An Absence of Bouncers--July 25, 2023

An Absence of Bouncers--July 25, 2023

[The farmer in Jesus' parable said:] "Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn." [Matthew 13:30]

I know this may be difficult to hear, but Jesus doesn't need us to be enforcers for God.  Neither, it turns out, does God need bouncers, gatekeepers, or a brute squad to kick out the riff-raff.  

If God is presently willing to bear with the world being a mix of goodness and rottenness, of wheat and weeds as it were, side by side, then we are going to have to learn to be OK with God's choice.  And we are going to have to let go of our need to root out the ones we think of as "bad people" in the supposed name of holiness and purity (which is often the way we dress up bigotry in pious clothing).  Because God simply doesn't need us to be the hired muscle to hunt down "undesirables" and run them out of town--God isn't interested in running them out of town right now anyway. And at whatever point it's time for crooks and criminals to go, God doesn't need our help.  Our services are not required.

I think this is actually one of the harder things for us to accept about Jesus' understanding of the Reign of God: he is a whole lot less fussy about maintaining perfect purity and holiness around him than we think a respectable Messiah should be.  That, of course, was also what kept getting Jesus in trouble with the Respectable Religious Leaders in the storytelling of the gospels, too: Jesus was unbothered by sharing a table with "those sinners and tax collectors," striking up a conversation with an outsider, healing someone at the request of a soldier in the enemy army, and being counted among the unclean and outcast. But if we take Jesus' parable seriously, we'll realize Jesus believes that's actually God's policy in dealing with the world, too!  God is willing to let the world continue for the present time in this tension between good and rottenness, and God is not insistent on pulling out the weeds from the wheat in this life.  As we saw yesterday, Jesus says that God is willing to bear with tares in the field, even if that makes God look foolish or weak in the eyes of the neighbors, for the sake of preserving what is precious and saving what is beloved.

All of that means that we don't get to deputize ourselves to get rid of the people we have identified as "sinners," or "troublemakers," or "weeds."  We don't need to do it for the sake of God's purity or some divine allergy to sin, and we don't need to it for the sake of God's honor and reputation, either.  God is already willing to bear with whatever ridicule comes God's way for choosing to save what God loves at the expense of zapping the weeds.  

This is hard for us, especially us Respectable Religious folks, because we can be very easily persuaded to think we have to defend God's reputation for God, or root out the people we've pre-identified as "weeds" (or "sinners" or "bad people" or "ungodly" or whatever way we've worded it). We can convince ourselves that God's honor requires us to get rid of all of those undesirables.  And we tell ourselves, too, that we're doing it in the name of holiness, or for the sake of "looking out for our own," or "cleaning up our town."  So it comes as a shock to hear Jesus tell us a loud and clear "No."  No, we are not being called by God to run the riff-raff outside the city limits.  No, we are not being tasked with "taking back our country for God" and getting rid of anybody who doesn't fit.  No, we are not divinely authorized to threaten or intimidate people who don't share our values.  The humbling truth of Jesus' story is that God doesn't need our help to identify anybody as "unworthy" or "unacceptable."  Chances are, after all, somebody might take a look at my life (or yours) and decide we're looking rather weedy and deserve to be uprooted.  Jesus doesn't give them permission to get rid of us, either.

Too many times, people commit terrible acts of violence convinced that they are weeding out the unrighteous--and that they get to be the judges.  The shooter in the synagogue in Pittsburgh, along with the one in El Paso, along the gunman at Mother Emanuel, along with countless others in our history, all convinced themselves that they were looking out for "their own" by getting rid of the people they saw as threats.  That's what happens when we decide that God needs our assistance to eradicate evildoers on our terms.  And it's exactly what Jesus is calling us away from.  Jesus' story prevents us from ever saying we get to be the ones to decide someone is unworthy or needs to be gotten rid of.  Jesus' understanding about how God reigns in the world says that we don't get to issue those verdicts, and we don't get to decide someone else is a weed.  That authority is not ours, and it never has been.

Today, taking Jesus' story seriously is going to mean surrendering control (or realizing we never had it) over who we deem acceptable.  God has not given us the right to pull weeds from the field, and God doesn't really care what that choice does to God's reputation as "tough on sin" or "strong against enemies."  So if God is willing to bear with all of that now, well, our calling is to bear with those realities, too.

Maybe, instead of worrying about getting rid of the people we don't think are worthy, we might spend our energy first realizing that God has loved us when we were definitely not worthy ourselves, and then just doing good to everybody... whoever they are?

Lord Jesus, stop the impulse in us to get rid of the people we don't think are worthy, and instead let us see our own welcome as your gift of grace.