Good Plants and Audrey II

 

July 19, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

Last Sunday, in another church, I waxed nostalgically about my country roots.

“I grew up in rural Central New York where the stars were vivid at night, where thousands of tiny tree frogs peeped loudly when you tried to sleep, where you were surrounded by endless fields of corn, where cattle grazed on a thousand hills, and where slow moving tractors clogged the roads. 

“My father was a school teacher not a farmer, but my siblings and most of my peers were emersed in the agrarian culture. Just about every kid I knew joined the 4-H club. The H’s stood for Head, Heart, Hands, and Health and the purpose of the cooperative was to mentor young people by engaging them in agricultural projects. Many of my friends did projects on the farm they lived on. My projects took place in my father’s garden.”

I hated every one of them.

My family lived on a small plot of land on a quiet street in Morrisville, N.Y. My father borrowed the neighbor’s Merry-Tiller and, with his pipe clenched in his teeth and sweat dripping off the tip of his nose, plowed the back third of the lawn into furrows of dirt. 

“This is our garden,” he told my siblings and me.

By the end of the summer the garden yielded corn, peas, beans, tomatoes, lettuce, and asparagus. 

But it took a lot of work to get there.

The soil in Central New York is extremely stony. Stones impeded shovels and hoes, got jammed in rakes, and had to be removed. My father brought a wheelbarrow to the edge of the garden and started filling it with stones. Clearing the stones was a daunting task and he drafted my siblings and me into the work.

I won’t speak for my sibs but I hated it. To keep my mind occupied, I took time to examine each stone. Some were round and smooth. Some had chunks of pyrite which looked like gold but wasn’t. Many were fossils of trilobites, brachiopads, and crinoids embedded in shale 390 million years ago. I spent many hours meditating on rocks but, as I am sure my siblings remember, tossed very few of them into the wheelbarrow.

Then there were weeds.

Weeds. The scourge of every garden.

Dad wanted the weeds cleared immediately and suggested that would be a good job for me.

I sank to my knees and made a good effort to subdue the dreaded green monsters but I was soon overwhelmed by the task. New weeds rose up to replace plucked weeds and if roots were broken off they would surge to menacing size like Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors. My discouragement knew no bounds and I tried to convince Dad that dandelions and milkweeds were beautiful plants that deserved to live.

Little did I know that my early years were lived in a Twilight Zone version of Jesus’ parables of seeds and weeds.

Earlier in Matthew’s gospel there was the Sower whose seeds fell on rocky ground, thorny ground, shallow ground, and finally on fertile ground where they bloomed and thrived.

The parable of the Sower is more than an allegory of planting. It’s a metaphor of life’s cycles of bad days and good days, defeats and victories, successes and failures. 

Jesus uses the parable to describe opposition to his ministry. The seeds he is planting bear the fruit of love, salvation, eternal life, peace, and justice. But not all these seeds will germinate. The Devil grabs some seeds and crushes the life out of them. Some people briefly embrace Jesus’s words but soon get bored and wander away. Some people are so emersed in the thorny minutia of their own lives that they can’t hear Jesus’s words. 

But all is not lost. Despite the opposition to Jesus’s ministry, some seeds do get through to rich soil. The final promise of the parable is that opposition, denial, and indifference to Jesus’s will not prevail. The kingdom of God will not be put off. God will make it happen.

Now we have the parable of my own personal hell: the bad weeds intermingling with the good plants.

Jesus tells a story about a man who plants good seed in a field. But in the middle of the night, while he is sleeping a bad man sows weeds among the good seeds.

Why anyone would do that is a mystery, but we remember that these are not real people. Jesus is making them up to make a point.

The wheat and the weeds come up hopelessly entangled. Appalled, the man’s servants suggest they attack the weeds immediately.

“But (their master) replied, ‘No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. 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 13:29-30)

I wish, 65 years ago, I had thought to suggest this solution to my Dad.

Jesus explains the parable this way:

“The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” (Matthew 13:36-43)

The parable offers some hints as to why God allows evil to exist, or why bad things happen to good people.

In this life we will always coexist with good and bad people and before the end of the age it may appear that the bad people are winning. 

But at harvest time God’s justice will prevail.

New Testament scholar Jennifer T. Kaaland writes that in Matthew’s Gospel, “the kingdom of heaven delineates differences between the realm of God’s kingdom and the kingdom of Roman emperor. As the people in the first century Mediterranean would have experienced it, the emperor’s kingdom is on earth. The kingdom of heaven is where God reigns. The act of Jesus coming into the earth represents the in breaking of the God’s kingdom on the earth. 

“This makes explicit that the gospel, is indeed, a political document. The writer is proposing an alternative understanding of the world, one that would directly oppose the political leaders of his time. As such, clear lines needed to be drawn. Which kingdom will prevail? Whose empire will you participate in?”

What are the political weeds and tares that are choking our world today?

Millions of Americans who can no longer afford health care because federal subsidies have been eliminated to lower taxes for the rich? 

Thousands of innocent, nonviolent people harassed by aggressive ICE agents who sometimes break into their homes and sometimes kill them? 

Ignorant and authoritative politicians who say climate change is a myth and scoff at energy derived from solar power or wind turbines while promoting the use of coal and oil and other fossil fuels?

Obtuse politicians who believe racism no longer exist sand that white men are better suited for promotion and authority than women or people of color?

Megalomaniacal office bearers who lead us into unnecessary and illegal wars without considering the costs in human lives, economic stability, and international trust?

Indeed it often feels like we are being strangled by the volume and apparent indestructibility of the weeds that surround us.

Jennifer Kaalund offers these words of assurance:

“In Romans 14:17, Paul describes God’s kingdom as righteousness, peace, and joy. In order for us to see a world that can be characterized as such, we must acknowledge that the causes of sin are not simply our personal struggles, but more so our societal ills. For instance, the causes of poverty — war, greed, selfishness, etc. — are sin. 

“It is not for us to judge one another or to separate ourselves from each other. If our spiritual wallet is to contain a license issued by the kingdom of God, we must live peaceably and compassionately with all, recognizing that we (the good and the evil) are necessary for each other’s survival.”

And at harvest time, God’s justice will prevail.

Scatter Some My Way

 

July 12, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

One of my favorite books is Jesus: A Pilgrimage by Father James Martin, S.J. an account of his visit to biblical sites in the Holy Land. Father Martin says a visit to the Holy Land is like a “fifth Gospel” because seeing the places where Jesus walked gives new meaning to what happened there. 

Father Martin writes: 

“One hot day, standing in the place where Jesus most likely preached the parables on the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, I looked around and noticed that the surrounding landscape included rocky ground, fertile ground, and thorny plants. Immediately I thought of Jesus’s parable of the sower, in which a farmer spreads his seed on just those kinds of terrains. For the first time I realized that when Jesus was preaching, he may not have been describing abstract plots of land (as in ‘Try to imagine rocky ground’), but what his listeners were standing on. I could envision him pointing and saying, ‘Look at that ground over there.’  

I grew up in rural Central New York where the stars were vivid at night, where thousands of tiny tree frogs peeped loudly when you tried to sleep, where you were surrounded by endless fields of corn, where cattle grazed on a thousand hills, and where slow moving tractors clogged the roads. 

My father was a school teacher not a farmer, but my siblings and most of my peers were emersed in the agrarian culture. Just about every kid I knew joined the 4-H club. The H’s stood for Head, Heart, Hands, and Health and the purpose of the cooperative was to mentor young people by engaging them in agricultural projects. Many of my friends did projects on the farm they lived on. My projects took place in my father’s garden. 

Among the things I learned is that not every seed grows where it is planted. Corn quickly exhausts the soil of nutrients so it can’t be planted in the same place every season. Other seeds get suffocated by weeds and I rarely took the time to clear the weeds. And some seeds give yield to spectacularly healthy plants for no apparent reason, like my father’s tomatoes, which were huge, red, and juicy. I had little to do with those tomatoes except watch them grow so I remained modestly silent when the 4-H club presented me with a special gardening ribbon. 

Jesus’ parable of the Sower of seeds has an interesting echo in this week’s lectionary which tells the story of Jacob, Esau, and the prolific seed of the Patriarchs. (Genesis 25:19-34). 

Jacob and Esau, as we recall, were bitter rivals right from the beginning. 

According to Genesis, the brothers’ sibling rivalry began earlier than most: when they were still in Rebekah’s womb. The boys wrestled and twisted so violently that Rebekah thought she was going to die. In the days before obstetricians, she went directly to God with her complaint, and as with many modern doctors, God was only partially helpful. God did give her prenatal information that went far beyond the gender or health of the fetuses: 

Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger. 

On the other hand, God did little to ease her violent cramping. The wrestling continued until the time of labor. Esau burst out first. He was startlingly red and hirsute, so they named him Esau, which of course means Hairy. His brother, struggling for the advantage down to the wire, is dragged out grasping his brother’s heel. They named him Jacob, which means Heel. As it turned out, both names were appropriate. 

The boys’ bitter rivalry was exacerbated, as often happens, by parental favoritism. Rebekah, whose postnatal soreness must have lasted for months, loved Jacob because he was smooth-skinned and liked to hang around the tent with his mother. Jacob loved Esau because he liked his meat and Esau the hunter had more slabs on him than a Lady Gaga dress. 

In a sorry show of sibling rivalry, Jacob covers his body with hairy animal pelts and deceives his blind father Isaac into believing he is Esau and tricks him into blessing him.  

The parable of the Sower is a helpful metaphor to keep in mind as we re-encounter the familiar histories of the old Patriarchs. When God first approached Abraham and told him his seed would conceive a nation as populous as the stars in the sky, God didn’t mention how turbulent that sowing would be.  
 
The Patriarchs were not perfect. Many of them were distractingly quirky, and it’s easy to get angry at Jacob every time you read of his cruelty to his brother and his deceit of his father. Some of the seeds the Patriarchs sowed fall on rocks, others on thorns. But God remained faithful to their covenant, and in the end their seeds grew incalculably more than a hundredfold. The Patriarchs, imperfect as they were, remind us that God’s seeds have also been planted in us – and as imperfect as we are, God has promised to bring forth a sumptuous harvest. 
 
When I became a man I edited a national church magazine and the parable of the Sower took on new meaning for me. Each year we would send out thousands of letters urging people to subscribe. Some of the letters got lost amid the glut of advertising fliers at the post office and were never seen again. Others were summarily rejected by people who replied, “Cancel my Subscription, I never read it.” And slightly less than a third of them brought forth checks and subscription renewals. 

The parable of the Sower is more than an allegory of planting. It’s a metaphor of life’s cycles of bad days and good days, defeats and victories, successes and failures. 

Jesus uses the parable to describe opposition to his ministry. The seeds he is planting bear the fruit of love, salvation, eternal life, peace, and justice. But not all these seeds will germinate. The Devil grabs some seeds and crushes the life out of them. Some people briefly embrace Jesus’s words but soon get bored and wander away. Some people are so emersed in the thorny minutia of their own lives that they can’t hear Jesus’s words. 

But all is not lost. Despite the opposition to Jesus’s ministry, some seeds do get through to rich soil. The final promise of the parable is that opposition, denial, and indifference to Jesus’s will not prevail. The kingdom of God will not be put off. God will make it happen. 

Just why anyone would hear the Good News and reject it is anyone’s guess. Some will hear and not believe. In fact they are legion. We who do hear and believe can be grateful to God, but that is not a matter of pride. Martin Luther pointed out that faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit that we neither merited nor earned. 

Pastor Jennifer Pietz, assistant professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary, offers this helpful summary of Matthew 13: 

Faith in God is a gift from God. We cannot understand exactly how it occurs, but we are called to share the riches we have been given and strive to persevere in faith, guided by God’s word and the Holy Spirit. 

 

Christians are not to feel superior to those who have not embraced the gospel. We do not fully comprehend God’s work in the world. The kingdom is not yet here. The church is called to continually preach the gospel in word and deed, to all, leaving the results to God (for example, 1 Corinthians 3:6). 

Threats to the gospel flourishing in people’s lives persist. While the church cannot eliminate all threats, it can help people navigate them. For example, Christians can accompany people through tragedies that make them doubt that God is real.  

 

And we can help each other recognize the enduring temptation to place our trust in money and possessions instead of in God. The parable creates space for naming the particular challenges we face to persevering in faith or to doing the work of the gospel. 

 

Amid bleak news cycles, unexpected hardships, and acknowledgment of our own weaknesses, we can trust that God is working to bring about God’s purposes of life and abundance.