A Proper 11
16 Ord BFC 2017
Matthew
13:24-30
July 23, 2017
Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie
comes from 39 generations of rabbis and leads a pop-up synagogue in New York
City, in keeping with the Wilderness Story in the Jewish tradition. Pop-up and
Wilderness convey faith as a transient journey—with evolving understandings and
truths. The identity statement of this pop-up synagogue is: “everybody-friendly, artist-driven, God
optional.” Rabbi Lau-Lavie arrived at
this identity statement, coming back to his Jewish tradition, after having
moved away from it in his teens. During
those teen years, Rabbi Lau-Lavie believed that enjoying storytelling, theater,
and drag, places where he found meaning as a gay man, were somehow not a part
of what it meant to be a Jew. As he
struggled with Jewish teaching during his early 20s, he began to ask himself
questions about “what if?.” What if
there’s something else here? What if he,
as a gay man who loved to dress in drag was not an abomination? What if it’s not either/or, good/bad,
abomination/sanctity. He went on to say,
What I’m
feeling doesn’t feel unholy, it doesn’t feel messy, and so maybe the Torah is
not right. And I remember feeling, at some point, like there was this thing —
thinking, “OK, one day I’m going to die and I’m going to stand before the
Throne of Glory, and there’s this one option where God’s going to look at me
and say, ‘Why didn’t you follow all the rules that all the rabbis told you? Eh.
You go to hell.’ Or the other option was that God’s going to look at me and
burst out laughing and say, ‘Wow, why didn’t you follow your heart?'” And I
thought that that latter option is much worse.[1]
What
if? What if following our heart,
charting an authentic path, however strange is the desired will of God? What if God doesn’t think in these dualities? What if God’s dream for communities is much
more expansive than our own? That “we”
is more expansive than what the culture tells us? Rabbi Lau-Lavie believes his holy work is
about reinventing the meaning of “we.”
As in you and I. In this
together. We.
Last
week I dared to suggest that we might critique Scripture in its final form,
that the writer of Matthew added a moral to the interpretation of a wisdom
saying of Jesus that was never the intent of the original saying. As Jesus moved from community to community to
teach his wisdom, share his stories, and present his parables, we can imagine
that he refined and shaped them in such a way that sharpened their point and
had meaning for a particular location. Part
of the oral tradition is the continuing development of presentation, wording,
and pattern with each new opportunity. How
do people react? What do people
remember? Is the truth told yesterday
one that needs to be pushed today? Jesus
would have been about this task.
Though the written tradition can
have its own development and direction as people interpret and re-interpret,
the written tradition also locks in words, phrases, and patterns. For example, the author of Matthew very often
includes a phrase used also by the author of Luke and included in the book of
Revelation, “For those who have ears, let them hear.” That little phrase, used by Matthew as a
moralizer, asks the reader to pay attention and can be seen as a little slight
to the reader or listener who just doesn’t get it. Don’t get it? (said with snarky tone) Well, I guess you just don’t have ears to
hear?
Today, we once again have before us
a parable that the author of Matthew interprets to be one of strong judgment
and vindictiveness. That strong judgment
and vindictiveness might not be found in the parable itself, but Matthew has
bracketed this parable with the telling of the sower of the seed parable and
the interpretation of the sower of the seed parable, which, as I stated last
week, comes with a strong statement of judgment against seeds which are strewn
in various kinds of soil. Though the
Gospel of Thomas parable is much more similar to Matthew’s this time around, it
does not come with the sower of the seed and its meaning bracketed around it.
From its context, I believe Matthew
interprets this parable to mean, “We are the good seed and the children of the
Reign of God. They are the weeds and the
children of the Evil One.” Within this
context, the parable is no longer a parable.
Parables are meant to take what we know, invite us into conventional
understandings, and then totally flip or change our perspective, to open up new
ways of thinking or acting in the world.
Telling you and me that we are good and those people who are not like us
are bad is not a unique way of seeing the world. Using an “us” and “them” perspective, as
Matthew does to put this parable in context, does not flip, change, or
transform the perspective. It is very
human nature to suggest that we are the “in crowd”, and you, and your people,
well, you are not only the “out crowd” but probably the people who will be
gathered and burned.
“We are the children of God” and
“they are the children of the devil.” I
believe Matthew wants us to use this teaching as an insider game that becomes a
weapon against others. Matthew suggests,
“Jesus is on our side. We root for
Jesus.”
So this is a scary theology for me,
scary because it sure seems like the theology I also hear coming from many
pulpits and churches today. We are the
good people, and everything else outside the church is evil. We don’t want to be the weeds. All we have to do is round up the bad people,
institute morality, and all will be right in the old barnyard once again. Reading this text, remembering the text we
had for last week, we can certainly see how the tradition of God as judge was
based in holy text.
There
is something that tells us that God as judge is a little off here though. The one who burns the weeds in the end is the
person who owns the land, runs the farm, the plantation owner. That is not somebody that rural peasants
would have identified as good, right, or just—certainly would not see the
plantation owner as Divine.
So
I would suggest that there is a wider context that follows this parable, might
follow a natural pairing Jesus used as he was teaching along the sea, speaking
to these rural folk. In this parable, we
get a clue that this is Matthew’s interpretation because Jesus has the
plantation owner talking about burning the weeds. Jesus’s community and following would not
have been sympathetic to plantation owners.
They would have been seen as the very people who had created suffering
and pain for a great many people, leveraging debt to buy up land and drive the
poor and very poor into suffering.
Further
in Matthew, Jesus continues with his Empire parables to say that the Empire of
Heaven is like a mustard seed added to the garden or leaven added to the
loaf. We have long heard those passages
understood as something small that grows into something large. But hear this, mustard was a weed that would
take over the whole garden. The Kingdom
of God is like a weed? Unlike today, leaven
was considered unclean[2]
and unleavened
was a strong metaphor in the Hebrew Bible for all that was sacred and
holy.[3] Leaven was kept separate in a kosher kitchen
for it could change the dynamics of bread and make all that was sacred profane.[4] The Kingdom of God is unclean?
Now
remember to whom Jesus is offering these metaphors that turn the world upside
down, that open up another world view, these parables. These people are the poor and destitute,
thought of as the lazy, good-for-nothing, corrupt masses. They are the leeches who drain Rome of its
riches. These are people who have heard
time after time that they are the weeds and they are unclean. And now these people hear that the very home
of God, the Empire of Heaven, is among the weeds and the unclean. One of the most widely known scholars on the
parables, Bernard Brandon Scott, suggests that the association Jesus is making
is so strong that Jesus is effectively saying that God cavorts among weeds and
the unclean or the very self of God is unclean and weed-like.[5] God is a weed? God is unclean?
Can
we even imagine what good news this was to people who had heard the world, call
them unclean and weeds time after time? Can
we hear this good news for our world?
Jesus
knew how he and his community were perceived by others. He offered real life lessons of the width and
breadth of God’s arms and how far they extended that might scare off any
well-meaning church. For Jesus suggested
that once weeds are welcome in the garden, the very nature of harvesting is
changed.
Merriam-Webster
defines a weed as “a plant that is not valued where it is growing”[6]
and Dictionary.com defines a weed as “a valueless plant growing wild.”[7] As I related in the worship service that
began Billings Sanctuary Rising, a weed is a weed because we call it such. Is a dandelion a weed or a burst of sunshine
which can be used for medicinal and culinary purposes?
In
21st Century North America, these parables can really get under our
skin. So much of our culture preaches
success, working to identify ourselves as good seed from good stock.
Jesus
lived in a time when the political, religious, and economic morality codes were
being clearly defined by those in power to stay in power. If someone came along to blur those codes, to
call the legitimacy of claims as to what brought life and who was an insider
into question, that person would be considered mighty dangerous by the
authorities. And what if Jesus came from
a community and created a community which blurred those lines, which called
people’s claims to being the good seed into question.
What
if, what if Jesus comes at night to plant weed seed? Maybe he knows that he and the people gathered
round him are the enemy? Better yet,
what if God is our secret planter of weed seed?
For
that reason, I think this parable says, at the very least, that those who have
made it their job, their vocation in the world, to determine who is good seed
and weed to exclude and diminish, these people have not chosen a holy
vocation. To say, “I know who is seed
and who is weed,” is to say, in effect: “I know how God sees you. More than that, I know who is favored by God
and who is not.” The parable says that
we cannot claim to know the heart and mind of God when we declare others a
wicked part of the garden.
The
Jesus community embraced the least and the last, the poor and outcast, and
recognized that the world changed when they did so. The garden could not grow as before because a
small mustard seed grew as a weed to become the biggest plant in the
garden. A woman has secretly placed
leaven in the bread and changed and transformed its very nature. The Jesus community took people who were
defined as an abomination, unholy, shameful, impure, unclean, and morally
corrupt and called them the Children of God.
Distinctions were blurred such that the old categories did not
work.
So
the good news I have for you all today is that you do not have to believe what
the world calls you. If you are called
weed, mustard seed, or leaven, you can find a place in the Empire of
Heaven. Remember that the character of
weeds is not so much that they are dominant as pervasive and persistent. Remember that our God and our God’s activity
are defined by such unholy, unclean, and profane metaphors.
Rabbi
Lau-Lavie came back to find storytelling and theater deep within the Jewish
tradition and his drag character, Hadassah Gross, widow of a Jewish rabbi, opened
up a point of humor for his rabbi father to come to terms with his son coming
out. When asked what he thought of
Hadassah Gross, Amichai’s father replied, “She has nice legs.” I think some of what the parable is teaching,
as Rabbi Lau-Lavie is that people and concepts evolve, that we must be patient,
that we aren’t there, and we should not be out pretending like we know who is
truly a weed and who is just not evolved.
Or, maybe it is we who need to evolve.
He counsels:
So we need to
read some of those sacred words as metaphor, as bygone models, as invitations
for creativity, and for sort of the second meaning and the second naïveté here
that still retrieves this text as useful and these narratives as holy, not as
literal. I think that is, of course, the
conversation between so many of us of different religions who are struggling
with our brothers and sisters who choose to read things literally and speak for
a Biblical truth that is unalterable, where we — some of us think that there is
room here for creativity, for sacred metaphor and change. And we’re not there
yet. We’re not there yet for those days of dignity and equality and radical
justice . . .[8]
Parables
open us up to a new way of thinking and being in the world. In God’s garden, those emerging as seed and
weed from the earth do so alongside each other.
And whose to say which is which?
Whose to say? What if those
considered to be an abomination are just evolving? Or maybe we need to evolve? So that we can
move to a more profound “we.” What if
God’s idea of community is that much more expansive? Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Krista Tippett, “First Aid
for Spiritual Seekers: Conversation with
Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie,” OnBeing,
July 13, 2017, https://onbeing.org/programs/amichai-lau-lavie-first-aid-for-spiritual-seekers/. Rabbi Lau-Lavie tells the great Talmudic parable
as a way of recognizing that we are all in this together: “[A] ship that is sailing, and there are many cabins. And
one of the people in the cabins on the lower floor decides to dig a hole in the
floor of his cabin, and does so, and sure enough, the ship begins to sink. And
the other passengers suddenly discover what’s going on and see this guy with a
hole in the floor. And they say, ‘What are you doing?’ And he says, ‘Well, it’s
my cabin. I paid for it.’ And down goes the ship.” We’re all on the ship together.
[2]“[T]he process of
leavening frequently stood as a metaphor
for moral corruption.” Bernard Brandon
Scott, Re-Imagine the World: An
Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Santa Rosa , CA
[4] Pliny the Elder (23 CE to 29
CE), a chronicler of history and nature was the author of thirty-seven books of
Natural History. He wrote, “It [mustard] grows entirely wild,
thought it is improved by being transplanted:
but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible
to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.” (Natural History, 29:54.170 [LOEB])
quoted from Bernard Brandon Scott, Re-Imagine
the World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Santa Rosa , CA
[5] Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), p. 308. Since Brandon
[8] Tippett,
OnBeing.
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