Sermon Preached at St Margaret’s Church, Wrexham 17th July,2011 by Mr Brian Reader

Isaiah 44:6-8; Rom 8:12-25; Ps 86 11-18; Matt 13:24-30, 37-43

Good morning to you all and I hope that I will see many of you again at 11 o’clock at St Mark’s, although I have yet to see how we will all fit into that church.Many years ago, when my son was at university, he and his mother, when the world seemed to throw them a bad hand, would use the expletive ‘TANJ’, yes you did hear right, TANJ T-A-N-J. which stood for ‘There ain’t no justice’

.‘There ain’t no justice’ And for your information ‘ain’t’ is in the dictionary, and they weren’t actually swearing. And as I heard that parable this morning,I thought that if the farmer had spoken English he might well have said TANJ, or something stronger, when he realised that someone had sown tares amongst his lovely wheat. ‘There ain’t no justice’.And isn’t that something that we feel when we hear the news or see the world around us,with all its evil and suffering.‘Why doesn't God do something?'That is perhaps the most frequent question that people including Christians and those of some other faiths, too, ask their leaders and teachers -. Tragedies happen. Horrific accidents devastate lives and families. Tyrants and bullies force their own plans on people and crush opposition, and they seem to get away with it. And sensitive souls ask, again and again, why is God apparently silent? Why doesn't he step in and stop it?Now this parable is not a direct answer to the question, and probably no direct answer can be given in this life. But it does show that God's sovereign rule over this world isn't quite such a straightforward thing as people sometimes imagine.Would people really like it if God were to rule the world directly and immediately, so that our every thought and action were weighed, and instantly judged and if necessary punished, in the scales of his absolute holiness? I doubt it! Bishop Tom Wright asks that if the price of God stepping in and stopping a campaign of genocide were that he would also have to rebuke and restrain every other evil impulse, including those we all still know and cherish within ourselves, would we be prepared to pay that price? If we ask God to act on special occasions, do we really suppose that he could do that simply when we want him to, and then back off again for the rest of the time?Well, no, probably not if it was put that way.Let us consider the details. The tares mentioned where probably Darnel. It was forbidden to plant it and punishable under Roman Law, as it still is in India today.Either for revenge or jealousy, meanness or sheer vindictiveness, the sole intention of such nastinesswas to spoil the farmer's crop and yield.The problem of evil is not explained but it cannot be ignored.Now the first impulse of the servants was to go into the field and pull it all out.But Darnel grows as tall as wheat and, until the ears were filling, it looks just like wheat and it was sometimes called ‘bastard' or ‘perverted wheat'.So if the servants went in to pull out the darnel they would probably pull out some of the wheat and trample down much of the crop.The farmer counselled patience until harvest; So this parable is all about waiting; and waiting is what we all find difficult. The farmer waits for the harvest-time, watching in frustration as the weeds grow alongside the wheat. Just as a woman baking bread must wait for the working yeast to spread its way through the dough until the whole loaf is mysteriouslyrisen before it can be baked. And that's what God's kingdom is like.Jesus' followers, of course, didn't want to wait. If the kingdom was really present where Jesus was, coming to birth in what he was doing, then they wanted the whole thing at once. They weren't interested in God's timetable. They had one of their own, and expected God to conform to it. Aren’t we all like that?We want to judge and take action now but life is never that simple. Did Jesus, perhaps, have an eye here on the revolutionary groups of his day, only too ready to step into God's field and pull up what looked like weeds? There were many groups, including some of the Pharisees, who were eager to fight against pagans on the one hand and what they saw as compromised Jews on the other. These ‘servants' may have intended to do God's will. They were longing for God to act, and were prepared to help him by acting themselves. but part of Jesus' whole campaign is to say that that the true kingdom of God doesn't come like that, because God himself isn't like that. Now God didn't and doesn't enjoy the sight of a cornfield with weeds all over the place. But nor does he relish the thought of declaring harvest-time too soon, and destroying wheat along with weeds.Many Jews of Jesus' time recognized this, and spoke of God's compassion, delaying his judgment so that more people could be saved at the end. Jesus, and then Paul and other early Christian writers, took the same view. Somehow Jesus wanted his followers to live with the tension of believing that the kingdom was indeed arriving in and through his own work, and that this kingdom would come, would fully arrive, not all in a bang but through a process like the slow growth of a plant or the steady leavening of a loaf.This can sometimes seem like a cop-out today, and no doubt it did in Jesus' day as well. Saying that God is delaying his final judgment can look, outwardly, like saying that God is inactive or uncaring. But when we look at Jesus' own public career it's impossible to say that God didn't care. Here was one who was very active, deeply compassionate, battling with evil and defeating it - and yet still warning that the final overthrow of the enemy was yet to come.We who live after Calvary and Easter know that God did indeed act suddenly and dramatically at that moment. When today we long for God to act, to put the world to rights, we must remind ourselves that he has already done so, and that what we are now awaiting is the full outworking of those events. So we wait with patience, not like people in a dark room wondering if anyone will ever come to turn the light on, but like people in early morning who know that the sun has arisen and are now waiting for the full brightness of midday. So if we are forgiven and saved by God’s Grace what should we do? Sit back and wait for the second coming? By no means. We should continue to work for the growth of God’s Kingdom by obeying His commandments and passing on the good news of Jesus’ Gospel.*Sometimes good and evil look alike; and we are too quick to judge, too quick to label and to classify other people, and to want a purge.Don't judge other people; only God can judge.You won't know the truth about them until the End and then you may will be surprised.You will see some folk who are in heaven and equally surprised that some that you expected are not there; and, as a famous Scottish divine once said, if you and I are there to see it, it will only be by God's surprising and forgiving grace.The Good News is that while Darnel is darnel and weeds and wheat cannot change - people can. Bad people can become good, for God can forgive our sins and set us free from evil.He can root out of us the things that spoil us, and help us grow in grace until we become what we are meant to be. We are all ‘work in progress.’Equally, good people can become bad: So, pray earnestly, ‘Deliver us from evil.'Love God and keep His commandments. AMEN *Altenative EndingUnlike what some non Christians think,God is not a sadistic monster who would happily consign most of his beloved, image-bearing creatures to eternal fire, but neither is God an indulgent grandparent determined to spoil the youngsters rotten by letting them do whatever they like and still giving them sweets at the end of the day. Anyone who can't see that there is such a thing as serious and vicious evil in the world, after all that's happened in the twentieth century and is still happening now in the twenty-first, is simply wearing the wrong spectacles. Anyone who doesn't hope and pray that the God who made the world will one day put it to rights is condemning themselves to regarding the world as, at best, a sick joke. But anyone who supposes that the true and living God, the world's creator, can put it to rights without confronting, and defeating, not only ‘evil' in the abstract but those who have given their lives and energies to inventing and developing wickedness, profiting from it, luring others into it, and wreaking large-scale human devastation as a result, is asking for the moon.This is not to say that only large-scale and obvious wickedness will face God's judgment. The parable, with its interpretation, isn't that kind of story. It works with the stark categories that Jesus' hearers were familiar with: wheat and weeds, good and bad, righteous and sinners.but within that deliberately over simplified story line, the parable challenged them to the core, and it should do the same to us. It wasn't as obvious as they had thought.. Who were the weeds and who were the wheat? It was up to God to make that judgment; and God was delegating that judgment to this strange figure, ‘the son of man; the one who had been sowing the good seed, the one who, as Jesus' hearers would realize, stood for Jesus himself.Much of what Jesus said looks back, to the book of Daniel. The ‘fiery furnace', ‘The righteous shining like the sun' and with echoes from chapter 7, where ‘one like a son of man' is given the right to judge and rule over the monsters who have oppressed God's people. Daniel was a favourite book among Jesus' contemporaries, predicting (so they thought) the soon-to-come victory of Israel over the nations.Jesus was warning them that, though what they were hoping for would indeed come, God's judgment might not be as straightforward as they thought. They needed to think it through afresh in the light of what Jesus himself was doing and saying. That's why even the interpretation of the parable ends with the command, ‘If you have ears, then hear!' And if Jesus' own hearers needed that command, we certainly do as well. AMEN