Beloved

Early this week I found myself outside in the hot tub in the back yard late at night. As I relaxed into the warm water, I found myself gazing at the stars, which seemed unusually distinct for our Seattle area skies. Maybe it was the dry weather we’ve been having. As I gazed at the stars, in their distant marvelous beauty, I couldn’t help but think that the same God who set the spangled stars in the heavens, is the God who loves and cares for the thousands of unaccompanied children on the border, the countless slain children in Israel and Palestine, and the eighty children lost in the Malaysian Airlines plane that was shot down over Ukraine. How God must grieve over each child.
Eugene Peterson says that Psalm 129 is about perseverance, patience in the presence of withering resistance, stick-to-itiveness when distractions are more entertaining. But this week I heard a different voice in Psalm 129. This week, when I hear Psalm 129, I hear it in the voices of children – Honduran children, Salvadoran children, Guatemalan children, Israeli children, Palestinian children, Dutch children, Malaysian children, children of every place who are attacked in their youth, children whose backs are plowed.
“Often have they attacked me from my youth” – let the children now say – “often have they attacked me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me. The plowers plowed on my back; they made their furrows long.” The LORD is righteous; he has cut the cords of the wicked. May all who hate the children be put to shame and turned backward. Let them be like the grass on the housetops that withers before it grows up, with which reapers do not fill their hands or binders of sheaves their arms, while those who pass by do not say, “The blessing of the LORD be upon you! We bless you in the name of the LORD!”
In these three situations I have named, the unaccompanied children at the border, the anxious and struggling and slain children of Israel/Palestine, the unsuspecting children on a plane over the contested territory of the Eastern Ukraine, the most basic facts are the same. The land and borders are contested. The children suffer. When I listen to the message of the scriptures and the stars I hear this: They are the same, these children and mine. Who am I to say which ones are the wheat, and which ones are the tares?
Jesus told the parable of the Wheat and the Tares to a multitude so large that he was forced to teach from a boat on the lake. But he withdrew from the multitude before the disciples asked him to interpret it. It’s pretty clear that Matthew especially wanted to clarify the meaning of this parable for his audience, but suspected that most people were not prepared to understand. Remember that the community in which the gospel of Matthew arose was comprised of a mixed community of Judean émigrés and gentile converts in Syria. Syria – another place of contested land and borders and suffering children. On the surface, this parable seems to be saying that some people are like weeds, and they are dangerous – but the people who are wheat need to put up with them – to persevere – and let God’s messengers sort it out in the end. For that early Christian community, it might seem important to root out potential traitors and spies. After all, the Matthew’s people were refugees from the Jerusalem temple and adherent to a religion that had fallen out of favor in Rome. And when we hear that the wheat represents the children of the Son of Man and the weeds represent the children of the evil one, it is only natural that we would identify ourselves quickly with the wheat, and to vilify the weeds. However, I think there is something else going on here.
First, there is the nature of the tares. I learned this week that they were probably bearded darnel, a vetch that is similar to wild rice. It can be poisonous, unless it is prepared in a particular way – roasted first to destroy a bacterium that is thought to be the source of the poison. Thus, when subjected to the fire, it could become nourishing and beneficial. Still, there is the habit of the roots of the bearded darnel, which can indeed become entwined around the roots of the other grasses with which it shares the earth. If the tares are torn out, the wheat plants come out too. If left in place, the tares can even provide the benefit of stabilizing the soil. Who are we to say that the tares are evil?
Still, Matthew is clear in Jesus’ explanation to the disciples that the tares are the children of the evil one. Or is he? A wooden translation of verse 41 goes like this: Will send out, the son of man, the angels of him, and they will gather together from the realm of him the obstacles and the ones practicing lawlessness. Remember, Mathew is attempting to reestablish Torah for the covenant people who have lost their sacred home – the temple and the cult in Jerusalem. Thus, taken literally, the tares are those who are not practicing Torah. They would be the gentiles – or the gentile sensibility that does not yet understand the covenant.
Still, there is that pesky identification of the tares as the “children of evil.” We naturally think of the children as people, and yet, what if the fields in which the wheat and the tares are both sown are our lives and our hearts? Could it not be that the wheat and the tares are not good and evil persons, but instead the grains of wheat are the way of Jesus – the new Torah that revolve around forgiveness, generosity, healing, inclusion, and justice, and the new commandments contained in Jesus’ teaching on the mountain? Who are we to say that the tares are evil?
I think the point of the parable is for us to focus on who we are – not who or what the sower and the sown are. We, I believe, are the field, and we are invited to ask ourselves, what is planted in me – in us? To what am I – are we – giving growth and nourishment? What are the intentions and temptations planted in my life, and how can I allow them to remain while I prepare them for the harvest time?
So the children: they are not simply good seed and bad seed that we can allow to remain or choose to rip from the good soil of God’s creation. The children are sojourners, and so are we. We are passing through this land – incarnate for a time, carrying around with us little packages of earth that we call bodies. We are all born to be citizens of God-land – we are all God-landers. Our baptism in the death and resurrection of Jesus celebrates that birth – as the earth arose from the waters of creation, so our life in God arises from the waters of baptism, and we are sent as ambassadors for a time. We have been given this faith and this book – not merely as a system of constraints and a compendium of rules, but as a travelogue of those who have embarked on this journey before us – sojourners seeking to live as ambassadors of God-land. You might even call us immigrants who seek to come and establish our homes – as the prophet Jeremiah spoke for God, instructing the refugees of the Babylonian conquest. They were to settle and put their roots down with the native grain.
A recent blog post noted that we call some children who cross borders without documentation refugees – while we call others migrants or even aliens. The difference seems to be the nature of the crisis that sent them from their homes. Refugees are said to be escaping death. Migrants are merely escaping lives that may as well be death – lives that hang by a thread. All are seeking refuge from situations in which our situation plays a significant part. In the lands they come from, the poisonous tares whose roots become intertwined with the good native grain have drifted there from our side of the border.
So what can we do? How can we respond to the children – the young God-landers who have crossed treacherous borders seeking secure soil? Two things, I think. First we can advocate for the children, in whatever situation they have been blown. Write to our legislators and executives, claiming our accountability both for the immediate situation as well as the root causes. We can be a refuge, and we can extend that refuge beyond the artificial lines we call borders. God does not see the borders. Our intervention and our complacency have compromised the refuge of other lands. If all lands hold refuge for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, there will be refugees no longer.
Second, there is prayer. Does the situation seem beyond our grasp? Indeed. Are we ready to surrender? Indeed not. With God, all things are possible. Does prayer seem feeble and inadequate to the task? If so, it is at least a place to start. Walter Wink vigorously calls on us to pray in the face of the powers.
“Those who pray do so not because they believe certain intellectual propositions about the value of prayer, but simply because the struggle to be human [to be God-landers] in the face of suprahuamn Powers requires it. The act of praying is itself one of the indispensable means by which we engage the Powers. It is, in fact, that engagement at its most fundamental level, where their secret spell over us is broken and we are reestablished in a bit more of that freedom which is our birthright and our potential.” [Walter Wink, Prayer and the Powers (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), 1.]
Beloved, as sojourners – as God-landers – we can advocate, we can offer refuge, and we can pray. And we believe in the power of prayer – even when advocacy and refuge fail. Prayer changes things. And what prayer changes most are our hearts and our minds. Praying helps us to see the world as it is and as God desires it to be. Prayer awakens us to the dissonance of these two visions, and moves us to respond in concert with God’s unconditional love and expectation of shalom. Pray always. Pray for refuge. Pray for refugees.

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