O
God of grace, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Good morning! I’m grateful for the opportunity to dive into scripture with you and to think together about how it might be urging us to lead lives worthy of the calling to which we are called, as the writer of Ephesians puts it, with humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love. Bearing with one another in the context of a time in which wealthy people enjoy extravagant luxuries, while people in the lower classes suffer from abysmal living conditions. Bearing with one another while the government employs excessive force and gratuitous violence, autocratic control over the legislature, the courts, the treasury, and the military, bearing with one another while people who resist, face enslavement, incarceration or death. I’m talking, of course, about the Roman Empire in the first century of the common era.
I want to begin by suggesting something that might sound irreverent but is, I think, deeply true: Jesus was funny. Not accidentally funny. Not funny in the way that someone is funny when they don’t know they’re being funny. Jesus’ teaching was intentionally, structurally, theologically funny. Jesus told jokes. And if we’ve lost the ability to hear his jokes, we’ve lost something essential about who he was and what he was doing. Jesus came from a long tradition of Biblical joke tellers.
Smith College Hebrew Bible professor Joel Kaminsky teaches that Biblical writers in both testaments used humor, not only to improve the listening enjoyment, but to open up the listeners to deeper truths. In Biblical story-telling, horror and humor are often found in close proximity. The theological point, Kaminsky says, is that humor expresses a hope that “the reality of everyday life does not necessarily have the final word…humor challenges the dominant tragic worldview that confines humans to a stoic acceptance of the current conditions of existence…[humor] is a signal of transcendence.” [1] Lutheran pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber has recently written a reminder that “Jesus did not overthrow Rome. He laughed at it. He saw it for what it was: temporary. Fleeting. Harsh and demanding and tyrannical, yes, but temporary.”[2] Biblical humor is theologically significant because it names incongruity. It holds two things together that don’t go together: expectation and surprise, dignity and absurdity, the grand and the ridiculous. And the kin-dom of heaven, also known as the Realm of God or the Rule of Love is, at its heart, a sustained incongruity according to the Gospels. The last shall be first. The poor are blessed. The meek inherit the earth. The seed that dies bears fruit.
Reinhold Niebuhr taught that “Humor is a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer.” And Karl Barth, not known for his comedy, once said that “laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.” And I think they were onto something. Because grace, like humor, operates by surprise. It arrives when we’re not expecting it. It has nothing to do with deserving. It undermines our categories. Humor doesn’t just make us laugh. It makes us think differently. It reorganizes our understandings.
Some of Jesus’ best jokes are in the section of the Gospel of Matthew that we have before us today. For example: the Realm of God is like a situation where someone planted good seed to grow wheat but while everyone was sleeping, an enemy (i.e. someone you hate)[3] came with a big bag of weed seed and spread it all over the same field, so when the wheat grew and bore grain, the weeds appeared as well. What kind of jerk would plant weed seeds in a wheat field? I wonder the same thing about my yard. Who came into my front yard while my wife Joy and I were sleeping and planted dandelions and crabgrass? It’s a cartoonish image. Of course, this joke is not funny to a serious gardener or farmer. But that’s not Jesus’ audience. And the story goes that it was people who were enslaved who were asking the question.
Unfortunately, our Revised Common Lectionary does a great disservice by skipping verses – in this case verses 31-35, in which Jesus offers two more funny comparisons. They’re scheduled to be read next week, but I’m here today and they’re my favorites, so I just can’t leave them out. Jesus says, the Realm of God or the Rule of Love is like a tiny mustard seed that someone took and planted in his field. In order to get that joke, it helps to know that mustard is a weed like kudzu. It grows very fast and takes over every other plant in its vicinity. It was illegal to plant in a field in Jesus’ time, but nobody in their right mind would have planted it anyway. You don’t have to know this to know that Jesus is telling a funny story, though. You just have to notice that attracting the birds of the air to a field of growing food is the last thing a farmer would ever want to do. This is slapstick comedy.
The next comparison Jesus offers is about a woman who mixed yeast into about sixty pounds of flour. That might not seem so funny to those of us who love bread, but in Jesus’ time, yeast or leaven was a metaphor for corruption, for rot. Yeast didn’t come in neat little packets. It was a putrid lump of mold. Some ancient copies of Matthew say that the woman hid it in the flour. It is well-established that women in Mediterranean antiquity were ritually impure (and, increasingly, we still are). So for a woman to hide something that would corrupt a massive amount of flour is doubly outrageous.[4] It’s like a teenager who poured grain alcohol into a big bowl of punch at a church reception and all the parishioners got drunk. It’s hilarious (if you’re thirteen, that is).
Jesus goes from comparing the realm of God to a sneaky one who sows weed seeds at night, to a peculiar guy who plants aggressive weeds in his own field, to a woman who hid contaminating leavening in sixty pounds of flour. Then Jesus and his disciples went back into the house and the disciples said, “Wait. Go back. What? What does the parable of the weeds of the field mean?” Jesus keeps talking about mustard seed and leaven, but the disciples got stuck in the weeds.
Jesus is saying that the Realm of God, the Rule of Love is wild and unpredictable, uncontrollable, scandalous and shocking. The good and the bad are all mixed together in the Realm of God. The Realm of God works under the guise of the contaminated and the unwanted, the persistent and the pernicious. It grows where it isn’t wanted. It creates a mess. It attracts undesirables. A little bit goes a long way! Tiny seeds, tiny spores, create massive uncontrollable change. Weeds, after all, are only plants that are unwanted, or as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, a weed is “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”
What does that parable about the weeds mean? There follows a rather clumsy explanation that (to us) feels more like a stumbling block than a stepping stone, but the gist of it, to my ears, is stop fretting about who is in and who is out, who is good and who is bad. Jesus says the kin-dom of heaven (or the Rule of Love) is kind of a mess right now. It started out as a field sown with good seed, but bad seed has gotten all mixed in with the good. And it turns out that getting rid of the weeds will do damage to the good plants. Notice that in this parable, the real threat is not the enemy or even the weeds, but the servants who are impatient, enthusiastic and overly confident about their ability to eradicate evil.
Matthew gives us an allegorical interpretation of this parable — the Son of Man, the angels, the fiery furnace — and that interpretation has, frankly, been used to terrify people for two thousand years. But I want to suggest that the original parable, the joke at the heart of it, is much simpler and funnier and more liberating than the allegory: we are not in charge of sorting the weeds from the wheat. That is not our job. Stop trying to do it. Stop building systems to determine who’s in and who’s out, who’s righteous and who’s a sinner, who belongs and who doesn’t. The weeds and the wheat look alike anyway. We’ll pull up the wrong thing. So leave it.
Leave the plants alone, Jesus says. Don’t do anything about trying to kill the weeds mixed in with the wheat. Let both of them grow together and let God and God’s angels, the ones who are always going up and down the ladder, take care of the weeds – the weeds in the world, the weeds inside of our neighbors, the weeds inside of our own selves. Let the weeds grow. Leave the sorting to God, whose name is Love. Our job is not to be the weed police. At the end of the age (whenever that is) the angels are going to collect out of the Realm of God “all causes of sin and all evildoers,” and toss them into the garbage pit to be burned where they will roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth. This is good news! Causes of sin and evildoing do not come from God. Then the righteous parts of us, the parts in right-relationship, will shine like the sun in the Rule of Love. In the end, it will all get sorted out. If it’s not sorted out, well then, it’s not the end. Was Jesus right about this? We don’t know yet! Let anyone with ears, listen. Let anyone with a sense of humor, laugh. And then lean in, because the joke is also the truth, and the truth is this: the kin-dom is here, it’s already growing. We didn’t plant all of it, we can’t control it, we can’t sort it, all we can do is love one another. And when we fail at that, we help each other find ways to try again.
Chapel of St. James the Fisherman, Wellfleet
July 19th, 2026, 8th Sunday after Pentecost
The Very Rev, Pamela L. Werntz
Proper 11A-26
[1] Joel S. Kaminsky, “Humor and the Theology of Hope: Isaac as a Humorous Figure,” Interpretation, 54 no 4 Oct 2000, p. 363-375.
[2] Nadia Bolz-Weber, “Phosphoresence: A Sermon for Dark Times” on her Facebook page.[3] Nadia Bolz-Weber, “Phosphoresence: A Sermon for Dark Times” on her Facebook page.
[3] D. Mark Davis, www.leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com
[4]Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), pp. 321-9.