By now I think many of you know that my father was an Episcopal priest. What some of you may not know is that I come, courtesy of my mother’s side of the family, from a long line of Methodist ministers. While several of those men served as missionaries in China, the most famous member of the group, my Great Uncle Edward, stayed home in Pennsylvania where he acquired a reputation as a real fire and brimstone preacher while serving as the pastor of a congregation in East Stroudsburg, not far from my family’s hometown of Prospect Park. Evidently at some point in 1896 he became so wound up while delivering a sermon on the evils of alcohol that he called down the wrath of God on the local tavern. The very next day the tavern was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. American to the core, the owner of the tavern sued Uncle Edward. After lengthy litigation Uncle Edward was found not guilty, the lighting strike and ensuing fire being ruled an act of God. And yes, this ruling can be found in court records, so we know the story is more than simply colorful family folklore.
Now I never knew this person and I don’t know that my mother did either, but I have the sense that had Uncle Edward been the householder in today’s parable, he would not have had the forbearance to leave the weeds there in the midst of his wheat until harvest time. Oh no, he would not have wanted anything to detract from the pristine nature of his crop, so if some of his wheat proved to be collateral damage in the process of removing weeds then so be it. There would have been no weeds in Uncle Edward’s wheat field! However, whether we’re dealing with other people or the facets of our own personalities, life is rarely so clear cut as simply sorting weeds from wheat, no matter how much some people would like to believe it is.
I believe we’ve all been created with an infinite capacity for goodness. I further believe that most of us really do try to live into that potential, but in spite of our best intentions we make choices from time to time that move us away from being the person God is calling us to be. In his book The Kingdom Within John Sanford describes Satan, the evil one in today’s Gospel, as “the archetype of choice.” “An archetype,” he goes on to explain, “is an inbuilt pattern in the human psyche. Archetypes are common to all of us. To speak of an archetype of choice is to say every human being is confronted by the necessity of moral choice. None of us escapes this spiritual test.” While I don’t necessarily experience life as a never-ending test, there are certainly times when it feels like it is. Without doubt life is an ongoing process of making choices, and far from being consistent in the choices we make, even the most faithful of us sometimes say yes to God, sometimes no. What that comes down to, in the language of today’s parable, is that at any given moment we’re neither a purebred stalk of wheat nor a perfectly formed but unwelcome weed, but rather a spiritual hybrid of the two. Parts of our being seem able to connect really well with God while other facets seem to be in open rebellion against both God and other parts of our inner selves.
Thankfully, unlike the plants in the parable, we are not genetically nor spiritually predisposed to remain a stalk of wheat or an intrusive weed, nor even a static hybrid of the two, throughout our earthly existence. Rather, we’re constantly evolving spiritual beings, sometimes more weed than wheat, sometimes more saint than sinner, but almost never completely one or the other. This parable has much to say to us then, as we struggle to deal with those facets of our being that take hold of us from time to time, drawing us away from God and oftentimes the people who mean the most to us. Rather than trying to eliminate or weed out those parts of ourselves that we deem less worthy, sinful in some people’s terminology, I believe we’re called to struggle with them, in order to ultimately transform them.
The great irony of my family tree, you see, is that my mother, descendent of that long line of teetotaling Methodist ministers, married into a family of alcoholics. My father’s maternal grandfather was an alcoholic, so my grandmother would not have a drop of alcohol in the house. All three of her sons grew up to be alcoholics. But the thing is, though late in life, my dad did go through treatment and stopped drinking. My mother said the time between when he left the treatment center and when he was diagnosed with cancer was the best part of the second half of her marriage. My sister Kendra was the one who inherited the alcoholism gene in our generation. She celebrated twenty-nine years of sobriety earlier this month. People can change, we can change, if we’re open to the possibility and willing to work with each other in the life long process of becoming our best selves.
The challenge to changing, of course, is that it usually doesn’t happen overnight and doesn’t necessarily last forever. As anyone knows who has ever struggled to overcome any sort of addiction, be it to alcohol, food, tobacco, or social media, it isn’t a matter of just deciding to stop. That decision has to be made over and over again. That’s the whole basis of the twelve step mantra of one day at a time. Just for today I won’t take a drink. Just for an hour I won’t look at my phone. By their very nature those decisions have to be made again and again, and for many people, it takes the support of others to make those decisions in the first place, and then to stick with them. My father didn’t just decide one day to stop drinking. No, my brother and I, fearing for the well-being of our mother, strategized for months, he in Vermont and I in Oregon, about how we could best carry out an intervention when we would both be in New York for Christmas vacation. While the timing wasn’t as we had planned; circumstances forced us to make the decision to act on the morning of Christmas Eve day, the plan did work, so that on the day after Christmas my brother drove my dad to the treatment center where a place had been reserved for him. Five months later I called home to wish my mother a Happy Mothers’ Day, and at the end of our conversation she told me my dad had something to say to me. He came on and with little preamble stated, “I need you to know that I knew for a long time that I needed help. I’d sit on the side of the bed every morning and pray to God to help me stop drinking, but then lunch time would come, one of the guys would stick his head in my office and ask ‘Ken, are you coming?’ and it would start all over again. When I came downstairs on Christmas morning and looked at your brother and he looked at me, I knew my prayers had been answered through my children.”
We are God’s hands and heart in this world. I believe one of the reasons humans are meant to live in community is so that we can be there for each other when difficult decisions have to be made, when really challenging, and often frightening, changes are called for. How we help each other will vary from person to person. We each have our own set of gifts after all. The main thing to remember is that while physical growth ends somewhere in our teens or early twenties, spiritual growth is a never ending process. For that reason it’s a great gift that God is the householder of the field in which we grow, and that God is infinitely patient. Rather than ripping us up roots and all, no matter how weedy our lives may become, God gives us our entire lifetime to turn out right. When I think about the potential for change that abides in each of us, I often think of Oskar Schindler. A German entrepreneur who socialized with the Nazi elite, Schlinder saw in the Jewish population of the Warsaw ghetto a gold mine of slave labor for his factories. What Schindler didn’t count on was that over time he would become increasingly attached to the Jew he had made foreman of this operation, and through him acquire an empathy he never sought to develop with the workers themselves. Consequently, as the collapse of the Third Reich became immanent and the Germans worked at an ever faster rate to send as many Jews as possible to the gas chambers, Schindler arranged to buy the freedom of all the people on his list of workers. This man who had set out to use people to make money, spent all the money he had to save people. Today the descendants of the people Schindler saved number in the thousands and the body of Oskar Schindler is buried in Israel, where he is honored as a righteous man.
We Episcopalians don’t talk about evil all that much, but there is evil in the world. It’s easy in retrospect for us to recognize the evil of The Final Solution, though initially Schindler, at heart a righteous man, saw in what the Nazis were doing an easy way to make money. Just as Schindler did in his time, we have a hard time identifying evil in the world in which we live, but it is here. Whether it’s an obsession with acquiring material wealth no matter the cost to other people or the environment, the lust for power for power’s sake, or running roughshod over others out of the fear of losing power we really don’t even have, evil is real. When we were baptized we promised, or someone promised on our behalf, to renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God, to renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, and to renounce all sinful desires that draw us from the love of God. Those need to be more than empty promises. They need to define our way of life. Amen.
