Saturday, The Rev. Amanda Katherine Gott posted on her Facebook page a comment about doing online research on garden weeds for Sunday’s sermon. The lesson appointed for Sunday was the Parable of the Weeds

"The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, `Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?' He answered, `An enemy has done this.' The slaves said to him, `Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he replied, `No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'"

It seems like I’ve always heard this parable preached about in terms of fire and brimstone. Indeed, the following verses include, “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” While it is good news that the causes of sin will be destroyed in the end times, for those of us focused on God’s forgiveness and loving kindness, it doesn’t sound so much like good news.

My relationship with weeds has always been a bit different from that of the sower in the parable. I commented, “’One man's weed is another man's wildflower’. I grew up on Euell Gibbons and we often ate many forms of weeds from Oxalis to lambsquarters”. Although I didn’t really see how it related to the Gospel.

Another person posted a link to a great article, Why We Must Learn to Love Weeds. It contained many thoughts along the same line as I was thinking. It quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson saying a weed is “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered”.

This was in line with the direction Rev. Amanda took in her sermon. She talked about the weeds in her garden, which turned out to be Oxalis, the same weed I grew up eating. It is not for us to judge who the weeds are, we should leave that to God. Those people in our lives that we think of as weeds are people whom we have not yet discovered their virtues.

As she explored these sort of ideas in more depth, she said something else that particularly stuck with me. I love mixed metaphors and she mashed up the cup running over from Psalm 23 with the cup which is either half empty or half full, depending on one’s perspective. What matters, she went on to say, was not trying to pin blame on others for why the cup is only half full, but finding those whose cups are empty and sharing what we have with them. I thought about my current foray into electoral politics. I thought about friends who are going through tough times right now, through spiritual crises, people who can’t do church on Sunday morning because for them it is too cliché.

The cover of our church bulletin lists ten reasons you might like it at our church. Several of these reasons were well illustrated on Sunday

You’ll hear sermons that you can actually remember the next day.
You don’t think that religion should be based on fear and driven by rules.
You are seeking acceptance and affirmation of who you are as God’s own beloved.
You want God to be relevant to your life and you want your life to be relevant to God.
You’re looking for a community where there is diversity in the way people look, the way people talk and in what people believe.

I pray for my friends on spiritual journeys that they might find God’s love for them and how to share that love with others.