Pentecost 8A (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43)

​Each one of us carries a world of our own. We may think we live in the same world, but the way we inhabit it is unique to each person. The world our body dwells in is perceived and interpreted through our body and our mind.

What’s encouraging about this morning’s Gospel is that the good seeds—the children of the kingdom—are planted by God’s own hand. They are God’s inner presence within us. Let’s consider these children as the skillful habits, the virtues, that grow from the presence of God dwelling in us. (This is a different question from asking exactly who the children of the kingdom are, or whether we count ourselves among them.)

In the world each of us inhabits, the world we call our life, these virtues are the seeds God has planted. What makes them good is that God’s presence is in them. They carry something that helps us move beyond ourselves: generosity, compassion, empathy, grace.

So the good news is always the presence of God within us. But the parable also gives us hard news—there are weeds. These are sown by the evil one. On its face, this looks like a battle between good and evil. But let me tweak the frame a little and speak instead of the skillful and the unskillful. Here’s why. When we imagine weeds growing in this field we call our life, it can breed a kind of guilt that turns into self-punishment. And self-punishment rarely changes the unhealthy behavior. By attacking ourselves, we’re tricked into feeling we’ve somehow paid the price—when nothing has actually changed.

So let’s reframe it: skillful and unskillful. And the way to tell one from the other is to take the long view—to look at where a behavior leads. Rage, for example, can become almost addictive. It makes us feel powerful, in control. But it can wound others and make the situation worse.

Notice that Jesus’s own way of sorting weeds from wheat is itself deeply skillful. He tells the servants not to tear the weeds out. We cannot simply correct ourselves by force, and this is not about moral self-improvement either. We’re asked to let both grow until the harvest. And that means we first have to see what is in us. What inner voices am I listening to? What stress am I quietly creating for myself? Until we notice how these thoughts arise and shape us, we take them for granted and assume they’re simply true.

I want us to rest in the presence of God within. In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul distinguishes life according to the flesh from life according to the Spirit. And “Spirit” here becomes wonderfully concrete when we remember that the word also means breath. By the breath of God, we live. So we anchor ourselves in that breath and watch how the weeds and the wheat come to grow—skillful thoughts and unskillful ones, skillful actions and unskillful ones. Life according to the Spirit begins with training our eyes to see what is happening inside.

Once we can see them stirring within us, we can choose. Life according to the Spirit begins with training our eyes to see—and, seeing clearly, to choose the wheat. Choose what’s skillful.