NRS Matthew 13
24 He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; 25 but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. 27 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?'
28 He answered, 'An enemy has done this.' The slaves said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' 29 But he replied, 'No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. 30 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.'"
36 Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field." 37 He answered, "The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; 38 the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, 39 and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. 40 Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. 41 The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, 42 and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!

Historian and ELCA Lutheran Martin Marty once famously wrote that America is "a nation with the soul of a church." From our earliest colonial beginnings, the lure of faith and freedom drew waves of immigrants here, many longing to throw off the chains of their pasts and make new beginnings. Often that dream had a strong religious component to it, as believers aspired to establish a new church in a new world that would be free of the old world's taint. Not only would they worship where, when, how, and with whom they wished, but they would also, at long last, congregate in churches of saints united in common doctrine, living godly lives, and restoring Christian faith to its pure, apostolic roots.

It's a beautiful dream, and over the last 350 years that dream has helped spawn a virtual marketplace of all sorts of different churches and church bodies across North America. When I was recently visiting with Rita Klehm, she told me that when she was a girl in Germany, there were only two churches, the Catholic and the Lutheran. In the U.S. and Canada there are at least 217 different denominations, and of course, many, many thousands more independent, non-affiliated churches. Most Lutherans in North America are now clustered in 4 major denominations, but there are still another dozen or so smaller Lutheran church bodies scattered across the U.S. In Washington County alone, with a population of about 32,000, 80+ churches list their service times and activities in the weekly church page of the Banner Press. And I suspect that many of those churches were started with the same dream that inspired our forebears so many generations ago - the dream of a true church, a united church, a holy church.

I know that dream lives in the hearts and souls of many a pastor. I call it the fantasy of the "next call." Especially when I was younger pastor, I used to daydream that:
" In my next call everybody will just get along.
" In my next call everybody will love and respect each other.
" In my next call everybody will put worship as their first priority; they'll devote themselves to the Word and Sacraments; they'll give generously and volunteer willingly.
" And of course, in my next call everybody will think I'm the cats and force on me embarrassingly large amounts of money for my selfless, uncomplaining service.
I said it was a fantasy! And how I wish I'd laid it to rest, but it lives on, in me and in you, too. We all dream of an ideal community. We all dream of one big happy family where everybody has their act together, their priorities straight, and their lives in order. We all dream of a place where grace reigns supreme, where love is always genuine, where help comes without strings attached and never is heard a discouraging word. We can't help it.

Sadly, though, wherever and whenever humans have taken it on themselves to make that dream a reality, the results are typically not grace and light, but judgment and death. It was the dream of a pure church that inspired the bloody inquisition in Spain, and likewise the witch trials in Salem. People trying to make the church more Christ-like sometimes ended up burning other people they called heretics at the stake, and to spread the love and mercy of Christ, kings and rulers often took it upon themselves to launch annihilating wars and crusades, frequently with the blessing of church authorities. When in the past century the dream of paradise on earth took secular, atheistic form in Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, and Red China, the result was death and destruction on a scale never before seen in human history. Less dramatically but no less destructively, it's the same impulse that sometimes leads pastors and people to hopscotch from church to church, or husbands and wives to jump from marriage to marriage, all in the fantasy that we can make the kingdom come to us, on our command and in our time.

Today's parable of the weeds among the wheat is a message of both warning and hope for us hopeless dreamers. On the one hand, the parable cautions against acting on our often mistaken desires to help God out. Whether that desire is to create a perfect church or a perfect family, we can't yank out the weeds without also yanking out the wheat, and that's because our own hearts are also sown with wheat and tares. In Lutheran terms, we are both sinners and saints. God has cast his Word into our hearts, but as long as we live in this world, we are still subject to the weakness that comes with these bodies of flesh. As St. Paul wrote in the Romans lesson from two weeks ago, "So I find it to be a law that when I want to do good, evil lies close at hand" (7:21). We cannot perfect ourselves, much less perfect the communities in which we live.

That may sound a little jarring, since religion in America today is mostly marketed as self-improvement. Come to this church, hear this preacher, read this book, join this study, pray these prayers, and you'll be all fixed up and ready to go. But faith doesn't work that way, as I was reminded in a cartoon I saw this last week:

Faith is not about becoming this, believing that, and getting this result. Faith is trusting that God will harvest what God has sown. What we can't do, God will, through the grace and mercies of our Lord Jesus Christ. God will gather a harvest of goodness from our all too weedy hearts, just as God will harvest a people of truth and righteousness from the ends of the earth, despite our best efforts and the wiles of our enemy the devil.

In the meantime, as we await that great harvest, we have no real option but to live with a great deal of forgiveness and a healthy measure of tolerance. We have to temper our quickness to judge others, otherwise we open ourselves to the same withering judgment. Or as Jesus once put it, we can't go around pulling the specks out of other people's eyes when we're walking around with a log in our own. And of course, that applies to our communities of faith, or should I say, most especially to our communities of faith. If you're looking for a church where everything is sweetness and light, then good luck; you're going to need it. We like to imagine that way back when the church was just one big happy family where everybody pulled together for the common good. Dream on! The letters of Paul testify that even the earliest Christian assemblies were often rife with dissension and strife, not to mention some very strange ideas about what it means to be a Christ follower. Were those congregations any more or less Christian than our own? No. Because, you see, God doesn't call us to be perfect, just faithful. And even for that, we have to trust God entirely.

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.