Sermon by Pastor Brian - July 22, 2026
Sermons
Jesus, the Weed Keeper
Matthew 13:24-30
Jesus may have been level on the level as a carpenter, but he’s a terrible farmer. With over 70% of ancient Palestinians dependent on agronomy to feed their families, the local plow hands can’t survive another season of trouble in the fields. Despite his crooked row crops and plantings on rocky soil, Jesus shares a series of agricultural parables before a crowd bordering the Sea of Galilee.
When God turns the world right side up, he says, it will be like this: a landowner sows certified seed across the fertile ground. After sixteen hours of spade work, she retires to her pillow. During the hard sleep, an enemy jumps the fence and scatters tainted seed corner to corner. Months later, when the plants mature, the wheat is overrun with tares.
After discovering the tangle of root and grain, the day laborers interrogate the landowner, “Did you broadcast the wrong seed bag? You’ve fouled your own dirt! The wheat will be choked out, endangering next year’s yield. Let’s sharpen our pruning hooks.” Rocking on the porch, the landowner responds, “No. In separating one part from the other, you’ll destroy the whole.
Let them grow together, unharmed, getting plenty of sun, rain, nutrient, and fertilizer. On this plot, we don’t reap what we sow.” Flaunting the rules of horticulture, Jesus insults common sense, offering a glimpse of life after heaven fully invades earth. In this confusing story, found only in Matthew’s Gospel, why are his followers told, “Don’t pull up the weeds?”
Matthew 13:24-30 Jesus put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?” He answered, “An enemy has done this.” The slaves said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But he replied, “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’
Congregational Responses:
For those with Coeliac disease, wheat is not the preferred plant.
People change and so do some plants; they shape shift into a new variety.
Everything will be uprooted.
In her statement to police, 15-year-old Kristi Emberling said the triggerman, who slayed her boyfriend in New Orleans, “was stocky, with a light complexion.”1 Choosing from a series of photos, she positively identified Calvin Duncan as the perpetrator. Despite a contrary physical appearance and a corroborating alibi, he was charged with murder in the first degree. Based on the girl’s star testimony, the jury sentenced Duncan to life in prison. While at Angola, a Louisiana State Penitentiary, an inmate named Big Dugger shared this advice: “Put down the Bible and pick up a law book.” With access to the largest prison law library in the country, Calvin started studying. Trained as an inmate counsel substitute, Duncan served as a stand-in lawyer for fellow prisoners, overturning hundreds of guilty verdicts. After twenty-eight years investigating his own case, he uncovered gross inaccuracies in Kristi’s account.2 According to the Innocence Project, which aided Calvin’s exoneration, eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. The percentage of cross-racial mistaken identities, disturbingly, is even higher.3
According to master gardeners in the Holy Land, it’s impossible to distinguish between the Bearded Darnel, an annual grass with long slender bristles, and the Wild Emmer, the indigenous grain found throughout Galilee and Judea. As seedlings and plantlets, wheat and tares appear identical, with matching stalks, spikes, leaves, and color. The only way to verify one from the other is to wait until the harvest.
But Americans, unwilling to postpone judgment, are terribly impatient, spending $12 billion annually on herbicides. With sheds full of liquid poisons stacked by the gallon, we are a people fixated on total eradication. With our sprayers primed, today’s parable stops us mid-step. “Leave the weeds alone,” we are told, “It’s not our decision; it’s not our field; we can’t tell the difference; none of us can be trusted with Roundup.”
Shockingly, there is no botanical classification for the term “weed.” It’s a fabricated construct used to scorn plants deemed undesirable and incompatible with human preferences. A purple Iris among ears of corn, a pink orchid in a pine thicket, a blue Hydrangea in a Bonzi forest, and a white frangipani in a holly grove could all be labeled noxious. Put another way, “A weed,” says Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “is but an unloved flower.”4
Even weeds, in God’s wild patch, have divine appointments. Track the dirty footsteps of Jesus, and you’ll find him tending to goldenrod neglected in the ditch, repotting clover closer to the light, manuring dandelions to sustain them for the swarm of honeybees. Jesus, after all, was a weed keeper, a green-thumbed Savior who opened his arms to all that’s created, plants and people alike. He died wearing a crown of thorn and thistle.
To all the terrible farmers aiming to carry on his work, let us begin by loving the trampled-upon sprout vying for life between the cracks in the concrete.
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1 Otterbourg, Ken. “Calvin Duncan.” National Registry of Exonerations, 31, Jan. 2023, https://exonerationregistry.
2 Gross, Terry. “Wrongly Convicted, he became ‘The Jailhouse Lawyer,’- and helped free himself.” Fresh Air. 14, July 2025. https://www.npr.org/programs/
3 Innocence Project. https://innocenceproject.org/
4 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler . “The Weed,” Poems of Progress and New Thought Pastels, (Gay & Hancock, 1911).