8th Sunday after Pentecost (2026)

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I turned the radio on Wednesday morning while I was driving to church and the first sound bite that I heard was: a litany of quotes including this one: “…we must criminalize them and rid them from our society!”  

This sound-bite unfortunately came from an American political pundit. I’m not going to share which one. It doesn’t really matter which person it was. Sadly, it could have come from really anyone. It seems as if the volume has been turned up this week on this kind of rhetoric imploring us that it is now time – perhaps our last chance - to once-and-for-all root out particular ideologies or political ideas fearing that the nation or world will be lost if we don’t act.

And then, at church, I opened my Bible and read the parable we just heard from today’s Gospel lesson. It struck me that this parable today speaks to the same idea to what I heard on the radio– albeit allegorically. And we know it’s an allegory because Jesus interprets the parable for us in verses 37-43. So, we encounter today a story about a wheat farm. This farm is meant to be a representation of the places we live, the world. The farm hands are faithful people; the seeds are the offspring of the faithful; and the Master of the farm is the Son of Man – Jesus himself. In the case of our parable, wheat seed – representative of the next faithful generation - is sown by the Son of Man and then an “enemy” who Jesus names as “the devil” comes and sows weeds which represent “the children of the devil” as Jesus calls them or evil people. These weeds grow among the desired wheat crop. The story is an allegory for evil things infecting the good wheat crop which represents good people and good things.

The farm hands are thus filled with righteous anger about their predicament. It make sense. They’re frustrated that weeds have come up among their good crop. They ask if the seed they planted was good seed and the Master assures them it was, but that an enemy deliberately sowed weeds among the wheat.

So, in an allegorical sense, good people – the farm hands - have worked to raise good people (the wheat). In the midst of that good project, an evil enemy has infiltrated and sowed bad people amongst the good.

The instinct of the farm workers is to uproot those weeds! Get rid of them! Pull them out so that the good crop can flourish. They want to purify their crop.  

Now, recall the sound bite from the radio: “We must rid them from our society…” It’s an age-old idea going back further than even the Bible. My soundbite from the radio on Wednesday morning is representative of this ancient idea. The farm workers - us humans - we feel compelled to do the work of rooting out evil, or at least we want to empower someone who will do that work on our behalf.

Turn on a news channel, a talk-radio station, a podcast, or an online video that is addressing current events. You’ll hear someone telling you that now is the time to root out the evil, uproot the enemy, and purify the system. Someone will tell you we only have time now and they are the one that can save the wheat crop from being choked out by the weeds!

That’s the first narrative arc of the parable.

The second one begins with the Master, who says, “No; …in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest;[…]”

No. Do not root out the weeds.

The Master – the Son of Man, Jesus himself says to tend to both wheat and weeds until the harvest when The Master of the farm will separate the weeds from the wheat.

Jesus claims this job as his. Not ours.

We are called by Christ to tend the weeds alongside the wheat. To love the weeds. To have compassion for the weeds. To have hope that the weeds may produce fruit alongside the wheat.

So, what I heard on the radio this week is a lie. It’s a lie that any one of us is called to rid our world of evil. It is a lie that any one of us are called to be the uprooters. It’s a lie that we are the ones to judge and to condemn.

We are not called to do the work of judging and rooting out and saving. We have one Judge and one Savior and it’s not you, it’s not me, and it’s not any one of our state, local or national leaders. Our Savior is Jesus Christ. Any statement that says something other than that is a lie.    

The parable today challenges us to consider how we really do believe that if we uproot the weeds from the wheat field, then the wheat will have a better chance to thrive. And you know what, that is empirically true! For example, we weed our home gardens all the time to allow for the flowers and vegetables to grow better. So, logically, we think that if we uproot evil from the world, then the good will thrive. This parable challenges us to go to the logical conclusion of that thought process… Jesus challenges us to wonder: how do we root out the evil from the world if that’s what we’ve got to do? Do we go door to door, neighbor to neighbor, and interview them to find out if they’re evil? And, how do we make that determination? And, if we decide they are evil, then what? What does the act of rooting out look like?

When does the work of the good cross over into being evil itself?

This is exactly why Jesus tells us it’s our job to tend the weeds and the wheat, together. We are not qualified to uproot the weeds because we will most certainly pull the wheat out with the weeds. We’ll make mistakes and we’ll hurt our neighbors in the very process of trying to save them.

So, instead we tend the weeds alongside the wheat. We tend to what is good in our world and we humbly and honestly acknowledge that evil exists too and we acknowledge that some people unfortunately participate in it. And this isn’t to say that we let evil run rampant, but in our humbleness we trust our Savior Jesus Christ to judge, and that allows us to build systems of human accountability are filled with compassion and care as we tend to weed, to the evil, in hope that Christ will enter that tender, complex and challenging space to help heal even such that the weeds may bear fruit.

Christ calls us to into a tough space. A space of compassion and care for our enemies, perceived and real. In the midst of a cultural environment that constantly calls for us to raise up heroes who will root out these enemies, we stand with Christ, the Son of Man, who tells us to compassionately tend to the weeds and the wheat together.  

The hope is that at the harvest time, at the end of the age when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead, Christ’s loving compassion and God’s deep and ever flowing mercy will come to all of us – wheat and weeds. Our hope is that there will be nobody thrown into the furnace of fire, but that through God’s Mercy in Christ’s death and resurrection, we will all shine like the sun in the Kingdom of God.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Rev. Ryan Heckman | July 19, 2026