As we grow up, we learn all the tricks of being human. Well, maybe not all the tricks, but we pick up things as we go. I remember figuring out that conversations work a lot better for you if you wait for the right moment to bring something up. It felt like a superpower to realize that patience does pay off. The window of opportunity does open when you want to ask your parents for something. You just might have to wait for it a bit.  You could say I learned somewhere along the way to manipulate my parents like any child or I learned some manners. Maybe it was both. Either way, it pays off to pay attention to timing, but it can be torturous when your own sense of timing does not match other peoples’ sense of timing. The middle of the night is not the time to ask to go to the park in the morning, for example, even if the question is eating you up as you try to fall asleep. Timing, as the saying goes, is everything.  

There are lots of situations when we may know what we want, what we need, or how the world should be, but it’s not the right time for whatever reason for those thing to happen. God’s timing is often not our preferred timing. So, for whatever mysterious reason to us, we are tasked with hanging out with the weeds who are making our lives more difficult. We may feel choked out by those weeds. Encumbered. Stunted. And oddly Jesus is apparently unconcerned about this.

So, this can be a tough word for us to hear because we tend to want the weeds in our fields cleared out. We want clarity. We like order. We don’t want unwanted people or circumstances or truly dark realities to get in the way of happy lives, families, and communities. We like to think that Jesus also wants the same things for us, as well. We want to think that Jesus wants to make sure that his beloved ones all feel snug as a bug in a rug all the time, but maybe it’s all more complicated than that.  

Most of the time, the things we want for ourselves and for others are good things. We want peace, abundance, and happiness in the world. We want justice. We want freedom and fairness for all people. We want truth. There’s a lot of things we want that are good and we can trust that God wants good things for us and the world, as well. God also wants justice, freedom, love, truth, and beauty in the world. However, God’s path of creation may not be as direct and quick as we want.

So, when it is my turn to die and ask some questions of the great I AM, this may very well be my big question. Why create a world where the wheat must grow with the weeds? Why create a world where there is so much evil that harms the wholesome or innocent?

This particular question is different than the more common question, why does God allow suffering in the world. Personally, I have come to understand that we live in a world of radical freedom where people are free to do good as well as horrendous things. We live in a biological reality where viruses can kill or harm us and yet are also instrumental in evolutionary development of species. This is a weird, but true fact. So, I get that we do live in a reality where the wheat and the weeds do live together. But sometimes I wonder why do it at all. After all, God could have decided to not create the world, and we could all just be chillin’ in the great unity of all that is before the Big Bang. I bet it was pretty pleasant, really.  

Now, I’m not hatin’. I’m not even ungrateful, but some days I wonder what is the deal, anyway? We could have all just stayed fused with and in the great I AM without consciousness or differentiation of any kind. Again, I’m not hatin’ on this world, but it also sounds like a nice rest, like God’s great sensory deprivation therapy.

But here we are and our loving God chose to make it so. We believe God is love itself and acts for the sake of love and wholeness, so I can only surmise that life exists for the sake of love in all its many forms. And for love to be at all, doesn’t there need to be relationship? And for relationships to be real and authentic, doesn’t there need to be freedom and a place in which to express that freedom, which is life. And for life to exist, chaos does, as well. At least that’s what the physicists say. The existence of chaos and entropy is part of the fabric of reality.

The takeaway message there is that love makes for a messy reality.

In the Romans text, we hear Paul say that all the whole world is groaning in labor pains. The whole world is birthing a new creation, a new reality of life with Christ and we are a part of that. We are indeed learning to love one another, ourselves, and this planet more fully. Today, with all our worries and fears being turned up to 11 all the time, it is hard to remember that there is solid evidence that humans are becoming less violent over time. Indeed, there are good reasons to be hopeful about us, even as the weeds continue to exist.

We are most comfortable when we see progress every day that never goes backwards or sideways. We want the bathroom scale to always go in the right direction, whatever direction that might be. We want to feel a little bit better every day, if we’re sick. We want peace talks to go predictably forward, you know, if your country is at war. We want to systematically get those weeds out of our fields. However, our experience of change is rarely linear or even obvious.

How change often works is through a process called punctuated equilibrium where change seems to happen abruptly and quickly. This is a feature of some evolutionary change in biology, but it’s also talked about in social change. In biology, this may look like a butterfly suddenly sporting a new color for a species without gradually moving towards that change through gradations in color. It just pops out. However, that change likely comes from a whole bunch of mutations happening in the background that we can’t see until we do. And we experience it as a sudden change.

Likewise, when we’re in a process of social change in our lives or in the world, that silent work in the background may also be happening without any real noticeable change. And then, all of a sudden, change does happen and it may indeed feel sudden. The Berlin Wall coming down was one of those moments, for example. Not even a month before it came down, some people thought the status quo would never end and then it did.

Even though change can feel sudden to those on the outside, there’s always the folks in the background doing the hard, thankless work of quietly working towards justice or peace or health without any “impact”, any visible affirmation of change until change happens. It may seem like it comes out of nowhere, but it’s really from slow work of movements and the Holy Spirit subtly doing her thing. Babies may be born in a moment, but there’s a lot that goes into that birth. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the whole experience of the universe, from Big Bang to mom in labor, together brought that child into being. And yet, the hard productive and visible work of labor happens relatively quickly.  

This is a long way of saying, have hope. Have faith. Your God is a loving God who wants good things for you in a world that is created for the experience of love. It’s messy because that is what is necessary for it all to exist. So, we hope for a world that we do not yet see. We hope for Christ’s kingdom that is not yet here. We wait in expectation of healing, of release, of redemption, of peace and renewal. We wait. But in the meantime, we can also be doing the work to prepare the way so that when it is time for a new world, the road has been made straight. In the meantime, we watch for God’s action and direction and we get involved. In the meantime, we may need to allow those hated weeds to be there without getting our panties in too bit a bunch, as well.

Now, I’m like anyone else who would really like to clear the weeds, but this parable suggests this is not how God operates. However awkward for us, this is the world the Lord has made, where weeds are in the field alongside the grain, where chaos is a necessary ingredient, where other people’s freedom is inconvenient or even awful some days. In the meantime, we prepare for the day of harvest. We love people and feed people as we wait for the weeds of injustice and evil to be cleared out. We watch for God’s movement and get on board to do the work for love and justice in the world even as the weeds are thriving, because we can trust God to bring about the day of harvest for the sake of love for us all and this good creation.

AMEN