sometimes called false weed”.   The farmer in the parable knows that the weeds can’t be removed without damaging the wheat.  He is patient.  There will be a time, he says, when the wheat can be safely gathered and the weeds can then be burned.  But now isn’t the time.  For the time being, wheat and weed must remain intermixed until God’s good time, even though the instinct of the servants is to g out and pull up the weeds, thus wrecking the crop.

I said earlier that in this parable, we are the plants, but which plants are we?   Are we wheat?  Are we weeds?  Or are we both?  This week I read a lovely meditaton on this gospel reading by the Rev. Ben Dehart, and I’ll quote a bit of it.

The field is the world, Jesus says. All of it. But the world is not only out there. It runs through the church. The pew. Down the middle of you. The line between the wheat and the weed is not the line between you and everyone else. You have found the weed in yourself before. The thing you have prayed over and pulled at, and it comes up green again every spring. Start pulling and you take up half of yourself with it.

The temptation to go pull weeds anyway is very strong.  We live in a hyper-polarized age where our politics and our discourse seems to be about labeling the other party as evil and refusing to see our own flaws.   As Jesus said, take the plank from your own eye before you go after the speck in someone else’s eye.

To return to the imagery of our parable can’t weed ourselves if we are part wheat and part weed.   As Paul says in Romans, if we know what we should and shouldn’t do, and repeatedly do the opposite, then we are enslaved to sin and the only one who can rescue us is Jesus (Rom 7:15-21).

In today’s lesson from Romans, Paul writes that the world itself, all of creation, is suffering and longing for it’s renewal:  “creation itself will be set free” (Rom 8:18-23).   One of the disciplines and virtues of the Christian faith is patience, to know the difference between what we can change and what God, in God’s good time will transform into something.    A planet burning and overheated groans for its rescue.  The hungey, homless, and ignored groan for a greedy society to truly see them.   And we, in our own confused, hurting, and secret lives, long to be healed and restored. 

We are wheat, and we are weeds.  And we are loved by our creator and gardener, loved far more than we can possibly love the plants in our own care.    That mighty and loving gardener will not give up on us and he will give us the time and the grace to grow into the likeness of Christ. to transform from weed into golden wheat.   And so, as Ben Dehart writes beautifully, God the gardener will let the wheat and the weed in us grow, “Not because he can’t tell them apart [but] because he will not give up on the weed”.