Jul 5th: Together: The Wheat and the Weeds, with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski.
Join us online or in person this Sunday at First Presbyterian Church of Bend. You are welcome here.
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Rev. Dr. Steven Koski
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Together: The Wheat and the Weeds with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski. Series: More Than You Think: Discovering the Parables of Jesus A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Matthew 13.24–30, 36–43.
Wondering how to love this country when you’re heartbroken by it too? This Sunday we’re talking about holding gratitude and grief together, and what it looks like to seek courage, integrity, and justice without giving up on each other. If you’re tired of shouting matches and looking for a more human way forward, you’re not alone.
Join us online or in person this Sunday at First Presbyterian Church of Bend. You are welcome here.
Transcript:
Steven: A happy birthday, America. 250 years. Now that’s a long time to be anything – marriage, friendship, an experiment in democracy. And on this weekend, we are asked to celebrate. So, let’s celebrate. But first, take a look at those flags. I mean, they’re everywhere this weekend on porches and overpasses and pickup trucks and lapel pins. You know, likely we walked past flags so many times we’ve stopped really seeing them. So, let me tell you something about the flag that you actually may not know. Have you ever wondered why it’s red, white, and blue? The Continental Congress answered that in 1782 Red stands for courage, white stands for integrity, blue stands for justice, courage, integrity, justice, that’s what you’re looking at every time you see that flag, that’s what the founders said this nation would be built on, not a royal bloodline, not a state religion, not one ethnic identity, but values, ideals, courage, integrity, justice, and notice what’s not on the flag. No cross, no crescent, no Star of David, conspicuously, deliberately none, because the founders understood many of them from hard experience what happens when the state wraps itself too tightly in any particular religion. The flag was a promise, and that absence of religious symbolism was actually part of the promise. Freedom of religion only means something if it means freedom for all religions, including the ones the government has decided in this moment to treat as threats. 250 150 years old this weekend. I mean, worth celebrating. Jesus tells a story about a farmer who plants a good field, good seed, good soil, everything done right, but while everyone is sleeping, an enemy scatters weeds among the wheat, and when the crop comes up, both come up together, weeds and wheat inseparable, at least for now. The farm hands want to do something about it immediately. Let us pull the weeds, and the farmer says, ‘No, not yet. You’ll damage the wheat. Let them grow together until the harvest. It’s not a comfortable parable. It doesn’t divide cleanly into good news and bad news, it holds both wheat and weeds, beauty and brokenness, grace and failure growing in the same field, under the same sun, in the same soil, that’s America, beauty, no doubt, and brokenness, grace, and failure. That’s the field at 250 years. America is neither a perfect nation nor a failed experiment. We are a field that has produced extraordinary wheat, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, the GI Bill, the Marshall Plan, the Americans with Disabilities Act, ordinary people who chose something larger than themselves. I mean, farm heads who stayed in the field when it would have been easier to walk away. We are also a field tangled with weeds we didn’t plant and weeds we did. The Trail of Tears, Japanese internment, redlining, mass incarceration, a health care system that still leaves far too many behind. A gun violence epidemic, the rest of the world watches in bewilderment. Langston Hughes knew both. The wheat and the weeds, he wrote, I too sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes. And then Langston Hughes with a defiance that is itself an act of love, but I laugh and eat well and grow strong. Tomorrow I’ll be at that table. The wheat is real. The weeds are real. Both are in the field, and Jesus says don’t pretend otherwise. You know, one of the weeds that seems appropriate to name, particularly this weekend, is Christian nationalism. You know, I say this as a pastor who loves Jesus and loves this country. Christian nationalism claims the flag, that flag of courage, integrity, justice, and insists that it belongs to one particular version of Christianity, that God is on our side, that faith should be enforced through political power, but look at what Jesus actually taught. I mean, Christian nationalism models the love of power, Christ modeled the power of love. Christian nationalism says America first, Jesus said, God so loved the world. Christian nationalism builds higher walls. Jesus set longer and wider tables. Christian nationalism asks, Who is worthy? Jesus asked, Who is my neighbor? And then answered the one you least expected. When Christianity gets fused to state power, history has shown us what follows, not the flourishing of the way of Jesus, but the church becoming a tool of empire, exclusion, control.
The early church, the earliest followers of Jesus, the church spread not through dominance, but through sacrificial love, hospitality, radical care for the vulnerable, it was most alive when it had the least worldly authority. A genuinely Christian patriotism doesn’t plant a cross on the flag. It asks whether the flag’s own promise, courage, integrity, justice. It asks whether that promise is being kept for everyone, including the ones who are still eating in the kitchen. The Reverend William Sloan Coffin wrote that that there are actually three kinds of patriots: two bad, one good. The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. The good ones carry carry on a lover’s quarrel with their own country. James Baldwin, who knew what it meant to love a country that did not always love him back, wrote this: I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for that reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually, not despite the love, but because of the love. You know that’s the only kind of patriotism that can sustain us through 250 years, and whatever comes next, clear-eyed, tenderhearted, unwilling to settle for less than what this country promised. Here’s what I want you to hear this morning. You can put your hand over your heart. You can feel genuine aching gratitude for the men and women who gave everything, sacrificed everything. So you and I could sit in this room in freedom, and, and you can weep when you watch those freedoms exercised in ways that diminish the humanity of others, both things at the same time, that is not contradiction, that is love, that is love of country. Fannie Lou Hamer, sharecropper, visionary woman who was, who was beaten simply for registering to vote, you know? She said it so plainly, nobody’s free until everybody’s free. Pablo Cassels wrote, the love of one’s country is a splendid thing, but why should love stop at the border? When love stops at the border, it isn’t love anymore, it’s something smaller, something wrapped in fear, something that that protects only itself. Freedom is not the right to do whatever we please. Our denomination, the Presbyterian Church USA, has a prayer for this weekend that puts it this way: give to the people of our country zeal for justice and strength of forbearance, so we may use our liberty in accordance with your gracious will, or, O God, zeal for justice, strength of forbearance, liberty in accordance with grace, that’s the field worth tending. You know, there’s a story I love for the Special Olympics that, that I think really speaks to the hope of this country we’re celebrating. There were 12 runners at the starting lot of the 100 meter dash. When the gun goes off, one of the runners, Danny, shoots to the front. He’s grinning, his arms are pumping, he’s waving at his family. He’s about 10 meters from the finish line when his feet get all tangled up, and he falls hard on the ground, tears streaming down his face. The other 11 runners, they reach Danny about the same time, and without a word spoken, they stop, every single one of them. They help Danny up, they brush him off, and then they all hold hands, and they cross the finish line together. Nobody wins until everybody wins. That’s not a slogan, that’s a picture of what the flag’s promise actually looks like when it steps off the pole and walks into the world. The question I want to leave you with is not who will lead us out of this mess that we’re in, not which side is the wheat and which side is the weed and the question is, Who are we choosing to be? No election decides that only we do. On a weekend when we celebrate freedom, the freedom to disagree, to dissent, the freedom to demand better. What if you exercise that freedom by reaching towards someone who sees the world differently than you do, not to win, just to get close enough to remember that they’re human hate cannot survive proximity. The farmer says, let them grow together, not as permission to ignore the weeds, but as a call to patience and humility to keep working the field to keep loving the wheat into flourishing to resist the certainty that we alone can see clearly enough to do the pulling and.
At 250 this country is still becoming the wheat is real, the weeds, the weeds are so very real. The field, the field is ours, not to abandon, not to worship, but to tend with a lover’s quarrel, with gratitude and grief held in the same hands, with the stubborn conviction that nobody is free until everybody is free, that we rise by lifting others courage, integrity, justice. That is what the flag says. May we have the courage to live, it may it be so. Amen.
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