July 19 ~ we, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, hope for what we do not see...

Video will be uploaded later in the week

Isaiah 44:6-8

Psalm 86:11-17  

Romans 8:12-25  

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Sermon by Pastor Joel

If you’ve followed Canadian news over the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed something. We seem to be sorting ourselves into camps. Every story becomes a contest. One side is right, the other side is wrong. Whether it’s debates over housing affordability, immigration, artificial intelligence, relations with the United States, even the devastation of wildfires, we have become remarkably quick to decide who the good people are and who the bad people are. Social media only makes it worse. The louder we condemn, the more attention we receive. Before long, we begin believing that if only we could remove those people—those politicians, those corporations, those activists, those bureaucrats, those elites, those protesters—then everything would finally be well.

Jesus tells a story that sounds surprisingly familiar. Someone has planted weeds among the wheat, and the workers see the problem immediately. “Should we pull them up?” It seems like an obvious question. Surely the answer is yes. Why would anyone leave weeds in a field? But Jesus surprises everyone. “No,” the landowner says. “Leave them both to grow together until the harvest.” Why? “Because in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.”

That answer has always made people uncomfortable. It feels passive. It almost sounds irresponsible. Surely wrongdoing should be confronted, injustice opposed, and hatred resisted. Of course it should. Jesus spent his entire ministry confronting suffering. He healed the sick, challenged religious hypocrisy, welcomed the excluded, defended the vulnerable, and stood with those society preferred not to see. This parable is not a call to ignore injustice. It is a warning about something else. It is a warning about the danger of believing that we know with certainty who belongs to God and who does not.

Notice that the servants are absolutely convinced they can tell the wheat from the weeds. They are ready to act. They have no hesitation. The only one who hesitates is the landowner. Not because he cannot see the weeds, but because he understands something the servants do not. Human beings are not very good at making final judgments about one another. Life is rarely as simple as we imagine.

The older I get, the more I realize that every one of us is a mixture of wheat and weeds. We are capable of extraordinary generosity and astonishing selfishness. We can be patient with one person and impatient with another. We can fight passionately for justice while allowing pride to creep quietly into our hearts. None of us is entirely one thing or the other.

Martin Luther understood this better than most. He described Christians as simul justus et pecator—simultaneously saint and sinner. That simple phrase has always struck me as one of the most honest descriptions of the human condition. We are forgiven for our wrongdoing. We are loved despite that wrongdoing and continue to mess up. We are growing, changing, learning, and sometimes stumbling. Which means that whenever we become convinced that we are the wheat and someone else is the weed, we have probably misunderstood the Gospel.

Grace has never been about separating worthy people from unworthy people. Grace is God’s refusal to give up on any of us.

That feels especially important today. Canada faces enormous challenges. Housing remains out of reach for many young families. Food prices continue to stretch household budgets. Communities wrestle with homelessness while trying to balance compassion, safety, and limited resources. Artificial intelligence promises remarkable advances while raising genuine concerns about employment, truth, and the future of human work. These are real issues. Christians should care deeply about every one of them. But Jesus reminds us that our neighbours are never the enemy.

The temptation in every age is to believe that if we could simply eliminate certain people, our problems would disappear. History tells us something different. Every generation has found someone to blame. Every generation has imagined that society would flourish if only the “wrong” people were removed. Jesus refuses to think that way. Instead, he asks us to live together, to love one another, to seek justice, to tell the truth, to protect the vulnerable, and at the same time to resist appointing ourselves as judges of another person’s worth before God.

That is much harder than condemnation. If we are honest with ourselves, judgment feels satisfying. Mercy rarely does. Mercy is slower. It requires humility. Mercy asks us to admit that we do not always see clearly.

I often think about the eclectic group of people Jesus hung out with. A tax collector who worked for Rome. A zealot who wanted to overthrow Rome. People who fished for a living. Women ignored by society. People living with illness. People carrying painful pasts. If someone had suggested cleaning up that group in those early days of Christianity, there wouldn’t have been much of a church left. Instead, Jesus trusted grace to accomplish what judgment never could. Transformation.

That is still how God works. I have seen marriages recover after everyone else thought they were finished. I have seen people trapped in addiction discover freedom. I have watched churches that believed they were dying discover entirely new ways of serving their communities. I have watched strangers become family within our community of faith. None of those stories happened because someone was thrown away. They happened because someone stayed long enough for grace to do its work.

Perhaps that’s what our parable today is trying to say. Not to become indifferent to wrongdoing. Not to pretend injustice doesn’t matter. But to trust that God’s patience is greater than ours. To believe that people are never simply weeds. To remember that every one of us stands in need of mercy. And perhaps to wonder whether the person we have quietly written off may yet surprise us, just as God continues to surprise us.

In the end, Jesus says that the harvest belongs to God. Not to us. And that is great news. Because if the life of the church depended on our ability to sort everyone correctly, there would not be much wheat left. Instead, we live by grace. We grow together. We forgive one another. We work for justice without surrendering to hatred. And we trust that God is not done with us yet.  Amen.