Nobody Knows But Jesus · pickerill casa

Welcome to The Comfortable Words.

This week has made me feel overwhelmed and small in the face of so much disruption around me. Engineers walking away from the companies building our newest technologies, saying out loud that they are afraid of what they are making. A safety failure serious enough that people who never think about these things are suddenly thinking about them. Conflict escalating in more than one part of the world at once.

It has made me wonder if my simple self and my simple life really matter in the grand scheme of things.

It has dis-couraged me.

It has also tempted me to just ignore the news, go live in the country, and pretend like I don’t have obligations to my fellow man. (Sort of a joke.)

How do you feel today? What cares do you bring with you as we begin? Would you slow down and take a deep breath? Invite God to strengthen you.

The comfortable words this week are a parable.

24 Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25 But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26 When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.

27 “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’

28 “‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.

“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’

29 “‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest.’” (Matthew 13:24-30)

Let me try to simplify this.

Jesus tells us that bad things will grow up alongside good things. We do not get to choose whether bad things grow up alongside our time. That is simply the nature of history and existence.

What this parable tells us is not that we can overcome the weeds. It is not that the wheat will outgrow and cover up the bad. It says both will grow up alongside one another.

Justice will come at the end of it all. Not before.

Now. A word about the weeds, because religious people often get this wrong.

We hear “weeds” and we think them. The weeds are the other people, the wrong people, the ones on the other side of the thing we are arguing about. And the fire at the end of the parable is for them.

That is one way to think about these texts. That they are about people, and about which people.

There is another way. I can think of my own heart as the field. A field that holds both weeds and wheat, growing up together, in me.

Because the weeds are the fruit of everything that is not of Jesus. Lying. Discord. Enmity. Chaos. Jealousy. Pride. The abuse of power. What gets gathered up and burned at the end is not the other. It is every part of all of us that runs counter to the peace and loving-kindness and mercy and justice of God.

Look again at what the owner actually says. While you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. If the weeds were simply other people, pulling them would not endanger the wheat. You would just take them out of the field and the wheat would stand there, fine.

The danger only makes sense if the roots are tangled together underground, where you cannot see them.

They are. Mine are. That is why I am not allowed to do the sorting. I cannot manage it inside my own chest, where I have the most information and the most at stake and every reason to be honest, so I have no business attempting it in somebody else.

The servants ask the question I want to ask. Do you want us to go and pull them up? It is a good question. It is the decent, eager, do-something question, and it comes from the people who work for the owner and love his field.

The answer is no.

So I ask it the older way, the way the psalmist asks it. How long, O Lord… how long to sing this song?

And then I think about the faith that came out of American slavery. About people held inside a field built to consume them, who were never handed the power to end it.

I want to be careful here, because that is not the same thing as being powerless. They resisted. They escaped. They organized, and taught, and preached. They kept families and churches alive under conditions designed to destroy both. They built a theology that has outlasted the people who enslaved them, and that the American church would be impoverished without. The singing was not what they did instead of all of that. The singing was part of it.

And I do not want to reach for their history as a way of correcting myself, as though their suffering exists to put my small complaint into perspective. That would be a very small use of something enormous. What I want is to learn, because the faith that came out of that field is older and more tested than mine, and it knows things about standing in a ruined place that I do not.

Listen to what they sang.

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen Nobody knows but Jesus Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen Glory, Hallelujah

The trouble is named first. Fully, without flinching, with no hopeful clause tacked on the end to make it bearable.

Then the second line hands it to the only one who can carry it. Nobody knows but Jesus. That is a comfortable word, sung in the worst field in this country’s history, by people the field was built to destroy. If the comfort of Christ held there, it holds here, and my hard week does not get to be the exception.

But look at what the song does next. It does not move on. It names the trouble a second time. It will not let the comfort erase what is still true.

And then, after the second naming and only after it: Glory, Hallelujah.

Not because the trouble ended. It had not ended. Not because the field got better. It did not get better.

The praise and the trouble grow up together. That is what Jesus said the field would look like.

So what do we do when it feels like the sky is falling?

We aren’t called to be superheroes and we’re not allowed to ignore the shaking.

Both halves of that matter. The superhero tears up the field trying to save it. The one who looks away lets it rot and calls it peace.

We are limited creatures, and our limitations were given to us by God. They are not a defect in the design. They are the design.

Our work now is not to fix all that is broken, or to prevent the scattering and breaking happening around us.

Our work is simply to be wheat.

We grow into the people Christ calls us to be. We are marked by the fruits of the Spirit. We resist fear. We love our neighbors. We consider the poor. We bear joy. We care for the people closest to us.

So what about being good neighbors? What about political civility, in a season with very little of it?

I think it starts smaller and closer than we expect it to. I think it looks like showing up well in the simplicity of the life that is in front of me each day. The neighbor. The errand. The conversation I would rather avoid. The person at the school pickup whose yard sign makes my jaw tighten.

Showing up well, even when it doesn’t feel like it matters.

C. S. Lewis wrote something in 1948, when everyone he knew was afraid of the bomb:

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

Bathing the children. A game of darts. Not a man refusing to take the bomb seriously. A man refusing to let it take the place of his life.

And if this week has worn you down, I want to give you an out.

You are allowed to stop reading the news for a few days. You are allowed to catch your breath. Rest is not desertion, and stepping back from the noise is not the same as looking away from the world. The field is not yours to hold up. You could not hold it up if you tried, and no one is asking you to.

Paul wrote this to a young church living under a great deal of pressure:

11 …make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, 12 so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody. (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12)

Notice that he calls it an ambition. Not a retreat. Not a consolation prize for people who could not manage a bigger life. An ambition, which is a thing you aim at on purpose, with your whole chest.

And notice who the quiet life is for. Not so that you can stop thinking about the world. So that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders. The people outside your circle. Outside your church. Outside your politics.

So be the kind of neighbor whose ordinary life is worth the respect of someone who disagrees with you about everything.

I opened by wondering whether my simple self and my simple life really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Here is the answer. The grand scheme is not the alternative to the small life. The grand scheme is made out of small lives. There is nothing else for it to be made of.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in Gift from the Sea:

The here, the now, and the individual, have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet, and - from time immemorial - the woman. In the small circle of the home she has never quite forgotten the particular uniqueness of each member of the family; the spontaneity of now; the vividness of here. These are the individual elements that form the bigger entities like mass, future, world. We may neglect these elements, but we cannot dispense with them. They are the drops that make up the stream.

Take a slow breath with me, and sit with these questions this week.

What does it look like for me to be wheat-y, even in a field where the weeds seem to be growing rampantly?

What do I need to stay resilient?

How do I grow deep roots?

And what do I do when the weeds infringe on me?

Let both grow together until the harvest. That is not resignation. It is the patience of a God who would rather wait than lose one stalk of wheat to a careless hand, including yours, including mine.

So I will leave you with the oldest blessing we have, the one given to Aaron to speak over the people, spoken over frightened congregations in bad fields for three thousand years.

Place your hand over your heart, or make the sign of the cross, and receive it.

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.

(Numbers 6:24-26)

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Amen.

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