[I’m on vacation for the month of July. But I’m still blogging. This isn’t a sermon or a reflection I’ve written with anyone in mind. Just thoughts that happen alongside the lectionary.]
This week: Proper 11A
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?’
There’s something familiar about that response, isn’t there?
The slaves go out into the field to do their work—and freak out. Because the field isn’t perfect. They don’t know what to do. They want the master to tell them.
But instead of asking what to do, they ask why it isn’t perfect. That’s what has their attention. Something is wrong. Why? Where did this come from
They then easily jump to a conclusion: the master did this.
And because the master is powerful and awesome and good and perfect, there is no way he would have done this. And yet, here it is! How? Why? Is the good master also responsible for evil?
They want to know where the evil comes from. And what to do with it.
Like us—they can’t handle living in the now. Not when there are serious questions about the future.
These aren’t bad questions.
Nobody should feel bad about asking them. Or needing to deal with them. It just isn’t necessarily what the master is focused on.
As a student, I marveled at the other students who processed this way. The ones who didn’t just ask good questions, but needed to deal with everything. Because they often synthesized this into their notes. Notes that I, in the end, came to envy.
And yes, here, and always, the question of evil is totally part of this deal!
But it is often also a distraction.
Because the master has given his slaves work to do.
Which is not to say that they are wrong to ask the question. It’s to say that the question these characters ask in the parable isn’t centerpiece of Jesus’s teaching.
And sometimes, we can get kind of stuck on this stuff.
So often, the teacher is talking about the good and the disciples are busy focusing on the bad.
How amazing is it to sit down to dinner with family, enjoying ourselves. But I forgot to ripen the avocados.
Yes, the bad has value, but doesn’t it always have a way of drawing our focus?
Everybody loves the bad guy.
That’s what we’re told, anyway.
**Star Wars is great. Because of Darth Vader. Ultimate bad guy.**
Never mind that 6 year-old me wanted to be Luke Skywalker. Obi-Wan Kenobi, actually. Only, you know, younger. But powerful. The real Jedi. Not the wannabe.
[Which, once again proves that children get the point we are intent on messing up.]
Culture wants us to love the bad guy, though. Often advertising them more than the heroes.
I think we’re confusing love for what fascinates us. The bad guy draws our attention. Not to be like, but as the thing we can’t not look at.
We focus on the bad guy, even when we want to be the good guy.
Catastrophising is much easier than trusting.
The negative future is way more attractive than the positive one we want.
We might like to dream of a better world, but we’d rather believe in Murphy’s Law.
The irony, of course, is that we aren’t supposed to be realists. Or skeptics. This isn’t the foundation of the Kin-dom. It isn’t the centerpiece of Christianity.
Trust is.
Love is.
Hope is.
Negativity is the stuff we bring to the table to avoid doing the hard work of trusting, loving, and hoping.
Negativity is easy. And it sucks.
It literally distracts us from living.
And it helps us avoid what it is that we’re called to do.
We return to the positive.
The plants:
When they’re shooting up out of the ground, the wheat and the weeds are too hard to identify. Then, when you can tell the difference, taking out the weeds can kill the wheat. So just chill out.
Of course, the disciples miss this. They want the secret key for unlocking Jesus’s teachings. [Hey, he did it last time!]
I suppose we’re bound to do the same. The explanation helps us focus on the bad people and what’s going wrong with the world…
No doomscrolling = less negativity
This isn’t a pollyanna take on a weird little gospel. It’s a critique on an obsessively negative culture. One that confuses negativity for activity. Like reading the news is the same as participating in one’s community.
It’s about recalibrating.
And for me, being off social media for three weeks has me feeling sooooo much better.
And sometimes we need to shed the toxic—whether it is toxic positivity or negativity.
But…
It isn’t either/or. It’s keeping the point the point.
So it isn’t about being positive or negative. Or finding a happy medium. It isn’t about left or right or moderate.
We’re to keep the point the point.
And I find it waaaaay too easy to dwell on the negative instead of what we’re supposed to do.
That focusing on the negative? It isn’t being a realist. It’s avoiding the work. The work we all share in common. Of building a better world.