A Progressive New Year

Practical Jokes

I used to be the king of practical jokes. The key to doing a practical joke is to not be around when the joke hits. I was the last person people thought would do a practical joke. One of the best ones I ever did was in college to one of my professors. I attended Asbury College (now University) and had a Christian Ministries professor.

I had received a scholarship from Campus Life, which is a now defunct Christian youth magazine that was called Ignite Your Faith, before going belly up. Because I got a scholarship from them, I also received their magazine. Every so often, they would send me a stack of postcards with about 500 Christian universities, colleges, and seminaries, which I could fill out and request more information about their institution. The Internet was around, but in its very primitive form. So requesting this information was by snail mail.

So, as a practical joke, I filled them all out in one of my professor's names. I held no animosity towards him. In fact, he was one of my favorite professors and I thought he could take this joke very well.

Imagine spam mail, but just in the snail mail version. This is what happened to him. Slowly he became inundated with huge envelopes from all of these colleges and universities around the country, thinking that he wanted to attend their college as a prospective transfer student. I made one mistake. I anonymously left a note for my professor on our attendance sheet, which said, "Have you gotten any mail lately?" He shrewdly compared handwriting and deduced that I was the culprit. On the very last day of class, before finals, he had a huge box of mail that he dumped in front of me on my desk and told the class what I had done.

He took it good-naturedly and even remarked that one of the letters he received was from a fellow student he had been in college with that he had to fire from the college newspaper.

This practical joke had been good-natured, but Jesus told a parable of a practical joke, that was not good-natured at all.

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The Parable of the Weeds

Jesus told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like someone who planted good seed in his field. While people were sleeping, an enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat and went away. When the stalks sprouted and bore grain, then the weeds appeared.

"The servants of the landowner came and said to him, 'Master, didn't you plant good seed in your field? Then how is it that it has weeds?'

"'An enemy has done this,' he answered. The servants said to him, 'Do you want us to go and gather them?'

"But the landowner said, 'No, because if you gather the weeds, you'll pull up the wheat along with them. Let both grow side by side until the harvest. And at the harvest time I'll say to the harvesters, "First gather the weeds and tie them together in bundles to be burned. But bring the wheat into my barn."'" (Matthew 13:24-30 CEB)

I like this parable a lot. A farmer had planted some wheat in his field. Someone maliciously went and sowed weeds along with the wheat. The Greek word for the weeds (sometimes called "tares" in older Bible translations) is thought to be ryegrass, a type of plant that looks similar to wheat as it grows, but doesn't produced seeds for human consumption and is often a culprit of hay fever.

As the crop grows, the farmer's servants notice what has happened and offer to weed out the ryegrass. The farmer declines this, saying that they might accidentally pull out wheat along with the weeds. It would be better to wait until the harvest time when it would be much easier to sort the good crop from the weeds.

This is the Realm of Heaven

Just a note about the word, "kingdom." I have many friends who object to the term, mostly due to the masculine implications of the word and assigning gender to God. My own church likes to use the created word, "kin-dom," to imply that we are all kin with each other and with God. If the word is a stumbling block to you, think of it more as a "realm."

This realm is not something we are striving to work towards when we die, but is something for us to establish here and now. This parable, especially, shows us how we should treat each other. Often we like to evaluate and judge people immediately and consign them to hell. We want to harvest the crops too early. This has happened so often:  the Spanish Inquisition, the Peasant Wars of Europe during the Reformation, the Salem Witch Trials, "Farewell, Rob Bell," etc. When Rob Bell wrote his extraordinary book, Love Wins, many Evangelicals, like John Piper, felt that he had left Christianity because he dared to critically look at our understanding of Hell.

People are quick to judge and slow to be patient.

Jesus said that we shouldn't do this. Leave any "judging" to God. God will handle it. 

And we? What should we do?

Live life. Be kind to each other. Possibly the worse thing to do is to exclude someone from your community because they are different. Maybe they think or believe differently than you. Maybe you believe that they don't worship the same God as you. So what? Treat them as if they were created in the image of God because that is exactly what they are.

When the Harvest time comes, in whatever way God sees fit for that to come, let God do the work. It's God's job anyway.

Let us make this New Year one where we treat everyone as if they are loved by God.