On Reaping What We Have Sown
Revelation 14:14-20 and Matthew 13:24-30
August 28, 2005
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword.
His truth is marching on.
I really couldn’t think of a better beginning to this talk than to sing these words which draw on the scriptural poetry we will be exploring together today. Both of the texts we will be looking at are apocalyptic visions…visions of the end times…and I’ll be sharing something about the situations to which they originally spoke in just a moment. Then we’ll spend some time teasing out those situations to which they speak today. But first, I want to share some of what led me to ponder these texts and reflect on them with you today.
Many of you know that I recently completed a three month assignment serving as a Soldier and Family Life Consultant with the United States Army in Europe.
I had this opportunity because of a special initiative originated by the Secretary of Defense to provide extra support in the form of civilian counselors. This initiative had been launched in recognition of the especially stressful situation our military and their families had been under due to our nation’s involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the Army, and other service branches, already provide an impressive array of supportive services to our troops, some military personnel and their families tend to shy away from using them. Not only do visits to mental health and social service providers go into one’s military record, but living in the Army community is like living in a very small town, where everyone else seems to know your business better than you do! In such a setting, Soldier and Family Life consultants provide a safe, neutral, and totally out of the loop source of help for families nervous about using other resources. The soldiers and their families value our presence because we are not “green”…that is, part of the uniformed service community. The fact that we are deployed temporarily (a month at a time) makes us even safer. They know that we are going to go home soon, and that their secrets will go safely with us.
So what kind of people did I see? At both bases I served, the soldiers were away most of the time, deployed to Afghanistan, or participating in extended field maneuvers in preparation for a return to Iraq. So I ended up spending most of my time with young children who were dealing with prolonged absences of mostly daddies, and some times mommies. These children told me stories that would break your hearts, and the pain in their little faces will stay with me for ever. I also worked with my share of anxious spouses, and when they were home, the soldiers they lived with.
While for reasons of confidentiality, I cannot go into detail as what my work with these folks involved, I do feel free to share some of my general impressions and what I learned by doing this work:
1. I learned a tremendous respect for soldiers and their families. These individuals, the men and women who are ready to lay down their lives for you and me, are incredible people making incredible sacrifices on our behalf. And the sad thing is, they are not always even aware of this themselves. The lives of sacrifice they lead become commonplace for them, and I counted the most sacred moments I spent with them as those moments when I was able to remind them of the awesome gift they were giving to us back at home.
2. I learned that this precious resource of commitment and talent is something that we dare not waste. It is far too precious to be used in a situation that is not clearly necessary and justified. You don’t disrupt the lives of these people, and send them into harm’s way, unless there is an extremely good reason for doing so.
3. I came away with a deepened conviction that our current policies have created a situation where, not only are these wonderful people, the people of our military forces, being misused, but that there will be some tremendous hell to pay at some point in the not too distant future. I need to hasten that this last conclusion is one that I reached on my own. Almost to a man, to a woman, did these folks know that they believed in what they are doing. They bore the devastation that these wars have caused in their personal lives with a grace that can only be described as amazing. They also did not, for the most part, ever discuss the politics that sent them there. A soldier’s job is, after all, not to question policies, but to perform them. The sacred commitment that they make to their country, to you and to me, leaves no room for politics at all. And this makes the way they are being misused, to my mind, even more poignant.
So what did I see and hear that made me turn to these two texts before us this morning? Both texts come out of an apocalyptic tradition that runs through the New Testament. Apocalyptic literature is about things that are currently hidden, but which will, in the end times, finally be revealed for all to see. The dark visions of the Book of Revelation are the most famous of these. Most scholars believe that these visions were speaking about the Roman Empire, and its eventual self-destruction. In the vision read for us today, we see “one like the son of man” – the archetype of human being – set out to harvest the earth. And what he harvests are those famous grapes of wrath, placing them in a wine press, where their vintage can indeed be trampled out. The image of the vine is one that Scripture uses consistently to describe the eventual legacy of our misguided policies and actions. Just as real grapes seem to record the influences in which they are grown, imparting to the wine the particular influences of a particular time and place, so do these grapes of wrath record the conditions under which they were ripened. They contain all the bitterness of the oppression caused by Rome and her many partners.
The Gospel text also comes from a tradition of apocalyptic that began with Mark’s Gospel. Here we encounter it in a parable also known to us in song. You sing it almost every Thanksgiving:
Come you thankful people, come.
Raise the song of harvest home…
Wheat and tares together sown,
Unto joy or sorrow grown.
In this story, the farmer plants good seed, but then an enemy comes in the night and plants weeds. The wheat and the weeds grow together, and cannot be distinguished from one another, until the time of harvest, when the work of the culprit is finally revealed. It is only at the time of the harvest that they are separated from one another, with the grain going into the food supply, and the weeds going into the fire. Many scholars wonder about how authentic these words attributed to Jesus can be. The saying has the flavor of a later strain of apocalyptic teaching that we don’t find in the most authentic teachings of Jesus. But I think this teaching is nonetheless instructive, especially if we begin to understand who the culprit who planted those pesky weeds was. Do you have any ideas about that? You could surmise, as many have, that the villain in this story is the Devil. But I think you and I both know that the actual culprit was probably the farmer himself. Anyone who has ever planted a lawn (and may God have mercy on your soul if you planted one in Tucson) knows that mixed in with the grass seeds are a certain percentage of weeds. It’s impossible to produce a completely pure seed stock. One has to plant the good seed along with the bad. There is simply no choice. And so one is consigned to weeks of weeding any time one plants a new lawn. That is the very situation in which we, as human beings, constantly find ourselves. Even when our aims and our intentions are good, our actions always have an unintended downside, and this downside is not revealed to us until the time of harvest, when the seeds we have sown finally declare themselves.
And so my friends, it always must be when we decide to go to war. Even wars which are fought for the best of reasons are wheat and weeds together sown. I don’t think there is anyone alive today who would have challenged the necessity of the United States participating in the Second World War. The enormity of the evil being perpetrated upon humanity justified the evil of war. It was unthinkable that we would have done otherwise. And yet, over time, we reapt a harvest we did not intend. My own father is a member of “the greatest generation”. And he came home with scars that played out in our lives in ways that none of us understood until fifty years later. As a child, I knew that something was wrong with my father. He was vacant and absent most of the time, a true workaholic. The only time I ever had inkling of the painful memories he brought home was when I one time made the mistake of waking him from a nap. Almost immediately he was on his feet, thinking that I was a Japanese soldier attacking him. It wasn’t until my father became a very old man that he felt he had the freedom to begin discussing all that he had seen and heard, and now we can’t shut him up. He has a need to tell these stories about the horror of his war experiences over and over again. And I can only wonder how our lives would have been different if he had been able to confront these demons in a healthy way at a much earlier point in time.
You see, my friends, the seeds have been sown. We have a generation of young families who have been marked in an indelible way by the conflicts in which our nation is engaged. It couldn’t be otherwise. What concerns me most is the nature of these marks. While none of the soldiers I spoke to actually felt able to speak out against the war, several of them were brave enough to at least wonder out loud if all the sacrifices they and fellows had made were actually in the service of a good and just cause. The ones who had the most severe symptoms were those who couldn’t find a moral compass for the atrocities they had seen and committed. They could not deal with the hell they found themselves in because they could not justify or forgive their own actions. And though I did my best to relieve them in some way of their guilt, they knew that it was not enough. They knew in their hearts that their actions were indefensible.
My friends, what frightens me most, as a professional, and as a citizen, is the jeopardy in which these young souls have been placed. Unjust wars may be problematic for the havoc they wreak on the world stage. But they ensure a special hell for the individuals who fight them. I was recently heard the largest provider of homeless services in Los Angeles say that today there are 50,000 homeless vets of the Viet Nam era living on the streets in LA County alone! These vets never came home from Nam. And I am certain that you have personal knowledge of others who may not have lived on the streets, but who never came home themselves. In this context, discussions about “just war theory” become deeply personal. The costs of unjust war must finally be figured in terms of lost and damaged souls, and those who conduct unnecessary wars must be prepared to pay.
My friends, make no mistake: a bitter harvest has been sown and awaits us in the years ahead. This war, which all of us bought and paid for, is going to have lasting consequences for us all—not only in terms of increased turmoil in the Middle East, and the 84 billion and counting which was not spent on more worthwhile projects, but in the way it will impact our brothers and our sisters, our cousins and our nephews, and their children, and their children’s children.
Now we must face together the real secret of this apocalypse story. The culprit who planted the weeds in the wheat is among us. Who is he? If we are completely honest, we would have to agree with Pogo, and admit that we have met the enemy, and he is us. We are the ones who, by our inaction, allowed this atrocity to occur. We are the ones, who by our inaction, allow it to continue. We are the ones who benefit every day from the privilege of living in Pax Americana…the Roman Empire of our time. We are the ones who paid for the guns and put them into the hands of our young. And we are the ones who will be paying for generations the wages of this particular sin. Faced with such knowledge, what are we to do? The answer, I believe, is deeply personal. Some of us will doubtless be called to actively protest this war. Others of us may be called to at least reconsider our votes, or become more involved in politics. Still others of us may feel a special call to minister to families affected by the war. There are many ways to go about weeding this particular patch of ground. And God will lay on your heart the way that is right for you.
But there is one thing which I believe that all of us who bear the name of Christ must be prepared to do. And that is to engage in sisterly and brotherly correction with other people of faith who support these wars. Many of them are Bible-reading folk who, curiously enough, are drawn to these very passages we have been studying—passages which portray the battles of the end time. Viewed against these dark visions, American incursions into the Holy Lands (and Iraq is one of them, being the ancestral home of Abraham and his kin, and possibly even of Eden itself) are seen to be a part of God’s plan… sort of a jump start on Armageddon, the War of the great and final apocalypse. I submit to you that whatever other actions we undertake, we must begin to take theological action to correct this nefarious and dangerous reading of Scripture. We must not only help our sisters and brothers to see that the most obvious correlate to the Beast of Revelation is the American empire itself. We must help them to see that the apocalypse originally foretold in the Bible never occurred. Jesus did not return when Jerusalem fell to the Romans in 70AD. Jesus did not return when, at various times, those seeking to decipher the secrets of the Bible predicted he would. Every prediction of such an ending has finally proven itself false. Yet in every failure of this kind, perhaps the true meaning of the Apocalypse is being revealed: that God’s judgement is always upon us, waiting for us to recognize; that Jesus is continually coming, continually harvesting the seeds we have planted. And that in every here and now we have the opportunity to taste after justice in the grain and in the wine we harvest. The word we speak to our sisters and brothers of faith must be said loudly and clear: we cannot leave final judgment in this or any other matter to Jesus, because Jesus has left it to us for ius to do. At this table. In this sacred place. And in the sacred wide world beyond. Now is the moment to choose which seeds we will sow. Now is the moment to forgive ourselves for the bad seed we have sown, and to commit ourselves the endless task of weeding out their unwanted fruits. We must be prepared to ask ourselves the hard questions. Questions like “Who would Jesus Bomb?” And in this work, this challenging and sometimes heart-wrenching work, we can and we must trust the one who has loved us from the beginning, and who will provide us all that we need to complete our mission.
And now to the One at work within us
Who is able to do far more than we could ask or think:
To this One be glory from generation generation
In the Church and in Christ Jesus,
For ever and ever. Amen.