Staying in Your Lane

by Lance Helms in Sermons

Preached at Gentle Spirit Christian Church, Atlanta, Ga.
Reading: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

The Parable of the Sower

The Gospel reading for today centers on what is known as the Parable of the Weeds. In the Gospel of Matthew, it follows what is known as the Parable of the Sower, which was the Gospel reading and subject of last Sunday’s sermon.

In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus tells the story of a sower whose seeds fell:
On the path, where the birds came and ate them up.
On rocky ground, where they sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow, then withered in the scorching sun.
Among thorns, which grew up and choked them.
On good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

In that parable:
The birds that eat the seeds quickly represent the enemy.
The quickly sprouting seeds are those who initially hear the word but wither in the face of persecution.
The ones sown among thorns represent those who hear the word but the cares of the material world choke the word out.

And of course, the ones who hear the word and understand it bear unimaginable fruit.

The Parable of the Weeds

Which brings us to the Parable of the Weeds. In this parable, which directly follows the Parable of the Sower in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives us a framework for understanding how to take God seriously, and how not to let the enemy – nor the cares of the world – extinguish the flame that burns in your heart once God takes the spark of your love and fans it into a truly life-changing fire.

But what do you do when you look to your left or your right and you see someone clearly focused on the wrong things? Someone not quite walking the righteous path? Maybe even someone doing harm?

God’s kingdom is like a farmer who planted good seed in his field. That night, while his hired men were asleep, his enemy sowed thistles all through the wheat and slipped away before dawn. When the first green shoots appeared and the grain began to form, the thistles showed up, too. (Matthew 13:24-26)

In the Parable of the Weeds, we once again have four elements: The farmer, the enemy, the seed, and the field.

In this parable:
The farmer is Jesus
The one who sowed weeds among the wheat is the enemy
The seed is the word
The field is the world

And here we have another story that makes perfectly fine sense to the modern ear but had particular resonance for the agrarian people of Jesus’ time.

Back then, when one farmer wanted to sabotage another, it wasn’t uncommon for them to sow a noxious weed called “bearded darnel” into the field of their declared enemy.

This was such an insidious and effective tactic for ruining the fortunes of a rival farmer that Roman law prohibited it. So Jesus’ example would have rung super true for the Galileans hearing this parable.

Bearded darnel is such bad news that it’s actually poisonous and in big enough doses can even be toxic.

Not only that, but bearded darnel mimics many of the characteristics of wheat all the way up until the two plants are mature enough for the differences to finally reveal themselves in their fruit.

So the reaction of the farmhands in this parable who uncover the wrongdoing would have been very real and relatable: They ask the farmer if they can help eradicate it right now. They think they’re offering to help the farmer nail the problem now — and possibly expend fewer resources nourishing the weeds that are camouflaged among the good wheat.

But the farmer understands that the only way to preserve the good wheat is to wait until harvest time and let the harvesters remove the darnel.

Otherwise, prematurely attempting to determine which is the wheat and which is the darnel risks jeopardizing the good crop along with the bad one.

In other words:

When he finally arrives, blazing in beauty and all his angels with him, the Son of Man will take his place on his glorious throne. Then all the nations will be arranged before him and he will sort the people out, much as a shepherd sorts out sheep and goats, putting sheep to his right and goats to his left. (Matthew 25:31-33)

You’re Focusing on the Wrong Things

If I could give Jesus’ ministry a subhead, I think it would be “You’re Focusing on the Wrong Things!”

The main headline of course, will always be: “Good News! You Are Loved.”

The headline is easy. It’s what’s supposed to come after it that can get us going down all sorts of rabbit holes.

Are we supposed to be saving souls?
Are we supposed to be using the government as an instrument of God’s will?
What is God’s plan for the two-thirds of the world that don’t confess Jesus Christ as their savior?
Should Christians be concerned about climate change?
Is artificial intelligence a force for good, or evil?

It’s a big scary world out there, and it always has been. We wouldn’t be human beings if we didn’t secretly fret that we were living in the end times. We’ve been doing it for generations.

Remember the Cold War? Mutually assured destruction? Nuclear winter? All those images of schoolkids hiding under their desks? My own grandfather’s house, built in 1969, included a fallout shelter in the deepest, coldest part of the hill that the house is set into.

There’s a blockbuster movie out this weekend that recounts the effort to develop the nuclear technology that gave birth to all those fears.

At that time, there was enough conviction among the powers-that-be in America that unleashing nuclear bomb technology on Japanese civilians was necessary to end World War II. And we paid the price for it for the next four decades, until that very same technology ended the Soviet Union and almost ended the planet when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor melted down.

Now it seems we barely hear talk of nuclear anything.

Instead, our end-times bogeymen are artificial intelligence, climate change, overpopulation, rampant inflation and a level of wealth concentration like the world has never seen.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

The people of Jesus’ time had a similar basket of fears of course. In the society he found himself in, they dealt with those fears by being extremely tribal and erecting all sorts of societal walls and fences to make it clear who was in and who was out. Plus the dozens, if not hundreds, of things one would have to do to get back in good graces.

Jesus came into the midst of all that to say: “Hey! You’re loved.” And also: “You’re focusing on the wrong things.”

Not only that, but he said — over and over again — not to worry.

In the Sermon on the Mount alone, he says it five times (Matthew 6:25-34):

“Do not worry about your life” (v. 25).
“Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” (v. 27).
“Why do you worry about clothes?” (v. 28).
“Do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or “What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’” (v. 31).
“Do not worry about tomorrow” (v. 34).

Instead, by focusing on God, what we should be turning the entirety of our hearts, souls and minds to comes into clear focus:

I was hungry and you fed me,
I was thirsty and you gave me a drink,
I was homeless and you gave me a room,
I was shivering and you gave me clothes,
I was sick and you stopped to visit,
I was in prison and you came to me.’ (Matthew 25:34-36)

Staying in Your Lane

So why did I title this sermon “Staying in Your Lane”?

It’s an expression I’ve used a lot to help me not overdo things, particularly at work. I take it as a reminder that each of us has a job to do, and a set of expectations around that job.

Whenever I’m tempted to overdo something, or I get overwhelmed, I take stock of what part of the work at hand will absolutely not happen if I personally don’t do it. Then I ask myself what part of that work is most likely what people expect from me.

Sometimes those two things don’t line up, and the gap between them is usually “hey, that’s not my job” territory. Which at first blush can sound sort of callous, but in actuality is a form of respect. Everyone has a job to do, and it’s up to them to get it done on their terms.

When you’re staying in your lane, you can see the other lanes, you can see who’s in them, and you can see how they’re driving. They’re probably not all driving the way you would drive, but if you get too focused on them, you risk doing a really poor job of your own driving.

And that’s your Number One job, because if you don’t do it for yourself, no one else can do it for you. Not only that, but you can put yourself in serious jeopardy.

Life is full of lanes. Society is full of lanes. Christianity is full of lanes. And the sad fact is, we as humans generally do a terrible job of staying in our personal lanes. We’re so terrible at it that we have a fistful of sayings, Bible-based and otherwise, that exist to serve as lane markings on the road of life, reminding us how to stay focused on ourselves — and allow everyone else to do the same.

Live and let live
Judge not, lest you be judged
Love others as you yourself would be loved

647 Ways To Drive Yourself Crazy

You could say that the world Jesus grew up in was the equivalent of a 647-lane mega-highway, because the people of his time had dreamed up that many ways to section people off and exclude them in the name of tribal identity. It was a survival tactic that was tearing their society apart.

They’d become so beholden to those 647 laws concerning purity and the rituals around it that they couldn’t see the people affected by those laws as people anymore. They couldn’t see them as similarly flawed humans just trying to find a lane to stay in without someone else running them off the road.

Bring all this back to the Parable of the Weeds, and what you have is Jesus issuing a warning that if we don’t let God do God’s job — if we don’t have a truly humble understanding of what our own job is — then we risk complete failure at the mission of allowing those stalks of wheat to make it to maturity.

We risk failing those earnest souls, who like us are just trying to grow toward the sun and draw nourishment from the same light, water and soil that are also sustaining the toxic weeds masquerading among us.

With this parable, what Jesus is pointing out is that the weeds pose no immediate threat to the wheat. There’s no reason to worry right now.

As the saying goes, “Everything will be okay in the end. So if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

More importantly, Jesus is indicating the folly of we mortals thinking we can do God’s work of separating the weeds from the wheat — because with the limited perception we have in our very human lane, the weeds haven’t yet revealed their true colors, and we’d jeopardize the good crop along with the bad.

In other words, don’t get so worried about what you think it takes to save souls that you forget how to protect them in the first place.

Finally, as members of an LGBTQ+ affirming church, some of us may recognize the reverse implication of this parable: There will always be people in our midst who sincerely see us as the weeds among the wheat. They will exercise what they believe is their God-given duty and right to call that out. They will not be able to stay in their lane.

In doing so, not only are they missing the main point of the parable — that we humans simply don’t have the ability to discern between the weeds and the wheat — but they’re also assuming the weeds are even there.

Remember, in the world of the people this parable is aimed at, not every field got sabotaged. There would have been plenty of untainted fields that yielded perfectly fine crops whose total yield the harvesters judged fit for human consumption.

So in the hardscrabble world of an ancient farmer, to spend time looking for weeds among every grain of wheat would have been a massively unproductive — and counterproductive — distraction.

Instead, Jesus is saying, stay in your lane. Trust the process. Trust God.

We are all children of God. Between us we possess everything it takes for our brothers and sisters to not just survive, but to thrive. Jesus wants us to see how effortless than can actually be.

Plants need light, water and soil. We humans need love, mercy and justice.

Or as the prophet Micah put it:

But he’s already made it plain how to live, what to do,
what God is looking for in men and women.
It’s quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor,
be compassionate and loyal in your love,
And don’t take yourself too seriously—
take God seriously. (Micah 6:8)

Tagged with: , ,