Jacob is on the run. He stops to rest with a stone for a pillow. Then he dreams  of a ramp with angels moving up an down, messengers /messages moving up and down He will carry the promise of Abraham even though he tried to grab it by unseemly means. Jacob has a dream. Maybe God couldn't get through his defenses any other way. Even though he stole the birthright and blessing, God reveals that the will be the one to carry the promise to Abraham, the promise of fertility given at the dawn of creation. God will work through such a one as Jacob, on the run from his rightly furious brother. Moreover, God says that he will be with Jacob, will keep him wherever he goes,  and will not leave him. God does not only work with the obviously good and pious. Instead God seems to always be weaving and reweaving human action to a fabric that advances the goal of God for human well-being and redemption. Bethel means house of God. Bethel is in all) of us.

 

The parables are quick angelic messages of the ways of heaven on earth. The wheat and weeds grow together in life. At first, the wheat and the weed, darnel, are indistinguishable from one another, so farmers usually left them alone until they could be told apart. Indeed, the story was told that the weed existed from the time of Noah; it was wheat that had gone astray. Only at harvest time are they handled differently. The farmer fears that destroying the weeds will destroy the crop as well. In this life, we are mistaken to look for perfection, for we live in a mixed field always. Indeed, I would push the image further and say that all of us have wheat and weed mixed together inside of us and in the farm we call society. Augustine famously called the church a mixed body. The work of judging separation at the harvest is not for us. Remember it is the one who runs the harvest who decides between the wheat and the weeds, not us. In early farming, it was laborious separation where women would carefully separate the two by color.  Oh one more thing, the darnel is poisonous if consumed. Sometimes the religious imagination gets dualistic, in or out, good or bad. The parable reminds us that life is rarely so simple. Indeed that very predilection could be a weed in our own spiritual gardens.

 

Paul's image is also in an apocalyptic vein He looks to the end also clearly as a beginning. He sees the evil in the world as afflicting all creation weed mixed with wheat. He attributes some of the pain we experience as birth pangs, labor pains, for the birth not only of a new self in Christ but that the entire  creation is moving to a new stage, giving birth to a new promise. Yes, creation groans in pain with us, but its pain presages a new age, one we pray without the many causes of pain in our world. or at least one without weeds. For Paul, the old ways are passing away in favor of the new age of the kingdom of heaven. In an odd way, we live within a time of seedtime and harvest mixed together.

 

One theme that ties our readings together this morning is hope. "Hope is a thing with feathers" said Emily Dickinson. Hope does not fly so high that it is blind to reality. Hope does fly over the difficulties of life; it flies over the rough weather and sees the sun above. Hope flies in spite of, not because of troubles. Hope is not chained to the illusion that things have to remain the same.