July 19, 2026 "Sorting Things Out"

8th Sunday after Pentecost

Isaiah 44:6-8

Psalm 86:11-16

Romans 8:12-25

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Dear fellow ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ,

 grace and peace to you from the one who will sort everything out. Amen

So It’s always a fun week

 when the gospel mentions sinners

burning in a furnace of fire and weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Welcome back from vacation….

It’s a dramatic image

 that captures our imagination

 and there is a certain tradition of preachers

 who use such images to invoke fear in their audience

 with the idea that fear of such an end

or time spent in eternity

will lead heretofore unrepentant sinners to accept Jesus and salvation

and therefore avoid the eternal sauna of dental abuse.

It should not come as a surprise to you

 that I am not one of these preachers

it seems to me,

as I have read the scriptures

particularly the teachings of Jesus

that while he did address the question about what happens next

his main concern, the focus of his teaching

 is how we live, in this life, now.

And the focus of the parable of the weeds and the wheat

is actually more about how we live this life

most of all a call to patience and trust in God.

let’s look at this parable again,

Jesus sets up the reality of the world,

that even if what we do is all good

there will always be times when bad is mixed in with the good

just like the weeds get mixed in with the wheat.

At which point we might pause and ask God

 ‘Does it really have to be this way?

You’re God, surely you can take care of evil,

so why let it run rampant?’

 Of course this assumes that evil is a force unto itself

 working in opposition to God,

a common but not biblical assumption,

as my seminary preaching professor, Dr. Craig Satterlee puts it

 “the biblical understanding [is] of God as the Creator of all things through God’s Word, Jesus Christ. The world, full of joy and sorrow, triumph and tragedy, love and hate, 'is not a co-authored project between a good but less-than-omnipotent God and a well-matched demonic counterpart.' God has no competitor. Evil is God’s gift of freedom to accept or reject the Creator misused or misdirected. Wrongly directed freedom comes to its fullest expression in Satan. In response, God remains intent on bringing good, even out of evil.” (My Burden is Light, 87).

This understanding of evil,

 as wrongly directed freedom,

albeit sometimes intentionally wrongly directed freedom,

makes this parable slightly less frustrating for me

 because my instinct is that of the slaves,

who when they realize an enemy has misused their freedom

 and sown weeds in with the wheat

want to go into the field and rip out the weeds,

eradicate the false plants,

the bad plants that are intermingling with the good wheat.

‘We’ve realized the problem now let’s do something about it!’

Now the nuance of the parable that gets a little lost in translation is that

the weed referred to in the parable

is one that looks so much like wheat

that the distinction only comes when it’s time for the wheat to produce grain.

The only foolproof way to tell the two apart

 is to wait until the end and sort them by what they produce, or don’t.

There are times when we have a hard time

 telling what is good from what is bad

 because at least at the start, they look very similar

and our instinct upon discovering the bad is to uproot it,

but The Master in the parable tells the slaves

who are all fired up to go rip out the weeds

to leave them be.

“For in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.”

and he counsels them to let the two plants,

(remember they look very similar until the very end)

 grow until the harvest

and in the end, at the harvest

he will have the reapers, the experts

sort out the weeds from the wheat

and only then will the weeds be discarded

as the grain is gathered in.

Jesus wants us to leave the sorting to him

 because there are times when the bad looks so similar to the good

that we confuse the two and rip up the wrong plant.

In our human calculations

 we might think that to lose some along the way is worth it,

 but not Jesus,

Jesus doesn’t do collateral damage

and counsels us to have patience

to trust that he will take care of everything in the end,

all he asks is that we let him do the final sorting.

Which on the one hand is supremely comforting

A reassurance that the suffering we experience is not caused by God

But on the other hand is extremely frustrating

 because what about the suffering that is going on right now?

Are we to stand idly by

as others misuse their freedom in ways that actively hurt others?

Are we to just let them grow and trust God to sort them out in the end?’

No,

the patience and trust Jesus is counseling

 does not include inaction,

 look at the gospel accounts of Jesus’ own life

 which has him consistently and actively

 interrupting the suffering of those he comes across,

 and teaching and empowering his disciples to do the same,

 however, notice that

when he feeds the hungry, he feeds everyone,

when he heals the sick, he heals all the sick,

and when he dies on the cross, he dies for everyone.

Part of our calling as followers of Christ

is to work for peace and justice in the world,

for everyone,

to use our free will to the best of our ability

 guided by the greatest commandments to love God and neighbor

to bring good for everyone

without trying to determine who deserves it and who doesn’t,

 that is for God to sort out

And it doesn’t always make sense to us,

And we don’t always get it right

But Jesus has promised that it will all be made right in the end

And so we have hope

Even if we can’t see the full picture.

 as Paul says in our reading from Romans today “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption”

 God has not saved us only to have us despair at the state of the world,

God saved us so that we might have hope

 and share that hope with the world,

“For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

God has promised that good will prevail,

 has already taken the biggest step in that direction on the cross,

and made sure, in our baptisms

that we know who we belong to, God.

And so when faced with the less than perfect state of the world

 we hope with patience for the unseen good of God,

 and in the meantime, we seek the good of all we encounter,

trusting that God will sort it out in the end. Amen