| Jesus Hates Zombies. (But Not Weeds.)Tenth Sunday After Pentecost, 2008 A
Gospel: The Holy Gospel According to St. Matthew
Sermon:
Grace,
mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ. AMEN.
I—love—monster
movies. It’s kind of my thing. Werewolves!
Zombies! Creatures from black
lagoons! The campier the better, as far
as I’m concerned. Why, back before I
got hitched, one of my favorite rituals was to gather once a week with my best
friend to watch some truly awful monster flicks. Mutants, aliens, giant bugs, evil spirits,
you name it. Those were the classics in
our canon—the Shakespeare of schlock, the best of the B roll!
And
let me tell you, to this day it confuses the heck out of both my wife and
mother. Just what is it, they wonder,
that my friends and I see in such cinematic masterpieces
as Mansquito or Frankenfish?
Honestly? I think it comes down to monster movie morality. Hear me out on this.
You
and I live in a world of gray areas. A
world of flaws and shortcomings, a world of compromise and half-measure. Such is the nature of human community. Churchgoers understand this better than
most, I think. Christianity has never
been a solitary religion. It has always
been communal—such was Christ’s explicit intention, that we live and worship
and celebrate and mourn in community, amongst people with whom we might have
nothing in common save that Christ has called us together.
Plenty
of people adhere to Christ’s teachings and example in theory. Love is great in theory. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” is something
that most every half-decent human being will affirm—but it’s a lot harder when
you realize that it applies not just in theory but directly to the poor
schlub sitting next to you in the pews.
He might not be so easy to love.
I
often hear people say they believe in God, but have no intention of attending
any worship because they think all Christians are hypocrites and sinners. To which my response is: “Exactly!
You’ve got it exactly! We are
hypocrites! We are flawed! We are pains in the rear—pull up a
chair! Join us!” Christ came for the sick, not the healthy;
for the broken, not the whole. Plenty
of other would-be gods claim the perfect, the pretty, and the pure. Christ, however, comes to claim real
people in the real world.
Real
people are
what Luther called simul iustus et peccator: “At the same time both saint and sinner.” Sinners in that we are, indeed, wicked nasty
biting little apes. Yet saints in that
God loves every single one of us anyway. No one is so good that Judgment does not lay bare their flaws and
hypocrisies. And no one is so perverse
that does not love them and care for them as His own dear child.
It’s
kind of complicated, isn’t it? It’s a
paradox—all the saints are closet sinners, all the sinners twisted saints. You have to realize that your heroes are
human. You have to realize that the
people who hurt you are children of God.
It ain’t easy.
Contrast
this, then, with the monster movies! Do
monster movies have such a subtle, nuanced, compassionate view of the
world? Heavens no! In monster movies, good guys are
sympathetic, evil is ugly, and the jerks get eaten first! Brain-hungry zombies are not both saint and
sinner. Horrible soulless mummies are
not children of God. So grab your
torches and your chainsaws, folks, because in the movies, good is good, and bad
is bad, period.
That’s
the appeal of monster movies! A
wonderfully clear, black-and-white dualistic view of the world. It’s a great way to have some mindless,
escapist popcorn-fun. But it’s a
horrible way to live in the real world, with real people.
Deep
down, we like dualism. It
appeals to us because it is simple.
Right and wrong, good and evil, yin and yang, black and white, angels
and devils. That’s why, whenever we
talk about historical conflicts, we feel the need to pick a “good guy” side and
a “bad guy” side. Oh, history gets
revised, we may switch who’s good and bad, but the dichotomy is still
there. And it works its way into our
religions too.
There’re
a lot of dualistic religions out there.
It’s a very popular mindset. One
of the most famous is Zoroastrianism, which used to be the state religion of
Persia. Zoroaster preached that there
were, in fact, two coequal gods: One
god of order, fire, and truth, and another of chaos, shadow, and lies. At the end of time there would be a titanic
struggle, and may the strongest god win!
Christians
might be more familiar with a now-extinct heresy known as Manicheanism. Mani thought that people, animals, even
inanimate objects were either entirely good or entirely evil. They could not mix, any more than oil and
water. You were either born good and
forever blessed from the cradle, or you were born bad and stayed eternally
wicked and deluded to the core. To this
day, when a person sees the world in overly simplistic terms of black and
white, unable to see the evil in themselves or the goodness in their foes, we
refer to that person’s mindset as “Manichean.” Such
dualities—with their “movie monster” worldviews—have been explicitly and
consistently rejected by the Church of Christ for thousands of
years. Christ lived and taught a
morality of humility, compassion, mercy, and love. That excludes simple black-and-white, excludes easy
human judgment. This is not to say that
we do not speak truth, but Christ commands we ever keep in mind that all
of us are both sinners and saints.
He commands that we view even our most spiteful enemies as loved
by God.
Our
foes are not zombies or werewolves, to be dispatched with gasoline and
chainsaws. Would that life were so
blissfully, stupidly simple! Our foes
are the prodigal sons and daughters of our Father—and as such, they remain our
wayward and mistaken sisters and brothers.
They are our family.
Well,
what does all this have to do with our Gospel?
Let’s see. Our parable this
morning is that of the wheat and the tares.
I think we all know what wheat is.
We wouldn’t get very far without it.
Tares,
on the other hand, are a type of weed.
When sprouts are yet young, tares and wheat are impossible to
distinguish—they look identical. As
they get older, however, the wheat grain grows heavy and the stalks of wheat
bow under the weight.. Tares,
meanwhile, produce smaller, poisonous seeds. And the tares stand tall.
By this you can distinguish tares from wheat, and rip out the former
before the harvest.
Typically,
when this parable is read, preachers assume a dualistic worldview. Theirs is a lame, simple reading of the
parable, whereby there are good people and bad people, and the good people can
take some comfort in knowing that the bad people are going to get set on fire
someday. Weird Al Yankovic summed it up
best: “I really don’t care; in fact I wish him well / ‘cause I’ll be laughing
my head off when he’s burning in Hell!”
Personally,
I fail to see how that’s terribly comforting.
I
mean, what’s the take home message there?
That there are good people and bad people, and God doesn’t kill off all
the bad yet for fear of collateral damage?
In such an understanding, the problem appears to be God’s lack of
accuracy! As if He gave sniper
rifles to all His angels and they’re just waiting for a clear shot!
Moreover,
such an explanation assumes that we’re the wheat, doesn’t it? We’re the ones who are good and pure, and
everybody else deserves the flames. But
like I said before—Christ isn’t the God of the pure. He came for the weeds.
There
is more going on here than some primitive monster-movie worldview. There is always more than meets the
eye with the teachings of Christ. After
all, if these parables were so simple to understand, why would the Apostles be
so consistently confused, begging Jesus to explain further?
The
Parable of the Wheat and Tares is not an endorsement of a simple
black-and-white mindset, but rather an explicit rejection of it. You may think you know who the wicked
are, and you may think it’s best to rip them out of the world and be
done with it. But here’s the
kicker: You’re a weed. We all are.
And God has not ripped you up yet, has He? And why not? Because He
loves you.
Mixed
within us are seeds of both poison and nourishment: both seeds which God
intends for His harvest, and seeds the Devil has sown to defile it. Christ says the angels will come some day to
pull out the poison and cast it to fire.
Do the weeds burn forever? Are
they destroyed? Are they cleansed and
purified? I don’t know. But I don’t think this parable is meant as
an eschatology—an easy roadmap or blueprint for who goes up and who goes
down. Hell is a topic for another day. But
the take home message of this parable for us, for Christians, is that we live
in a world of hope. A world
where poisonous weeds like you and I are graciously allowed to flourish in the
sure promise that one day God will bring His work to fruition in us. The Devil sought to ruin God’s harvest by
sowing bad seed in us. But Christ’s
redemption is so total that even poison may grow to become the
pride of the harvest.
In
Christ, the broken find love. In
Christ, the weed is given a place in the garden. In Christ, no one is beyond hope.
And
thank God for that! AMEN.
|
(I'm a-scared!) This is going to be the most bizarre cinematic experience I've seen since... well, 
Eucharist with several ladies at one of the local elder homes capped off an enjoyable afternoon, and I even had time to get through my "incrementals." (I read 10 pages a day of 
