Proper 11, Year A                                                                   Wisdom 12:13, 16-19
July 17, 2005                                                                            Psalm 86
St. Margaret of Scotland Episcopal Church                               Romans 8:18-25
The Rev. Linda McCloud, Pastor                                              Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 

Those Pesky Weeds 

            There’s a line in the Prayer Book - and I think it’s also in the Good Book - that says, “Deliver us from evil.”  Today, I want to address a problem that is running barefoot in our world – the problem of evil.  More specifically, if God is good, why does God allow evil to exist side by side with Good?  I want to say at the outset that I don’t have all the answers.  I probably don’t have any answers.  But I thought that together we could explore the questions.   

First of all, let’s establish a working definition of evil.  The classic definition, simply put, is that evil is the absence of good.  It is the absence of a good that is natural to a human being.  Therefore, evil is the absence of what ought to be there. 

God in God’s great wisdom and love created the world and declared that it was good.  In fact, after God created humankind and then surveyed all that he had done, he declared that it was very good.  So we are left to wonder what went wrong.  How did evil get here in the first place?  For this I offer no original ideas.  I offer what Christian thinkers have hammered out over a period of almost two thousand years.   

I have come to agree that pride is the original sin of the universe.  Pride says we don’t need God.  Pride prompts us to ignore God’s good love and God’s commandments to walk in that love.  Pride distorts the truth for its own purposes – makes up its own rules of behavior. I think that’s how evil entered into the picture of the human race. 

St. Augustine, who lived about fifteen hundred years ago, said that nothing could be corrupted unless it was good in the first place.  So evil diminishes the good.  If evil is the absence of good, can good be the absence of evil?  In our daily struggle with evil all around us, our job is to overcome evil with good.  In our culture, we used to have heroes that fought against evil.  By contrast, we are keenly aware of the doers of evil deeds whose followers treat them as heroes.  Some days, we wonder who is winning. 

In our Gospel reading for today, Jesus compares evil to weeds which were sown among the wheat.  Those pesky weeds are everywhere.  In fact, they look so much like the wheat coming up that it’s hard to tell weeds from wheat at first.  The wheat had to bear grain before anyone could tell the difference.  Then it was too late to uproot the weeds.  Notice how Jesus says we should treat the weeds.   

There is a lesson here for the Church on earth.  First, the church consists of both good and bad.  Second, God is not the author of evil.  And third, God does not always 0punish the wicked on the spot, but patiently bears with them.  That’s probably why the job of deciding which plants are weeds and which are wheat is given to the angels and not to human beings.  In our own lives, we need to be careful of attitudes that maybe – just maybe, God did not plant there. 

Right now, I have things growing in my yard that I did not plant there.  Some little plants keep springing up and crowding my Begonias.  I didn’t plant them, but all this rain that keeps falling on the just and on the unjust alike seems to bring them out of the ground.  There are hundreds of them.  They look like miniature mimosa trees.  I have tried to root them out of my Begonias, but I’ve given up pulling them away from the elephant ears and other plants.  I feel a little guilty pulling them up because I don’t know what they really are.  Maybe they’re a flower.  But for now, I’m treating them as if they were weeds.  And I’m pulling them up myself, because they will take nourishment from the soil that I want my flowers to have.   

Evil is a lot like those pesky weeds.  Evil saps the strength of the good.  For example, those who work with abused children say that for every negative comment that is made to a child, it takes seven positive comments to soothe out that one negative.   

Jesus went about doing good.  Evil is what put Jesus on the cross.  But evil could not keep him in the grave.  Jesus rose again so we could all share in the abundant life of God.  In Jesus we have this hope.   

St. Paul, the truly great original Christian thinker, comments on this in our Epistle for today.  He says that because of human failure at the beginning, all creation is groaning.  Paul draws a connection between evil and suffering.  When evil is done everyone suffers.  Innocents suffer. The environment suffers.  But the good news is that we have hope of new life in Christ.  Paul gives us the picture of creation groaning as if attempting to give birth to what is good, renewed, or innocent.  It’s as if Paul is saying that even creation wants to start over.   

Planet Earth is shifting and changing.  We have learned over the years that there is hardly any way to predict an absolutely safe place to be.  We know this:  we probably won’t get off the planet alive, and we probably won’t get off the planet without suffering.  Our passage from Romans links suffering to evil.  But it doesn’t stop there.  It goes on to talk about the hope we have in God.   

Paul links us together with our environment in such a way that he says that all creation - and we are all God’s creation - all creation is craning its neck in confident hope – looking for renewal and love from God.  Christians can help that love to flourish.  Evil would pull us back and discourage us from getting a fresh start in God’s love.  Evil would say there’s no hope.  Evil is wrong about that.  Because of the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus, it’s possible for us to participate in this process of starting over.  We can do this in small ways every day.   

There’s another thing about Planet Earth that we need to think about.  What about random events of nature in which people lose their lives and property?  Some people consider these random events to have evil effects.  That’s because things like the hurricane that made landfall in the Gulf last Sunday, and the next one that’s on its way, cause chaos.  The problem with natural chaos is that it causes random tragedies.  Natural chaos is not in itself wrong or malevolent, yet many consider its results to be evil.  That’s  because it keeps some people from believing in and trusting in the goodness of God.  It causes people to ask, “Why me?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  What have I done to deserve this tragedy?”  The answer is – nothing.   

So, if Christians don’t have all the answers to the problem of evil, at least we have the secret of the cure for evil.  God in Christ has made a way for us to be free from the ravages of sin and evil.  That’s why it’s a good idea for Christians to band together in weekly worship of Almighty God.  That’s why it’s a good idea for Christians to pray daily and keep a constant vigil against falling away from the good.  When we come to this altar for communion, we receive the very life of God in the body and blood of Christ.  This is good indeed. 

As Christians in our world today, we must face the fact that evil is real, unexplainable, and often inescapable.  But Christian reaction to it is different from that of some other world religions.  We have hope of newness of life in God.  We also recognize our responsibilities and duties concerning the presence of evil in the world.  Our first duty is to combat evil in our own lives and in the world by every means possible.  And secondly, our duty is to believe that God is sovereign, and that God will ultimately vanquish all evil with his perfect wisdom and providence.   

            So how can we cultivate the good in our lives and overcome the evil that is present in our culture?  This is where we put our hope in Christ.  We can cultivate our own prayer life, because our hope is in Christ, who has once and for all defeated evil.  When we pray to our heavenly father in the name of Jesus, we are linked to all others who are praying.  There is strength in this to combat evil.             

So we still have not arrived at any answers, but we can cultivate an attitude of hope and hopefulness.  We can look for the best in others and try to see God at work in them.  Living in hope means that we can fan to flame any spark of good that we see in others.  And we can pray – “Deliver us from evil.”