Who Decides Who’s In and Who’s Out of the Church?
Being the mom of the three wonderful Lammers girls is truly fun and usually delightful. However, I will share that there is one topic that has been a point of frequent discord and the source of many an argument - clothing. Remarkably, my oldest does not care the slightest bit what she wears on a given day. She lets me pick her clothes out now at 6 years-old just the same as I did when she was 6 months-old. In many ways, it’s great! It makes me think she trusts my style wisdom and that she likes the clothes I buy for her, and that feels good. And I have the bonus of thinking that she is wise beyond her years, knowing that fashion does not define her and she is above such superficial things as clothing labels.
My younger two, however, are entirely different subjects in this area. When it comes to what clothing they will wear each day, these two have opinions, preferences and (dare I say?) demands. If I am so bold as to select an outfit without consulting them first, my selection is inevitably wrong. If I make a recommendation based on temperature outside or appropriateness for the day’s activities? Wrong. With these two, the only way to begin the day with that avoids conflict is to invite them into the process of selecting their daily attire. If we want to avoid tears, stomping of feet or prolonged whining, I have to start the day by opening the closet door, and saying, “You pick, because you know best.”
It’s a little humbling. I regularly have fight the urge to try to choose for them. Deep down I still kind of believe that I know best what would be right attire for the day, but I find that it works better for everyone if I assume a posture of humility. Peace is best kept when I realize that there are more opinions at play than just my own. There’s more than one valid perspective. There’s more than one right answer. And most of all, that I am not the expert in how they will best express themselves on any given day.
Humility. Humility is one of the biggest messages that I regularly take away from being a parent. It’s also a message that the church needs to revisit on a regular basis.
Yesterday’s (7/23/23) lectionary readings included the parable in Matthew about the wheat and the weeds. It’s the one where someone has sown good wheat seed into the field, and while sleeping, someone else, an enemy, sneaks in and sows weeds among the good wheat seeds. When this is discovered, the workers ask, do you want us to go ahead and yank out all the weeds? And the master of the house says, and I paraphrase, “No, if you do that, you will inevitably yank up some of the good stuff, some of the wheat, as well. Let them grow together until the harvest. And at that point, the reapers will gather up the weeds, bundle them and burn them. And the wheat will be gathered up and brought into the barn.”
Jesus then, a few verses later, unpacks this metaphor for the listeners – explaining that the one who sows the good seeds is the Son of Man, Christ himself. The field is the world and the good seeds are the children of the Kin-dom of God. The enemy is the devil and the weeds are the children of the evil one. The reapers are the angels and the harvest time is the end of the age.
As a reminder, parables are helpful in teaching us about the Kin-dom of heaven, but even more importantly, they are instructive to us for how we are to live and relate to one another in order to do the work of building the Kin-dom here on earth.
There are so many different interpretations that can be gleaned (pun intended) from this particular parable. It can be a message to us about how recognizing the difference weed vs. wheat is not always perfectly obvious at some stages in the growing process. It challenges the assumption that the weeds will choke the wheat and prevent it from flourishing if they are allowed to grow together. It raises questions of who is sowing what on this earth. It raises the question of who will be the adjudicator to decide what will be bundled up and burned at the time of harvest. It introduces a question of whether there is a possible utility in the weeds growing alongside the wheat. So many great considerations arise from this text that can be significant topics for exploring our faith in this world. However, for me, in reading this text in this particular season, I am again pulled to the concept of humility.
I relate so deeply to the agrarian workers in this parable who initially think that the solution is to go run out and pull up all of the weeds. I like to solve problems immediately. When someone has wronged me, I want to respond now, either by putting them in their place, outperforming or outsmarting them just to show them what’s what. I want the immediate fix. I want to feel better now so I can move on to something else. So for me, the lesson of this Parable that stands out to me is one of Jesus saying, “Slow down and chill out, because I got this!”
One of the challenges about needing to fix things immediately is that we often become fixated on needing to be right. And in doing this, we can become fixated on the wrong things. As a recent example, I was in a coffee shop working this week and it was the day after a round of severe storms had come through Memphis, knocking out power to almost a third of MLGW customers at one point. Two young men sitting at the table next to me were arguing. One was convinced that the storm debris and damage were consistent with us being hit by a small tornado. The other emphatically disagreed, saying, “No, no, no, the National Weather Service did not detect any rotation, and the severe temps we’ve been having have taken a toll on our trees such that the powerful straight line winds on the front end of the storm would have been sufficient to cause all the damage.” The first guy got louder, talking about how he had seen a hook in the cloud imaging on the radar, indicating rotation. They went back and forth arguing for about 10 minutes and all the while I was thinking, “WHO CARES?! Who cares exactly how the damage happened? We will probably never know for sure. What matters now is that thousands of our neighbors do not have power and it supposed to be 97 today with a heat index of 114 degrees!”
Their fixation on needing to be right on something that is likely forever unknowable while completely ignoring the real struggles that our neighbors were facing at that moment was so incredibly frustrating to me. And then I thought about how this frustration I felt at this exchange relates to the parable today.
The way that Jesus teaches us throughout the Gospels invites us into a posture of humility when it comes to us pretending to know the mind of God. Jesus again and again confronts religious and secular authorities who insist on a “rightness” that ignores who God has called us to be in regards to how we relate to one another as fellow human beings. Jesus essentially says, “No, do not go pluck out the weeds right now, because you might get it wrong and hurt what is good in your haste to fix and get it right. Leave it to me, and I will sort it out at the appointed time.”
I have a number of good friends and seminary classmates who are clergy in the United Methodist Church, and I have followed their painful journey toward denominational schism over recent years. The latest reports indicate that a few weeks ago, 20% of United Methodist Churches in the United States were given the official blessing to leave the denomination over the inability to agree on issues of LGBTQIA inclusion in the church. This schism hurts considering the long and storied history of a denomination that has the word “United” in its name.
I confess that I personally will never understand how a church can demand conformity to a single theological idea that is so deeply personal and so thoughtfully, seriously and biblically debated. How one side can be so convinced of its “rightness” that it would choose to no longer be in relationship with 80% of their peer churches in this nation is a kind of confidence in knowing of the Mind of God that I don’t have on this and many other issues. Friends, I do not know what it is like to identify as LGBTQIA in a world where so many do not view this as a valid identity. I do not know what it feels like to have my identity be used as a political weapon in the ways that we have seen recently in my state and many others. But I do know what it is like to have someone in the church world tell me that the Bible says I am wrong about who God has made and called me to be. As a female pastor, I do know what it feels like to be told I don’t really exist, or that I should just go away because I don’t belong in public life.
And so my message to all of us who have ever been marginalized or told to shrink ourselves for the comfort of others, or worse, who have been told that we need to be plucked out of the earth like a weed because we have no place in the Kin-dom of God, this parable of Jesus is for us. It’s also for those who walked away from the church because they have seen the hurt caused by overly-confident weed-plucking. This parable is a reminder that God does not need, is not expecting and does not want us to do that work of deciding who will be considered worthy of the Kin-dom of Heaven. This parable of Jesus is telling us that God has got this.
As followers of Jesus, the good news of this parable is that we do not need to pretend to know the Mind of God, or pretend to know who is worthy to be called a child of God. Jesus tells us that God is going to do that work for us at the end of days. The angels will do the sorting, not the overly confident and flawed leaders at the local church down the street. The fact that Jesus says to let the two seeds grow together – the wheat and the weeds – suggests that perhaps it is not our role to pluck one another from the pews, or worse, from the face of the earth, based on our limited understandings.
A few years ago, former First Lady Michelle Obama famously said, “Our motto is, when they go low, we go high.” We are living in a society, and in a cultural moment, where it seems that more than ever before, the individuals with the biggest platforms and with the loudest voices are those who have all the answers. We are always hearing from those who have simple answers to complex issues and those who operate from a good/bad binary, where some folks are in and others are out. We see this in politics and we definitely see it in religion. There are many around us who claim to be followers of Jesus who carve out their identity as a community by who they kick out, rather than by who they make space for. When following a Gospel that is dominated by an ethic of love and liberation, we have a surprising number of haters and oppressors in this world of Christendom.
But if I can call on the iconic words of Michelle, when they go low, we must go high. When our Christian siblings start prematurely ripping out weeds, let’s stop and remember the words of Jesus. Because God has got this. We are blessed that we do not have to be in the business of deciding who is qualified to enter the Kin-dom of God. Ours is to feed, clothe, visit, shelter, and love. So let’s be confident in our faith, yet humble enough to know that God is still God. Just like I need to let my little girls take charge of their own, sometimes questionable, fashion choices for the sake of harmony and good relationship, let’s let go of the need to have everything figured out and have all the perfect, simple and definitive answers. May our humility allow us to lean into a little more of the mystery of God as we follow in the ways that Christ taught us.
May we be wise and open enough to be humble. And when they go low, may we always go high.
Amen.
