Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
New Life as Exiles
James Sledge July
19, 2020
Back
in March when the stay-at-home order was first announced, I don’t think any of
us could have imagined that we would be holding worship today in an empty
sanctuary, live streaming it into people’s homes. And even now, in mid-July, we
still don’t know when we might have anything resembling worship as it used to
be.
COVID-19
has turned the church world upside down. No one knows exactly what church is
going to look like in the coming years. No doubt, livestreaming is here to
stay, even when we can have some sort of in person worship. But it also seems
highly likely that many congregations will never recover. Unlike FCPC, many
churches have no real financial reserves and operate on extremely tight budgets.
Some who study religious institutions are predicting large scale church
closings in the coming years.
But
what about church in general? Will worshiping from home open church up to new
people, or will it accelerate an already established trend of church decline?
Will people start to treat church like Netflix, watching a little worship when
they have time or the mood strikes them? Will church move further and further
from the center of people’s lives and from the center of the culture, further
diminishing the prominent place church once held?
Over
twenty years ago, long before COVID-19, Old Testament scholar Walter
Brueggemann suggested the metaphor of exile
as a good way to describe where the Church finds itself in America.[1]
He said that we had been deported from our comfortable homeland of the mid-20th
Century into a world that no longer works in ways we fully understand. The
stores stay open and youth sports teams play games during our sacred worship
times. Neither public schools nor the culture at large encourages church
participation as they once did. The landscape of America has changed dramatically
since the 1950s, and institutions like the Presbyterian Church, which had their
heyday then, find themselves aliens in a strange land.
If
exile was an appropriate metaphor at the close of the 20th century,
surely it is even more so today. The forces that led Dr. Brueggemann to speak
of the Church in exile are still with us, perhaps even stronger. And now
COVID-19 could push church even further to the edges of society and daily life,
increasing the sense of exile.
In
the Bible, when Israel is carried off into literal exile in Babylon, it created
a crisis. As exiles in a strange land, nothing supported their religious life.
The Temple was gone, the Ark of the Covenant lost, and no altar existed where
offerings could be made. The Babylonian culture around them had different ways,
different gods, different religious practices. It would be easy, even tempting,
simply to adopt the ways of the prevailing culture.
Exiles are always in danger of
disappearing, of being absorbed into the culture where they find themselves.
Countless cultures have simply disappeared over the centuries as a result. To prevent
this, exiles must cultivate a distinctiveness, a peculiarity. They must live in
ways that set them apart, allowing them to maintain a distinct identity different
from the surrounding culture. For the Hebrews in Babylon, Sabbath keeping and
synagogue emerged in exile as crucial elements that marked them as different
and distinct. But what about us?
The
parable of the weeds and wheat that we heard moments ago, wasn’t spoken to
people in literal exile, but they may well have been metaphorical exiles like
us. The Jews of Jesus’ day lived under Roman rule in a Greco-Roman world.
Hebrew, their original language, had disappeared from daily life, used only for
religious gatherings.
When
Matthew writes his gospel, he addresses Jewish Christians, followers of Jesus
who still go to synagogue and still see themselves as Jews. And the
metaphorical sense of exile must have been even stronger for them. The Romans
had destroyed Jerusalem and its grand Temple between the time of Jesus and
Matthew’s gospel. On top of that, the leaders of synagogues were beginning to
question whether those following Jesus were really Jews. Some synagogues were
asking people to renounce Jesus in order to remain members. Matthew’s gospel
addresses Christians experiencing multiple pressures to disappear, to fade into
the surrounding cultures of the Greco-Roman world or synagogue.
To these people, Matthew tells this
parable, one found only in his gospel, and I wonder if it wasn’t meant as a
call for exiles to remain faithful, to hold onto a distinct identity despite
pressure to disappear, to blend in. Unfortunately, our Bible translation may
obscure this.
________________________________________________________________
If
you’re a gardener, you know about the problem of weeds. If you don’t stay after
them, they will take over a flower bed or garden. You have to regularly pull
them, dig them up, or spray them with weed killer. I hate pulling weeds in my
vegetable garden, but I’m not at all worried about uprooting the vegetables
when I do, the concern raised in the parable.
Turns
out the weeds in Jesus’ parable are not run of the mill weeds. That’s the
translation problem. Jesus actually says that an enemy came and sowed zizanium
among the wheat. Zizanium is a specific weed, a type of darnel. It
looks almost exactly like wheat, even more so when it’s young. Some varieties
produce a mildly poisonous grain, so this enemy has done something much more
sinister than throwing out some crabgrass seed.
As
Jesus’ explanation of the parable makes clear, there are forces at work in the
world to undermine the way of Jesus, the way of God’s new day. And those forces
are often well disguised. The only way to tell them apart in the end is by the
fruit that they bear.
Jesus
regularly says that his followers are supposed to stand out in some way. “You
are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world… Not everyone who
says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who
does the will of my Father in heaven.” We are supposed to show the
world the peculiar ways of Jesus, not blend into the ways of the world.
That
has always been true, but it is even more so for exiles. In order to be
something that matters, that people not acculturated to church might want to
learn more about, we must show the world a different way, a better way. And Jesus
insists that, as crazy as his way may sometimes sound, it is a better way.
But
being different and distinctive, living out a way at odds with the prevailing
culture, is more than a survival strategy for exiles. It is Jesus’ call to a
new, purposeful, full, and true life, a life so transformed and renewed that it
is called salvation. Salvation: something so much more that what happens to you
when you die. Salvation: true wholeness and aliveness.
You
are the good seed sown in God’s good garden and called to bear good fruit. You
are the salt of the earth, the light of the world, those meant to change the
world and show it the way. And when together we live into that, we will
experience new life, salvation, resurrection life, here and now.
[1]
See Walter Brueggemann, Cadences of Home:
Preaching Among Exiles (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997)
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