So, you know you have a really, really good parable.
When Jesus goes out of his way to explain it, and I still leave scratching my head wondering what he meant.
The sower, I feel like we hear that one a lot. The wheat and the weed.
I was like, well, I've heard it. I've read it.
There's some sermons about it, some pretty good ones, but what do I take away from it?
What is the bigger picture? I'm trying to find, you know, he says,
those who have ears, let them hear. What am I supposed to hear?
So, I was reminded of a time in eighth grade when I was on a field trip to Washington, D.C.
And I'll be honest with you, I don't know that I actually learned a lot about monuments in eighth grade on that trip.
Because what I do remember is the street vendors.
Because the street vendors were selling Oakley sunglasses for five dollars.
And you better bet, I mean, nobody was convinced that they were real, right?
But I think actually we called them Folkley's. It's kind of a funny name.
But it didn't slow us down, literally at all.
I think by the end of the trip, all of us had ten or fifteen pairs.
Every combination, we were trading to see what colors we could find.
It became a whole thing.
And so you had this whole bus of thirteen year olds just wearing knockoff sunglasses.
Nobody cared. Nobody batted an eye.
And that's the thing about bad fakes. Bad fakes are kind of funny.
You know, you could spot them a mile away.
The fakes that do damage are the good ones.
The ones you can't tell that they're fake.
So for full time, I do cyber security.
And one thing that I hear and that I deal with a lot are fake emails.
Fake emails, phishing emails, you'll hear them called.
And oftentimes it looks like your boss emailing you, asking you for your password.
But it's got to be urgent. You have to give it to me now or we're going to go bankrupt.
I'm like, I don't think you need my password that bad.
I'm not that important.
Or it'll be an email from your bank.
It'll say, please log in for this urgent matter.
It's not real.
But sometimes it's hard to tell.
They're really good at making it look real.
And those are the dangerous ones.
Bad fakes get laughed at, but good fakes get trusted.
And so nobody knows that better than the devil himself.
He's been in the counterfeiting business since all the way back in the garden.
And he has never been one to sell something that just looks obviously evil.
He counterfeits what people already trust.
He fakes what is good.
He will fake the very Word of God.
In fact, that was his first move against the human race.
Did God actually say?
Did He say you'll die?
Really?
If you eat from that tree?
And that's the enemy that we see in today's parable.
It says the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field.
It's worth noticing that as he begins this parable, nothing is wrong.
The seeds are good.
The field is his.
But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.
And so everything grows together.
Everything looks fine.
Right until the wheat had grown to the point where you could start to see the grains.
And only then you can see what's been growing there the whole time.
Now, thankfully, Jesus doesn't leave us guessing about any of this, right?
His disciples, they ask Him later in private to explain the whole thing.
And He says that the one sowing the good seed is the Son of Man.
Jesus.
The field is the world.
The good seed is the children of the kingdom.
And the weeds are the children of the evil one.
And the enemy who planted them is the devil.
See, that's that counterfeiting operation.
Right out in the open.
The devil doesn't plant something that looks like a threat.
He plants something that looks like wheat.
And he's been doing that the same way in every generation since.
Teaching that sounds almost like God's Word.
Close enough to trust.
Just it's a little easier to swallow.
Words about God that are maybe 90% Scripture and 10% something else.
And that 10% ends up being the whole point.
That's how it's always worked.
Nobody notices the counterfeit until it finally bears its fruit.
And then by then it's been growing among God's people for years.
And so the servants go to the Master with a question.
That in reality is more of an accusation.
Master, did you not sow good seeds in your field?
They're asking, why are there so many weeds?
And the Master doesn't go out to inspect the field.
He doesn't wonder, you know, maybe I grabbed the wrong bag.
He just says, an enemy has done this.
That's the whole answer.
He already knows what happened.
And who did it.
And what's growing out there.
The weeds might have surprised the servants, but they never surprised the Master.
Because this is the same Lord who in our Old Testament reading from Isaiah said,
that I am the first and I am the last.
Beside me there is no God.
Who is like me?
Let him proclaim it.
The devil has been running his counterfeit operation for a long, long time.
But he has never once fooled the Master.
Not in the garden.
Not in the field.
And not today.
And the servants, you know, they figure that the next step is pretty obvious.
Right? They say, you know, do you want us to go and gather the weeds?
Do you want us to go and gather for you?
And the Master says, no.
No.
Lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.
Let them both grow until the harvest.
Why wouldn't you pull up the weeds?
I want us to understand what that no means because it's easy to hear it wrong.
The Master isn't saying that the weeds are fine.
And they're totally harmless.
What he's doing is he's protecting the wheat.
Down under the dirt the roots have grown tangled together.
And some of that wheat is still young and weak.
And if the servants go out there just pulling up everything that they're sure is a weed,
they're going to tear up the wheat that the Master fully intends to keep.
He's not willing to risk good plants to an overzealous cleanup crew.
And so the Master in his divine patience waits.
His patience is how he protects what belongs to him.
Because the harvest is already on the calendar.
The reapers are ready.
The enemy does not get to sow forever.
And so the field might look kind of like a mess.
But it belongs to Jesus.
Now, it would be really nice and easy to just stand up here the rest of the morning
and talk about false teachings.
False teachings everywhere.
But before I get into anything else,
I have the distinct privilege of asking you a very uncomfortable question.
Has the devil ever sold you a counterfeit?
Because his oldest trick, it isn't just planting false teachers in a pulpit somewhere.
It's whispering a slightly bent version of God's Word
to an ordinary believer who might be inclined to like it.
Did God actually say?
He said it to Eve.
And he says it to us.
God surely didn't mean that sin.
Not the one that I've come to peace with.
God wants me to be happy, doesn't he?
The big one that's taught boldly in churches around the world, even this morning.
A loving God would never actually condemn anyone, would he?
Every one of those sounds almost right.
Ninety percent scripture.
Ten percent something else.
And usually that something else is our ego, our pride, our reason.
And we bought it, not because we couldn't tell the difference,
but because it's what we want to hear.
So we're not just bystanders watching this counterfeit operation.
We're customers.
It's a strange thing about us.
The same people who keep falling for fakes are absolutely convinced
that they can spot them in everyone else.
That's the servant's offer, isn't it?
Do you want us to go and gather them?
As if they knew what a weed truly looked like.
Now Jesus isn't telling you to stop telling right from wrong, right?
This same Jesus said that beware of false prophets.
You will recognize them by their fruits.
He gave his church an entire process of how to confront sin.
Scripture tells us to test the spirits and call false teaching what it is.
You can look at a teaching and say that's counterfeit.
You can look at someone and what they're doing and how they're living their life
and you can say that's sin and it's hurting you and it's hurting people.
That's not playing God.
That's listening to God.
But there's a line.
That line sits right where the servant stepped over it.
It's one thing to see a weed and call it a weed.
It's another thing to go grab your sickle.
Judging between true and false is commanded to us,
but deciding if a person is finished, condemned,
past saving, written out of heaven altogether,
that verdict belongs to the Master alone.
The only one who can see the roots.
And we step over that line.
When we look at somebody in our neighborhood or our church or even in our own family
and we decide for them right then, that one's a weed.
That one's too far gone.
We remember what they did.
We see what they post.
We know how their story ends.
And we've already pulled them up and thrown them out in our hearts.
Martin Luther actually preached on this very parable
and he saw what was wrong with it.
With that, not it.
See, when you rip someone out now,
you're not just risking a wrong guess on your part.
You're slamming a door that God's been keeping open.
He said that he who errs today may find the truth tomorrow.
Who knows when the Word of God may touch his heart?
So that person that we've written off, God isn't finished with them
because the same Word that reached you can still reach them.
And then Jesus tells us what the harvest actually pulls out.
All causes of sin and all lawbreakers.
So not just the obvious weeds, all of them.
Let us hold our own hearts to that standard.
With the grudges, the pride, the counterfeits that we buy because they flatter us.
If our place in the harvest depends on being cleaner than the people around us,
then we have no place in it.
So where does that leave us?
Standing in the field with everyone else.
Tangled up with our own sins.
No business volunteering for harvest duty.
And so if there's any good news here, it can't come from us.
It comes from the sower.
Jesus said that the one who sows good seed is the son of man.
And later on in Matthew's Gospel, that same son of man tells us why he came in the first place.
To give his life as a ransom for many.
The judge that runs the harvest went into the field first.
And the field did to him what a field of sinners would do.
We called him the counterfeit.
A blasphemer, a fake messiah.
We bound him, condemned him, marched him outside the city.
Crucified him between two actual lawbreakers as if he were the weed that needed pulling.
And on that cross, the fire of the harvest, the judgment that Jesus said,
all causes of sin and all lawbreakers have coming to them, fell on him instead of you.
He took those grudges, that pride, every counterfeit we've ever bought, and he carried it into death.
On the night he was betrayed, he told us plainly what it was for.
He said, this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
Poured out for us.
Poured out for you.
So hear that teaching today with no percent of anything else added to it.
Your sins are forgiven.
And on the third day, the man that they threw out of the field walked out of his grave.
The one everyone tried to condemn is still alive.
And the Father has put the whole harvest in his hands.
The very judge that's coming for that final harvest is the judge who already died for you.
Later in his sermon, Luther noted that the good seed is sown only by Christ.
And the field, if left on its own, would grow nothing but weeds.
You aren't wheat out of sheer luck, or because you grew faster than the rest of the neighbors around you.
You're wheat because he planted you.
In your baptism, he put his name on you, joined you to his death and his resurrection,
and made you a child of the kingdom.
And what the Son of Man plants, he does not lose.
Jesus ends this parable with that strange little sentence we talked about earlier.
He who has ears, let him hear.
That's Jesus saying, if you can hear this, this one's about you.
Not somebody else's field or somebody else's harvest.
You.
And so hear it.
The person written off is lost.
The door's not closed.
And the master's not done sowing.
So let us put down our sickles and start praying for them again.
And hear this, too, that the harvest isn't a matter of waiting to find out which one you are.
The sower has already settled that for you at the font.
He already paid the price on the cross.
Your sins are forgiven.
Every counterfeit, every grudge, every verdict we've handed down, the field might look like a mess.
But it belongs to Jesus.
And when the harvest comes, the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.
That's you.
He planted you.
He died for you.
And he won't lose you.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
Amen.