6/26/66

Scripture: Matthew 13: 24-30.

How shall we deal with evil? Silly question! Oppose it, of course, if we have any shred of the love of goodness. Let the theme song of the churchman be “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as if to war.”

I. Yes, but that bare statement is too simple. For the question involves perplexities that have aggravated and intrigued men’s minds from the beginning of history. This question aggravated Plato. It pushes out at us from today’s headlines. People grappled with it in Jesus’ days in Palestine with such intensity that he addressed this story -- this parable -- to his hearers:

“The kingdom of heaven,” he said, “may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the householder came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed field? How then has it weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No; lest in gathering the seeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

That story, like all of Jesus’ parables, comes straight out of the life that people knew in his time and place. Theirs was largely an agricultural economy. Most people knew a lot about herds and flocks and grain fields. Here was a man who got his wheat field planted. Then he and his men went to sleep. They were probably tired by that time and needed rest. But, while they slept, a sly and cunning enemy slipped quietly into the field and deliberately planted the field with weeds, sowing a kind of seed that even looked a good deal like wheat grains. It was not until the plants of both the wheat gains and the weed seeds began to grow that the discerning field hands saw what was happening; and they reported it to the owner. The householder took a quick look at the field; saw what had happened; agreed that some enemy had “done him in,” trying to ruin his crop. That meant no income, and little bread for his household.

What should he do? Go over the field and pull up the weeds? You don’t do that in a wheat field. Even if you could, it would probably disturb the wheat roots so much as to spoil the whole crop. Some damage was bound to occur now. But the whole crop need not be lost. The farmer told his men to let it all grow together until the harvest. Then, when the crop had matured and ripened, the separation could and would be made.

Now of course this incident could not have occurred in the great wheat-growing sections of America where farms stretch over hundreds and thousands of acres and where the sowing of the crop requires both time and complicated machinery. But it could happen in a small country like Palestine, where farming land was scarce, and individual tracts were small, with sowing and harvesting being done by hand.

There was a well-known weed, a poisonous and bearded grass or darnel, that looked enough like wheat so that the Rabbis called it “a perverted kind of wheat.” Obviously Jesus’ parable would appeal to the understanding of an audience composed of people who knew how easy it was for an enemy to destroy a man’s crop by a night foray into his small field. And his advice, under that circumstance, to “let both grow together until the harvest,” must have seemed the height of good sense to them. In a hand labor farm economy, where every stalk of grain was handled in the harvest, the sorting could be done, and the good wheat could be saved.

Now we come to the more difficult point; what was Jesus trying to say to his hearers? Why did he use the parable? Here, serious scholars seem to be in some disagreement. Some say he was debating the question of what to do with Judas Iscariot who already showed signs of defection from Jesus’ band of followers. Should he send Judas away? If he did, what would be the effect on those who stayed? And he may have reasoned: “Perhaps we had better let Judas stay until we’re sure he is no longer one of us. Then it will be time to ask him to leave the group.”

The early church treasured the parable; for there were people in the fellowship who were evildoers and there were the purists who wanted to throw them out. A good deal of this controversy rumbles through Paul’s letters. And Paul makes it clear that he is on the side of patience. He would seem to subscribe to our Lord’s admonition in the parable - “Let both grow together until the harvest.” Evildoers were warned, prayed over, given every chance to mend their ways, and, only as a last resort, asked to leave the fellowship.

Three hundred years later, one of the church fathers, Augustine, when confronted by a similar situation, fell back on the parable for guidance. There was a group of intense Christians who were indignant at what they regarded as toleration of heresy in the church. They raised the cry, “Purify the church” and advocated an all-out persecution of anyone suspected of dangerous thoughts and practices. Augustine was certainly no friend of heresy. But he took issue with the extreme purists because he did not want the church destroyed by civil strife, and the fellowship broken by increasing hatred. He seems to have agreed in principle with those who wanted to pull up the weeds, so to speak. But he was not so sure that he always knew the difference between the weeds and the wheat in any given case. So he advised: “Let both grow together until the harvest.”

The sheer power of this parable comes through to one who gives it careful consideration. In a half dozen sentences, it suggests several fundamental truths about proper relationships between God, man and evil:

1) Good and evil are real facts to be encountered and dealt with.

2) Good and evil are, finally, as different as wheat and weeds -- - there is no ultimate confusion as to which is which.

3) There is need for the wisdom and the patience of God in dealing with evil.

4) Man alone is neither capable of rooting out evil nor able to do ` so; only God can do that.

5) Hardest of all, man must accept the inevitable interval involved in the growth of good and evil to the point that they can be identified and dealt with.

There is a time for planting and a time for harvesting, and stretching between the two is the inevitable interval --- a time for patient waiting during which the plant grows, and the determination of its true nature is made. It appears to be the counsel of our Lord that we should “let both grow together to the harvest,” and then the separation can be made. Which may be a way of saying that there is no place for snap judgments in God’s dealing with the world --- even with the evil in the world.

Why do we who would like to think God’s thoughts after Him have so much trouble with this? Have we not said, and tried to believe, that He sends his rain on the just and the unjust alike? Did he not send His son to call sinners as well as the righteous to repentance? Are we not grateful to God that there is no writing-off of anyone of us as being “hopeless” or “lost” or “worthless?” The point of the parable seems to be, clearly, that God insists on being fair to evil as well as to the good until the full nature of both can be determined. This is not a way of coddling and condoning evil; it is the only known way of protecting the good.

II. Above the landscape of the way we usually do things let us stand on this insight of our Lord, and we get a different perspective on people and events. Look back in our own national history, for example, to the Civil War between the states. It now seems appalling that attitudes could have been so crystal-clear on both sides --- if we may judge by what they were saying. It was a time of “black and white judgments.” You were “for” slavery or “against” slavery. There was no “perhaps” admitted by either side. It was a time of sharp, clear, harsh, snap judgment on “people, places, and things.”

Something like a century has elapsed since that day. Now how do people talk of the Civil War? Harold Bosley says that he was visiting, 3 or 4 years ago, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He went to the old capitol building, now a museum, to study the huge painting of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. Near him were seated a mother and her two small sons, looking at the picture. The older boy asked, “Which are the goodies and the baddies in that picture?” His mother replied softly, “It’s hard to tell.” “Why are they trying to kill each other?” the boy persisted. The mother answered him slowly, telling about slavery and other troubles that had erupted in the Civil War. “Did they have to fight?” the lad asked. Notice her reply: “They thought so.”

In that answer is distilled the gentleness which comes after a century of patient waiting and experience. Gone are the sharpness, the harshness of snap judgments --- now there is still an awareness, of course, of the evil of slavery; but also there is some awareness of what may be called the will to misunderstand, to misrepresent, and to misjudge people who disagree with us. This chapter in our national experience with its tragedy not yet wholly healed, may be submitted in evidence for the adage: “Two wrongs do not make a right.” Wherever people impatiently break forth with snap judgments, impatiently brushing past the inevitable interval of growth, another such chapter is in the making.

Why do we act this way? No answer is easy. Perhaps it is sometimes because we are afraid of the changes proposed by those who differ from us, and of course fear is always a risky guide. Sometimes we may act as we do because we do not take time to be sure before we make up our minds. The philosopher, Socrates, once observed: “He who takes only a few things into account finds it easy to pronounce judgment.” This way of talking is no poorly-disguised plea to be soft with evil; it is rather an open plea to be sure that what we first see as evil is actually evil before we move in on it, lest we destroy the good as well. And we have enough reason for some caution. The policy of “wait and see” is not pleasing to the eager young crusaders of the earth who cry, “Let me go forth and purge the world,” launching a reign of naked persecution of all who differ. But it will commend itself to those who have studied the way in which those who are called “dangerous radicals” in one generation become the so-called “founding fathers” in the next.

Recall how those who were believed by some to be young radicals, clustered around William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, in colonial days, become the Founding Fathers of our country’s Declaration of Independence; and how they formulated the key ideas of the Constitution of the United States. They were, in fact, the grand architects of many of our basic institutions. They were, for a time, accounted to be rebels, with a price on their heads for a while, yet became respected and honored later on. Thus the wheel of history turned under the impulse of God’s patience and love.

III. The impulse of all this is not lost on persons in positions of responsibility in our colleges and universities; as well as in our churches and in public institutions. Every wise college or university president knows that he must always be on the lookout to guard zealously the right of his teachers to grow toward full maturity in their thinking. He must restrain those misguided individuals who want to rush into a faculty and uproot the dangerous ideas and radical thinkers occasionally found there. For such well-intentioned individuals are like the servants who were ready to rush out to the field and tear up the weeds even when it was difficult to separate weeds from wheat stalks, and when uprooting one might well kill the other. Just as it seems to be Jesus’ wisdom to let weeds and wheat, once sown, grow to maturity before separating them, it is the part of wisdom for a great center of learning to prize criticism and differences of opinion as essential to its very being. And we may well honor institutions that do this in the face of biting criticism from committees that are all too often in evidence, apparently determined to dominate the educational institutions of America.

Every lover of civil liberties will want to keep at heart this insight of our Lord’s way of thinking in our world. Within the last half century we have had it demonstrated repeatedly that men can lose liberty either by overthrow from without or by betrayal of the spirit of freedom within their own country. In fact we have it in words of J. Edgar Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower that the fear of communism in our country may pose a greater threat to American civil liberties than communism itself. No experienced mind questions the truth that communism would put an end to what we know as a free society. It has done so many times in numerous countries, and it will do so again wherever it has the chance. But many of us who know this are not willing to face the sober truth that the fear of communism too often betrays us into snap judgments which equate serious criticism of our way of life with treason. Justice Olive Wendel Holmes’ “Golden Rule for freedom of thought” was “not free thought just for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought we hate.”

Some 14 years ago, Justice Learned Hand observed, concerning our tendency toward repression of cultural heresies and suppression of the heretics, that: “the doctrines that so frighten us constitute a faith, which we must match with a faith, held with equal ardor and conviction. So,” he says, “we are repeatedly assured, and rightly assured; but what we much less often observe is that, in making use of our faith as a defense, we may be in danger of destroying its foundations and abandoning its postulates.”

IV. Great patience, akin to the patience of God, is essential to the building of anything worthwhile --- especially to the greatest thing of all, the kingdom of God. Just as Rome was not built in a day, the kingdom of love cannot be established overnight, nor in any one generation. It can not be shoved into being by the fretful, self-righteous “men in a hurry.” How clearly Jesus saw it, and pointed out that it must be built patiently and persistently. The same is true of our efforts to be, and to become, a church; it must be done patiently, persistently with a steady, continuing effort; so that the Kingdom of God may be known in this family of faith as in others of like purpose. We need this kind of undefeated patience. We need Christ’s kind of patience. His was a positive, radiant grace. It flowed from his awareness of the greatness and goodness of God. Believing that God was working a mighty work of redemption through him, he gave himself to the work of making it real. Lying deep beneath all that happened in him was this confidence that “I work and my Father works in me.”

Perhaps that was the source of his patience in working with the disciples. He spent untold hours with them, answering their questions; training them to think; to feel and to pray for the kingdom. When they deserted him in the end, he could have wondered whether or not it had been worth his effort or whether his faith had been misplaced. But he had been right. Like some mighty magnet, it drew them to him and to the work of the kingdom again.

Those first disciples, like us, wanted to get things done in a hurry. Some of them thought that the kingdom would come right away. When they could not see it coming right away, some apparently thought that their faith had been misplaced and they left the fellowship. Others concluded that time was on God’s side and that He would use as much of it as he needed in the building of His kingdom. Thereupon they began to do two things that belong in Christian ethics: “wait and see” and “work and pray.” This is not the quiet folding of hands in moral irresponsibility. It is a clear recognition that great undertakings take time --- and the work of the kingdom may take an eternity --- only God knows.

Patience, so understood, does not mean being soft with evil nor being sentimental with evildoers. Rather, patience requires firmness --- the firmness of conviction, purpose and loyalty; but a firmness tempered with the gentleness that is aware of need for time until evil has grown to the point where it can be recognized and distinguished and separated from the good, and overcome.

Tuberculosis has been a great evil, and still is. But conquest has been won by the patient persistence of those who have struggled to overcome it. Cancer is a great evil, and conquest of it will surely come. But the ones who will win the victory -- and are winning it now -- are those of infinite patience in the laboratory and hospital and whose patience keeps them persistently at it. They must have the resources -- money and equipment and time. Firmness, persistence, understanding and patience are ingredients of the victory; and they take time.

The same is true of cancerous ideologies that present an evil challenge to all that we believe in and stand for. Our victory over them will come in firmness, patience and understanding operating steadily in our thought and life --- these will win, or else the victory will not come. This is not time to run out of patience with Russia or Red China or Fidel Castro in our effort to hurry along a complete victory. As surely as we were to abandon our firmness and patience, so surely would we be tempted to risk or actually take the steps that upset the precarious balance of peace and heighten the risk of irrevocable disaster.

True patience is firmness born of conviction, sustained by a purpose, guided by a gentleness which knows that time and persistence are essential ingredients of true victories.

In the light of a Christian ethic, there is one answer to the question, “Shall we be patient with evil?” and this is it: “Yes -- as patient as God is with sinners like us and with the evil in our lives.”

If the human point of Jesus’ parable can get through to our callused consciences and hardened hearts, it can make a tremendous difference in the kind of home, church, community, and world we shall build. Let us hold on snap judgments; let us not just hurry from headline to headline in frantic haste. Let no character be defamed by hearsay and gossip even in fundamental matters. But let the growth go on until the harvest can rightly separate the right from the wrong.

V. We truly need something of the patience of God if we are to live with each other. It is hard, as we well know, to be completely honest with other persons -- especially with those who disagree with us. Yet we know, from the snap judgments which people have passed on us and on others, how unfair they usually are. Here, Jesus shows the way. He frequently heard the word “sinner” applied freely to people around him. The word had a real bite then. It indicated someone you should not even associate with; someone from whom you should separate yourself as far as possible in all relationship.

It is striking that our Lord paid little attention to the distinctions that were supposed to keep saint and sinner apart. He knew that there was much more to any person than the sin he or she was supposed to have committed. He could see a child of God; a person who needed God; a creature in search of his Creator; a child in need of his Father, a human being in need of a friend. Jesus took the time, in loving patience, to know the sinner, beneath his sins to love him because of his need. That is why Jesus lived in a different ethical world from that of the accepted religious-ethical code of his day.

We are called to overcome evil with good -- when we are sure that we can distinguish them. We are called to “build temples, not to whittle sticks.” We are called to exercise the patience of God, seeing Him actually at work in people like ourselves. How much of this can we honestly expect to do? Do you recall the account of a little boy in a refugee camp who was offered a glass of milk by a Red Cross worker. It was a long time since he had had any and what little they had to eat or drink in the camp had been necessarily doled out sparingly. The boy looked hungrily at the glass of milk and asked softly, “How deep shall I drink, Ma’am?” “Drink as deep as you can, son,” she said. So let it be with our draft on the patience of God which comes to us in Christ. “How much of that am I supposed to have?” we ask. And the reply is: “As much as you can.”

[Let us pray: Give us grace, Lord, to drink as deep as we can, and as long as we can, of the patience that finally finds the good harvest for all Thy people. Amen.]

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, June 26, 1966.

Imiola Church, September 21, 1969.

Babcock Congregational Church, July 5, 1970.

Nekoosa UCC, July 5, 1970.

Tomah Congregational Church, UCC, July 12, 1970.

Neillsville Church, UCC, July 19, 1970.

Rudolph Moravian Church, November 1, 1970.

Delta, St. Paul’s UCC, May 23, 1971.

Cable Congregational Church, UCC, May 23, 1971.

Spider Lake UCC, May 23, 1971.

Marshfield UCC, August 8, 1971.

Stratford UCC, August 8, 1971.

Waioli Hui’ia Church, November 7, 1971.