Trust

Text: Matthew 13:24-30;36-43

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”

So wrote the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in a letter to his cousin Marguerite on July 4, 1914, penned from a trench in northern France. He spent the whole of the First World War as a stretcher-bearer, with few breaks, always on the front line, Flanders, Verdun, Ypres, Strasbourg, and he kept up a steady correspondence with his cousin from wherever he was.

Surely the setting in which he wrote was extreme, but nonetheless a reality we all must come to grips with in life, a reality that Jesus reveals in his parable today: that good and bad, joy and sorrow, pure and impure, justice and injustice co-exist in our world. They live side by side everywhere, sometimes inextricably intertwined, so that it can be hard to tell what is the good and what is the bad. 

And this is hard for many of us. We would like for there to be less ambiguity in life; we would like for things to be more black and white; we would like to know just what it is that we are called to do when faced with the reality of evil. We would like to know what to do when we see injustice, when we see uncharity, when we see, or think we see, weeds among the wheat.

An so we return to Jesus’s improbable farming practices and hear his invitation to stop and think about the consequences of hasty action to root out what we think is bad when we are trying to live in community.

The church throughout its whole history has not been immune to the urge to purify itself by demonizing, excluding, or full on driving out those it identifies as impure. Matthew’s community was embroiled in this very thing as those who followed Jesus began to separate from the synagogue. When Tom and I were in Spain earlier this year, we saw magnificent church after church built on the ruins of magnificent mosques and synagogues, symbols of Christian triumphalism over what the church deemed infidels whom it expelled from Spain itself in the 15th century. And some Christian individuals and some of our sister denominations are actively engaged right now in purging themselves of LGBTQ people and their allies and of ordained women, a tearing of the community that our own denomination has experienced in its own past.

This is truly a conundrum. Are we called to simply sit still in the face of injustice? Are we called to passivity when we feel so strongly that a wrong must be righted? But maybe this is the wrong question.

Maybe the question is, how do we act in the best interest of our community in the face of trouble?

Because Jesus’s answer is, trust that God is at work. Trust that God is going to sort things out. Trust that God sows good seed and that we need to trust that God will bring forth good. And, as Pere Teilhard said, that might take a while. So trust in the slow work of God and accept the anxiety that we feel as we discern the way forward. 

Because, as Jesus suggests, there are consequences, perhaps unintended consequences but consequences all the same, to seeing ourselves as God’s weed-pullers instead of God’s own plants among other plants. Matthew’s community became estranged from their own roots in the synagogue, an estrangement that widened over the ages to eventually result in horrific persecution of Jews. The expulsion of both Jews and Muslims in Spain began the decline of a once great civilization in which the three great religions coexisted and thrived, and gave birth to the Inquisition. Two of my own seminary classmates from other denominations have been removed from their posts, one removed from the ministry altogether, for officiating the weddings of gay couples. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin himself was cancelled by the church for his modern scientific writings, losing his position as a teacher and seeing his books removed from libraries and bookshops.

No community exists outside the reality that the good and the bad are living side by side all the time. And this reality is so very hard to tolerate. And so, our country is polarized and anxious to oust others in various ways. Mistrust has grown here in our own church and anxiety pushes some to judge others in haste. It’s almost impossible to know the intentions of others, but we scrutinize and speculate all the same so we can know which side to line up on ourselves or what side to assign others to.

But Jesus says, leave that to God. Trust that God will bring out the good, because it is God’s work to bring out the good even from disaster. It is not our work to judge or to sow bad seeds ourselves.

The fabric of our community has been torn, and we are divided in our reactions to this truth. But surely God is in this place, and we must learn to trust in the slow work of God and not act out of our anxiety about what has happened or what is to come. It is not helpful to the community to judge one another, or to lob accusations, or speculate, or scrutinize intentions. 

As we live into our own reality here and now, only God can say what we will be. It is natural to want to skip ahead, to forego the intermediate stages, to get to the new place now, to resist that it may take more time than we like and even deny that we are in pain. But it is our job to trust that God is with us, that God even now continues to sow good seed, and that God will redeem us. Let us give God the benefit of believing that God’s own hand is leading us, and accept the anxiety of feeling ourselves in suspense and as yet incomplete. Let us trust in the slow work of God, secure in the knowledge that God is with us every step of the way.