Sermon by The Very Rev Chris Yaw, 7/19/2026
Gardening with Jesus, Part 2: The Wheat and the Weeds
Pentecost 8, Matthew 13:24-30,36-43 | Sunday, July 19,2026
The Very Rev. Chris Yaw
Good morning, and welcome to our second installation of *Gardening with Jesus*.
If you were with us last week, you know we evaded the discussions on proper seed distribution, soil composition, moisture retention, and composting –
And instead concentrated on the topsoil of our lives.
But today, we are moving from the soil itself to what is growing in it.
And if we are being honest, when we look out at the garden of our world—and even the garden of our own hearts—it doesn’t take long to realize that things are incredibly messy.
I don’t know about you, but I am as mad as anyone when I see corrupt governments, cruel rulers, and people who oppress, persecute, and exploit the vulnerable just to hoard power and wealth.
When I turn on the news and see senseless violence, systemic greed, and deep-seated selfishness, a fire lights up inside me.
I want to fight. I
want to correct the wrongs.
I want to fix it.
And I want to fix it *now*.
And sometimes I can fall into that impulsive yet horribly wrong thinking that, "If we just eliminate the bad guys, the problem is solved."…
But Jesus, as he so often does, stands in the middle of our frantic, angry garden and tells us to put down the trowel.
Take a chill pill.
A deep breath.
And wait.
What we are going to discover today is a better way than our natural, violent, impatient instinct to "weed" the world.
One that is not spiritually dangerous—
One that is not a tragic misunderstanding of how evil actually works.
But the way God intends you and me to redeem evil and bring forth the kingdom.
---
So let’s jump into our parable –
And a very rare occurrence – like last week – when Jesus not only gives us the parable – but also the interpretation!
Here, we see that there are farmer’s servants who notice that an enemy has sowed weeds—specifically, a plant called *darnel*—right alongside the good wheat.
And their first instinct is tactical, immediate, and aggressive:
"Do you want us to go and pull them up?"
It is the oldest question in human history.
It is the cry of a humanity that believes we can achieve peace through a decisive, surgical strike of violence.
We convince ourselves that if we can just isolate the "bad" thing and destroy it, the "good" things will finally flourish.
But the Gardener’s response is a chilling warning:
"No, lest while you gather up the darnel you also uproot the wheat with them."
If you want to understand how incredibly accurate Jesus’s agricultural warning is, you don't have to look any further than our own modern history.
We have tried to play the "weed police" on a global scale, and the collateral damage has been devastating.
Think back to the wake of September 11, 2001.
In the shadow of that horrific tragedy, the collective global cry was for a swift, decisive "weeding."
The enemy was identified, localized, and targeted.
The mindset was simple, almost elegant in its directness:
If we can just go into Afghanistan and Iraq, eliminate the bad guys, dismantle their camps, and kill the terrorists, we can eradicate this evil once and for all.
But what actually happened?
Decades of war, trillions of dollars spent, and hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost.
And did we eradicate terrorism?
No.
Instead, the violence shattered societies, created deep-seated trauma, left massive power vacuums, and birthed even more extreme, virulent factions, like ISIS.
Yanking the "weed" of Al-Qaeda inadvertently tilled the soil for a dozen new, more aggressive weeds to take root.
We learned the hard way a truth that we keep forgetting:
You cannot shoot an ideology with a gun.
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If foreign policy feels too distant, look at our domestic policies.
For over fifty years, governments have waged a literal, militarized "war" on drug cartels.
The strategy has almost exclusively been the "Kingpin Strategy."
It is the ultimate weeding tactic: find the leader, the toxic weed at the top—whether it is Pablo Escobar or El Chapo—and eliminate or imprison them.
Cut off the head of the snake, and the body will die.
Yet, criminologists and historians have documented a heartbreaking pattern: every single time a major kingpin is taken out, local violence actually spikes.
Why?
Because the underlying systemic soil—extreme poverty, desperate consumer demand, and a lack of viable economic opportunity—remains completely unchanged.
Removing one leader simply creates a violent, bloody turf war among hungry subordinates eager to fill the vacancy.
The "evil" of the cartel is not a single bad person; it is a massive, self-replicating economic ecosystem.
We look at the field and think we can just slice out the tumor, but the weeds are deeply intertwined with the crop.
They are fed by the very same soil we are all standing in.
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To understand why this happens, we have to look at the botany of the plants Jesus’s listeners knew so well,
And let’s compare it to a botanical menace we know today.
If you have ever traveled through the American South, you have surely seen Kudzu.
They call it the "mile-a-minute vine."
It is an invasive species that swallows everything in its path—trees, telephone poles, abandoned cars, and entire houses.
It looks like a monstrous, green, choking evil.
When property owners first tried to eradicate Kudzu, they went to war.
They chopped it, mowed it, and sprayed heavy, toxic chemical herbicides.
But Kudzu has massive, incredibly deep root systems—some taproots weigh hundreds of pounds and dig feet deep into the earth.
The poison didn’t kill the deep roots.
Instead, the toxic runoff sank into the soil, poisoned the groundwater, and killed the surrounding ancient oaks, pines, and local crops.
In a frantic, angry effort to kill the weed, landowners poisoned the very soil they were trying to save.
Jesus's first-century listeners in Galilee knew an agricultural reality that was strikingly similar.
The weed in Jesus’s parable is translated as "tare" or "weed," but specifically, it was **darnel**
Darnel is a fascinating, insidious plant. In its early stages of growth, darnel looks identical to wheat.
In fact, rabbinical thought at the time held that darnel wasn’t even a completely different species, but rather a *degenerate form of wheat itself*—wheat that had gone bad, gone wild, or become corrupted.
More importantly, as darnel grows, its root system weaves itself tightly around the roots of the actual wheat under the dirt.
They share the same water, the same nutrients, the same soil.
If you walk into the field during the growing season and impatiently yank on a stalk of darnel, you will inevitably snap the fragile roots of the healthy wheat right alongside it.
Like modern landowners dumping chemical poisons on Kudzu, our aggressive, self-righteous attempts to force a "pure" field often end up poisoning our own families, our own communities, and our own churches.
---
Why do we keep making this mistake?
Why is our first instinct always to go on a weeding campaign?
It’s because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what evil actually is.
We treat evil like it’s a physical object—a localized tumor we can just cut out, leaving the rest of the body perfectly pure.
We look at the world and divide it into two neat columns: the good guys and the bad guys.
The wheat and the weeds.
Ohio State and Michigan.
And naturally, we always put ourselves in the "wheat" column.
But Jesus is trying to show us that evil isn't a physical substance, and it doesn't belong to just one group of people.
Evil is a set of choices, impulses, and systems.
And the tragic reality of human history is that, one way or another, the potential for it lives in all of us.
The great writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived the horrific labor camps of the Soviet Union, wrote a line that gets right to the heart of Jesus’s parable:
"If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
When we forget this—when we convince ourselves that the world is a simple map of "pure good" versus "pure evil"—we fall into a dangerous trap.
First, we start behaving like the very things we hate. Have you ever noticed how quickly our anger justifies itself?
The moment we decide we are fighting "evil," we feel permitted to use anger, gossip, exclusion, or even violence to win.
We tell ourselves, "Well, they started it, so I have to fight dirty."
But when you use the enemy's weapons, you slowly become the enemy. We end up spreading the exact same poison we set out to destroy.
Second, our attacks only feed the cycle.
When we try to "weed" people out with harshness and anger, we don’t change their minds.
We just wound them.
And hurt people hurt people.
Violence, judgment, and selfishness create trauma, and trauma is the exact soil where fresh hatred and anger grow.
This is why Jesus tells us to pause.
If you try to rip out the weeds in a self-righteous fury, you will tear up the good things, too.
You cannot heal a broken world by adding more brokenness to it.
I’m wondering how that may be speaking to you and me today – as we maneuver our relationships, our communities, and our world views.
How is God asking us to push the ‘pause’ button on our instincts to eradicate?
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So, yes, let’s look at Jesus's alternative.
If we aren't supposed to go on a weeding campaign, what do we do?
In the parable, the Sower gives a command that must have sounded incredibly frustrating to the hardworking, order-loving servants:
*"Let both grow together until the harvest..."* (Matthew 13:30)
In the Greek text of the Gospels, the word translated as "let" or "permit" is **apheta (a-fa-tay)
This is not a passive, lazy word. *Aphete* is the exact same Greek root word used throughout the New Testament for **forgiving**.
When Jesus teaches us to pray, "Forgive us our debts," he uses a form of *aphete*.
When he says to forgive those who trespass against us, he is using this word.
To "permit" the weeds to grow alongside the wheat is an act of profound, patient forgiveness.
It is the willingness to bear the presence of things we do not like, to endure the messiness of a broken world, and to trust that God's grace is larger than our rage.
And why does God want us to wait?
Because unlike physical plants, human beings have the capacity to change.
In the botanical world, a stalk of darnel can never become a stalk of wheat.
Its DNA is locked.
But in the Kingdom of God, a weed can become wheat.
A persecutor of the church named Saul can become the Apostle Paul.
A tax collector exploiting his own people can become Matthew, the writer of this very Gospel.
If God had sent his angels to weed the earth during Saul’s journey to Damascus, the church would have lost its greatest missionary.
If God had weeded the field when you and I were operating in our darkest, most selfish moments, where would we be today?
When we allow the fields to grow, we are giving space for grace to do its slow, quiet work.
And even when things are burned—even when we look at the parts of our lives, our history, or our communities that have suffered under the heat of brokenness—we must remember that God is the master of the field.
Think about this:
In agriculture, there is great nutritional value in **ash**.
When a field is burned, the ashes sink back into the dirt, enriching it with potassium, calcium, and magnesium, making the soil incredibly fertile for the next season.
Even the pain, the brokenness, and the "weeds" of our lives can be redeemed by God.
God can take the ashes of our worst mistakes and use them to nourish the soil for a harvest of humility, empathy, and deep faith.
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I’d like to close with an important distinction about evil: stopping an active perpetrator of violence or abuse is sometimes a necessary act of immediate defense.
God does not call us to be passive doormats in the face of active destruction.
But we must never confuse *containment* with *eradication*.
Containing a threat is a temporary, defensive necessity.
Eradicating evil is a divine task that belongs solely to God at the end of the age.
When we try to play God, when we try to force a perfectly pure field through our own anger, judgment, and exclusion, we step out of our calling.
**We are not called to be the "weed police."**
Our job is not to go around pointing fingers, cataloging the sins of our neighbors, or trying to uproot the people we deem unworthy of God’s field.
When we spend all our energy focusing on the weeds, we become bitter, self-righteous, and exhausted
. We start producing the exact same toxic fruit as the weeds we are trying to destroy.
Instead, we are called to change the soil and produce heavy, golden grain.
How do we change the soil in a practical, daily way?
We do it by building up instead of tearing down:
We support legal systems, human rights frameworks, and accountability structures that prevent power from being concentrated and abused.
We face our history and our personal harms honestly—through confession, repentance, and reconciliation—rather than burying them under fresh cycles of blame and violence.
We work to reduce the desperation, poverty, and isolation that make communities and individuals vulnerable to demagogues, radicalization, and hatred in the first place.
We ensure that our own lives are rooted deeply in the love of Christ, absorbing His grace, so that we can bend under the weight of heavy, nourishing grain.
We trust that God is in charge of the field.
We trust that God is patient, that God’s timing is trustworthy, and that true, complete justice will win out in the end.
So this week, let go of the shovel of judgment.
Put down the poison of anger.
Take a deep breath, trust the Gardener, and let's get back to the quiet, slow, beautiful work of growing together.
Amen.