“Throwing Out the Baby”

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, 47-50

Have you ever wanted to deck someone in the middle of a funeral? I have. Sitting on the platform of the Church of God in Christiansburg, Virginia in 1992, listening to a young, wet-behind-the-ears, and arrogant pastor question my uncle’s salvation, I wanted to let him have it. As I looked out at my mother and her sisters I could tell that some of them had that “I’m-going-to-smack-him” look on their faces. Just for the record, my uncle had accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

Well, I didn’t deck the self-righteous little ding-dong; I didn’t even say anything. I even managed to keep a rather bland and neutral look on my face. But when it was all over I once again gave thanks that I was a Presbyterian. If we who are of the Reformed segment of Christ’s Church are true to our heritage, we do not ever question anyone’s salvation, and especially not out loud.

Some lines in “A Declaration of Faith” express so very well what many Presbyterians believe about this topic: “We live in tension between God’s warnings and promises. Knowing the righteous judgment of God in Christ, we urge all people to be reconciled to God, not exempting ourselves from the warnings. Constrained by God’s love in Christ, we have good hope for all people, not exempting the most unlikely from the promises. Judgment belongs to God and not us. We are sure that God’s future for every person will be both merciful and just.”

Judgment belongs to God and not us. Jesus had some things to say about that in today’s texts about separating the wheat from the weeds and the good fish from the bad. Said Jesus, “… in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” As any good Palestinian farmer knew, attempts to purify the crop would severely damage it. The weed in question so closely resembled the wheat in its early stages that good wheat would be pulled up by mistake. Furthermore, the roots of both plants were so intertwined that the weeds couldn’t be ripped out of the ground without destroying the wheat.

In terms of the good versus bad fish, there could be no separation until the fishing was done. Galilean fishermen like Peter, Andrew, James, and John did not lift up the net every five minutes to clean out the fish that didn’t belong. Doing so would have wasted time and energy needed for the fishing itself.

One of the things we must never forget is that we run the risk of destroying or severely damaging the church when we try too hard to purify it. Our mission of fishing for people is too important to be interrupted by the constant cleaning of the nets. We must not forget to put first things first. Nor must we be guilty of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Various commentators have addressed these texts. Wrote Clair Crissey: “Why did Jesus tell [the parable of the weeds]? It is possible that some people (such as the Pharisees) had been asking why sinners had not already been separated from the righteous, if God’s kingdom had really come in the person of Jesus.”

Wrote Sherman Johnson: “The kingdom draws into itself people of very different motives, attitudes, cultures, and moral attainments, and those who spread its net dare not draw too many distinctions. Jesus, unlike the Pharisees of his time, had no interest in forming a pure church composed only of the perfect. God, in his good time, will judge; it is the prerogative of Jesus and his followers to offer salvation and forgiveness.”

Wrote Loida Martell-Otero: “To be under the sovereignty of God is to be patient – wait until the harvest – and struggle in love for the well-being of the [Christian] community. Under the Reign [the Kingdom] of God, the traditional dichotomies of ‘insiders and outsiders,’ of ‘pure and impure,’ and of ‘acceptable and unacceptable’ are swept away. This understanding of the [Kingdom] is what allowed the [Jewish congregation to whom Matthew addressed his Gospel] to open its doors to its Gentile sisters and brothers as they faced their own questions about who they were. It is this understanding of the [Kingdom] that challenges the Christian community today to welcome the stranger as brother or sister, to resist easy demagoguery that demonizes and dehumanizes the ‘other’.” Furthermore she wrote, “…[ the job of the servants is not] to ‘weed out’ bad seeds [or throw out bad fish]. This is what the Sovereign [God] will do in the end-time.”

What have we learned so far? ONE: God our Father, and he alone, decides who’s in and who’s out of the Kingdom. He is in charge; we are not. TWO: There will never be a perfectly pure church this side of heaven. THREE: Overzealousness in attempting to purify it will do much more harm than good to the life and mission of the church.

So what do we do with this knowledge? ONE: We keep sowing Gospel seeds and fishing for men and women. Those are our primary tasks. TWO: We pray for the salvation of the unsaved – I almost titled this sermon “Prayers for Tares.” THREE: We imitate classic prophets like Amos in asking God to withhold his judgment. There’s a good old country hymn along those lines that goes something like this: “Wait a little longer, please Jesus; there’s so many still wandering in sin. Wait a little longer, please Jesus; a few more days to get our loved ones in.” FOUR: The tasks listed in NUMBER ONE that we are commissioned to do are urgent. There’s another old hymn that tells us, “Work, for the night is coming…” Sow, fish, and pray. Those are our urgent tasks. Judgment is not included among them.

I will continue by sharing these words of Gordon Lindsey from a recent “Presbyterian Outlook” article entitled “Reclaiming Evangelism.” Wrote Mr. Lindsey, “The Barna Group last year issued a report that the reputation of Christianity among young people in America, ages 16 to 29, has taken a sharp turn downwards. When asked to describe Christians, American youth used terms like judgmental, hypocritical, old-fashioned, and too involved in politics. One frequent complaint was that ‘Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus’.”

Maybe that’s because we, like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, have, for too long, been majoring in minors. It was mentioned to me that both my alternate sermon title and the old country hymn I quoted were not orthodox expressions of traditional Calvinism. At the risk of being overly blunt, so what if they’re not? While admitting that my neo-orthodox seminary education and ecumenical leanings color my thoughts and beliefs, I don’t really think that non-Christians, or even most Christians, care all that much about such doctrinal quibbling. Nor are most of them all a twitter about the major issues we Presbyterians have been fighting about for the last thirty years.

Just prior to the 1987 Super Bowl a picture of downtown Bejing was shown, to which Keith Jackson responded with something like this in terms of their feelings about the big event about to take place, “Three billion Chinese and not one of them gives a damn.” If such language sounds out of place in church, please remember that I’m simply reporting what the man said, and it wasn’t “darn.” Furthermore it sometimes takes some strong language to cut through our pristine sensibilities and assumptions in order to make a point. The point being that there are millions of people – young and old - who have never heard the Good News about Jesus, and they don’t give a rat’s hiney about all our theological quibbling and debates over sexuality. They couldn’t care less about the purity of the church. They just know that whatever it is that makes life abundant is missing from their lives, and when they turn to the church in search of it they all too often encounter a body too absorbed in its own inner debates to even notice they’re there.

In the movie “The Fugitive,” as Harrison Ford’s character loudly proclaims his innocence, Tommy Lee Jones’ character says, “I don’t care.” As a United States Marshall his job was to bring an escaped fugitive to justice. It was somebody else’s job to determine his ultimate guilt or innocence.

There are weeds in the garden that is Christ’s Church. There are some bad fish mixed in with the good. Guess what? I don’t care, and neither should you. It is God who decides who’s in and who’s out. Not you. Not me. Not the ultraconservative Presbyterian Lay Committee. Not the ultraliberal Witherspoon Society. Not anybody in between.

It is not our job to either weed the garden or swim around trying to pluck the bad fish out of the net. Our job is to be our Lord’s witnesses, evangelists, and disciple makers. Our job is to invite people in not throw people out. Our job is to accept not condemn. Our job is to pray for the unsaved. Our job is to storm heaven on their behalf, begging the Lord to give us more time to complete the tasks to which he has called and commissioned us. Our job is to reveal Jesus to those young people who are disillusioned with Christianity. Our job is to stop majoring in minors and to be very careful, that in our zeal to purify the church, we don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Amen.