trust Archives - Deacon Chris Anderson

Weeds In Our Wheat

Matthew 13:36-43

Let both of them grow together until the harvest time.

There are these weeds in all our wheat, problems mixed up with all the good things in our lives, people we don’t like and things we don’t like mixed up with the things we do. Our lives are like that. They’re mixed. We’re always trying to make them better, of course, and we should, but they’re always going to be like this, no matter what we do.
And what’s interesting to me in Jesus’s explanation of the Parable of the Weeds is that he’s saying God will do the sorting out, the Son of Man, through his angels. They will “collect out of his Kingdom all who cause others to sin and all evildoers,” and this won’t happen until the end of time, the end of age.

They want the early church the way they want it and they don’t want to wait. They want to judge and they are judging.

The context for this is the urge of the disciples to do the sorting themselves and to do it now. They want the early church the way they want it and they don’t want to wait. They want to judge and they are judging. They want to weed out and they are weeding out, or trying, and the problem with that is that it’s not their job and the problem with that is they don’t know and can’t know which is which really. The weeds and the wheat are so mixed up with each other that it’s hard to tell who is good and who isn’t.
If we pull up the weeds now, we’ll ruin the wheat.

August 15, 2016

Prose

Trust

   Cresting a hill, you see it: above the fields and the tops of the walnut trees, low in the sky, very close, a giant hot air balloon, red and blue and green.
   And there’s a word spelled out on the side, the letters tall as people: T-R-U-S-T.
   Trust.

You assume it’s just advertising. You think, there’s the name of a bank on the other side.
But lately you’ve been so anxious. So afraid.

Long ago the Jews believed the Torah was an orchard.
From a distance all we see are trees, but there are branches, too, closer in, crissing and crossing, and there are leaves, a profusion of leaves, and there is the fruit in its many colors, and the nuts in their many shells, and beneath the skin the flesh, and within the flesh the seeds.

And then you reach the bottom. You level out.
And the trees are wheeling past you, the walnut trees, twisting and gnarled. The rows are flashing by, one after the other.
The long, deep, darkening lanes.

August 3, 2016