Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Bermuda Grass




If you are familiar with Bermuda Grass you know how invasive it is, and how hard to eradicate.  It spreads rapidly, sending out lateral runners that quickly take root and send out new runners from there.  But the underground rhizomes are worse.  These also spread out in every direction, forming a dense mat that chokes out other plants, and if you dig these out, one small section of rhizome remaining in the ground is enough to propagate a new plant and start the cycle over again.  And did I mention that at this time of year the Bermuda Grass is sending up slender stalks with forked seed heads like devil’s pitchforks, and that the slightest movement is enough to shatter them and scatter hundreds of tiny seeds onto the ground? 

I come from a long line of vegetable gardeners, and one of the things I was really looking forward to when we moved to the fine climate of Petaluma, and bought a little place of our own, was being able to grow a bit of our own food.     So you can imagine how delighted I was to move into our new house and discover that the yard is full of Bermuda Grass.  I considered various solutions to this problem, but all of them involved expensive and ecologically-dubious inputs like black plastic sheeting, redwood lumber, manufactured soil products, or herbicides.  I also know from experience that such solutions are temporary, and in the long run can create new problems that are just as hard to solve.
 
So in the end I decided to just start digging in the ground, and carve my vegetable beds out of the Bermuda Grass.  Every spring I’ve dug a new one, and re-dug the ones I dug before, so I now have three vegetable beds, and I think I’ll stop there, at least for now, and work on clearing some ground for vines and fruit trees.  Each time I dig those beds, and add compost and fertilizer, the easier the soil is to work, and the less time I have to spend squatting down, picking out rhizomes of Bermuda Grass.   I haven’t eradicated it, but I’ve accepted that I never will.  And I know that if I ever stop pulling it out around the edges of the beds, or re-digging them every spring, it will take no more than a year or two for it to reclaim my vegetable garden.  But for now, man and weed are in a tenuous balance, and that is good enough for me.
  
You can understand the story of my garden even if you don’t have Bermuda Grass in your yard.  In the same way, when Jesus told the parable of the Weeds in the Wheat it made sense to the people who were listening.  They would have appreciated the realistic agricultural detail in the story, even if nothing exactly like it had ever happened to them.  From their own experience they would have been able to imagine it vividly—the perniciousness of the enemy who sowed weed seeds in a carefully planted field, the dilemma facing the householder, and the practical good sense of his solution.  And this correspondence with their own experience would have made it all the more puzzling to consider this as religious teaching, and all the more startling to hear that this is what the kingdom of heaven is like.

The parables of Jesus make sense as stories about what really happens in the world, and so they are accessible to everyone.  This is also what makes them subversive.  The God whose kingdom is like the seed of a mustard plant, or a woman kneading yeast into her dough, or a man whose wheat field is full of weeds—this God is not the exclusive possession of religious professionals.  His word is not shut up in sacred texts that are hard to understand, but it falls freely here, and there, on the path, on the rocks, and among the thorns, as well as in the fertile soil.  Its harvest of liberating truth is ripe and plentiful, as anyone can see, needing only willing laborers to bring it in.

But the church by-and-large lost the common sense of Jesus’ parables in a process that was already underway when the gospels were written.  Her authoritative teachers began to read them in a way that Jesus himself likely never intended.  Rather than offering them as open-source images of the action of God in the world, they began to convert them into proprietary code, where every figure and action in the story is the outward form of a hidden religious idea.  This soon became the normative way of reading, and teaching, and preaching the parables of Jesus, and remained so for hundreds of years.  

It has only been in last couple of centuries that New Testament scholars have developed the critical tools to make convincing arguments for the way the gospel texts were put together.  They have shown how the different authors used their source material in different ways, and that not all of that material came originally from Jesus.  The Gospel of Matthew, for example, has a particular concern for the problems of internal conflict, order, and discipline in the faith community, and includes material, not found in the other gospels, that specifically addresses those issues.  With that in mind, it is not too hard to see why Matthew is the only gospel to include the story of the Weeds in the Wheat.  It also explains the addition of an allegorical interpretation of the parable, making it about the future destruction of evil and vindication of the righteous. 

This type of allegory was common enough in the 1st century, and it spoke particularly to people enduring persecution because of their religious beliefs.  The historical-critical study of Matthew suggests that the gospel originated in a Jewish-Christian community suffering in this way.  But while this reading addressed the urgent concerns of Matthew’s congregation, 40 or 50 or 60 years after the resurrection, it doesn’t fit so well with Jesus’ own teaching on the Kingdom of God. 

There was well-established precedent in Hebrew scripture for talking about this Kingdom, but Jesus is unique for his claim that it is not only the foundation of Israel’s identity as a people; it is not merely the guarantee of the authority of the law and the prophets; it is not only the promise of ultimate deliverance from evil and oppression and of the reward of plenty and rest.  For Jesus, the Kingdom of God is most importantly a present power, visibly at work in the realms of nature and human affairs, and impinging on the history of the world in a decisive and unprecedented way in his own life and ministry. 

So it might be more faithful to the mind of Jesus not to abstract from this parable an allegory of the final judgment, but to enter into the concrete situation it describes, to see what it shows us about our present world and the choices we must make there.  We dream of a world of order, of harmony and perfection, where our mate loves and wants and needs the same things we do, and on the same schedule; or of an ideologically and culturally homogenous nation, where everyone, or at least everyone in power, agrees with us; or we imagine a pure market economy, functioning perfectly without the need for political intervention; or of fields where herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides have eliminated every pest from the endless parallel rows of genetically-identical corn.   But instead of this perfect order, we get Bermuda Grass in the yard, Weeds in the Wheat, Muslims in the Middle-East, and Central-American children on the border, a mixed-up muddled mess. 

The frustration of our dreams of perfection continually tempts us to take action to set things right.   But Jesus’ parable puts hard questions to any corrective steps we might take:  do we have the greatness of mind to acknowledge the real presence of evil in the world, with all its destructive effects, and yet also to see that God is this world’s true ruler, who is preparing in the same place, at the same time, an immeasurable harvest of blessing and good?   Beyond that, do we have the humility and the wisdom to admit that we are not able finally to discriminate between what is of God, and what is not?  And most importantly, do we have the faith and the hope to hear the news that the one who can untangle this knot is here? 

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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.