The garden plots outside the parish hall are exploding with life. Take the plantings our landscapers installed and the wild seedlings carried in by dogs and squirrels, add these last few weeks of sun and rain and constant watering, and you get greenery of all sorts breaking the surface.
As I come and go from the office I almost always scan the soil, looking for weeds I can easily remove. Unfortunately, I’m no gardener. All seedlings look pretty much the same to me, and I’m hesitant to yank something out of the ground that may turn out to be planned growth.
If only I was so cautious when it comes to categorizing people. In the gospel assigned for this Sunday, Jesus tells a parable about the weeds that grow up with the wheat – how we might prefer to handle them, and how God want us to handle them. We are eager to categorize, but we are reminded that our efforts to remove the “bad seeds” from our communities too often do damage to all around them and even to the ground itself. Instead we are advised to leave the work of judgment to God, who sees wheat where we see weeds and adopts growth of all kinds into the garden.
In Christ,
Pastor Erik
By Proclamation 