Long live the weeds

I’ve spent the last few days reading a biography of the composer and notorious eccentric Dame Edith Smith.  She was invited to dinner one evening with some friends who lived about 10 miles away. She duly set off on her bicycle encased in thick brown tweeds with a flying helmet on her head.  When she was about half way there, she was suddenly struck by doubt. What, she thought, if she wasn’t properly dressed for dinner?  She decided that what she really needed was a corset, so she made a detour to the nearest village. “I’m sorry madam, “ said the flustered shop assistant. “I’m afraid we don’t stock corsets.”  Dame Edith looked around the shop, her eyes lit up, and she pointed.  “I’ll take that” she said. And about half an hour later, the dinner party hostess was perplexed to find Dame Edith ensconced in her shrubbery in a state of partial undress dismembering a large metal birdcage and trying to fit it under her tweeds.

Eccentricity is often uncomfortable.  In my last parish in Oxford, we once had a poorly dressed stranger come in on a Sunday morning just as the sermon was starting.  He took off his hat and passed it from row to row in the congregation.  And given that we were mostly English, and largely middle class and typically Anglican, we sort of shuffled for a bit, and caught each other’s eyes, and popped in a few stray coins and tried to look like we were still concentrating on the sermon.  Then the man marched to the front of the church, up to the state of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and laid the hat down at her feet. “Sorry its not very much, love” he said in a loud voice. “They’re a tight bunch.” And then he stomped out.

 I wonder if its ever been very different. If you were one of Jesus’ contemporaries, the quality to aspire to in your social and your spiritual life was a sort of decency at all costs. Whatever you do, don’t cause a fuss, and don’t give anyone reason to talk about you. The audience who first heard the parable of the weeds and the wheat would very likely have been the same.   Your duty is to wrestle with the law in all its details and to keep your distance from anything or anyone unclean. You are contaminated by eating the wrong food, by being in the wrong place, and by mixing with the wrong people; it doesn’t just make you dirty, it makes you ungodly. That explains the outrage of the decent religious folk in the gospel when Jesus spends his time with notorious sinners, with prostitutes, with the politically dodgy, illegal immigrants and the people who made their living from things that fall off the back of trucks. These are the weeds of the world. Surely someone who claims to be holy ought to be giving them a wide berth?

 All of the sympathies of the decent people would have been with the servant in the story. He gets agitated about the unnamed enemy who has paid a visit by night and planted these weeds.  The tares wouldn’t have had the audacity to spring up by themselves in his field - they are nasty plants planted by malicious people and the only sensible thing to do is get rid of them. That’ll teach them! But the landowner dismisses all his concerns. Just let them grow, he says with sublime confidence. I don’t care where they came from. We’ll see whether they turn out to be valuable or not at the end when harvest comes. In the meantime, you’ve got a mixture of good and bad, real and counterfeit all growing next to each other. Don’t worry about it.


The church, ideally, has all sorts of people tangled up together but increasingly it seems hard to live with the tension of our differences. There is a persuasive type of theology that wants to make careful distinctions – to divide the saints from the sinners, and to get rid of the weeds which have taken root in the body of Christ before they spoil everything. Those of you who have been following developments in the Anglican Communion over the last few years will have seen that theology at work, as the various parts of the communion shuffle towards a divoce, but manouevre to see who will keep the house. It would be easier for all of us if the church was a community of the likeminded. But the Gospel doesn’t allow us that luxury.  We are one church because we are all baptised into Christ, not, thank God, because we all believe the same things. The genius of Anglicanism is that it is so imprecise and largely so unheroic. We are a church, at our best, given to an unfussy and prayerful sort of pragmatism.  At our best,  we wrestling with the kind of accommodations which allow people of vastly different beliefs to somehow live together under the same roof. We struggle, and we often fail, to show the world the strange generous hospitality of God who keeps an open table for all.

But it is always so much easier to spend our time with those who are most like us, the people who affirm us most. Each of us lives with an almost unconscious temptation to weed things and people out of our lives. I keep a stack of old address books in a shoebox, and when I look back over them, I see a slow sort of attrition over the years. People who were once friends or colleagues slip back to being occasional correspondents, then creep onto the once-a-year-at Christmas lists, and finally we lose touch altogether.  And they are often those whose take on the world is different from mine.  Sometimes I feel the loss of the people who challenge me most, or who call me to account, but to be honest, I mostly just don’t notice that they’re gone.

The temptation to weed can make an appearance within our lives as well.  As a culture we are strangely addicted to self-improvement. We join a gym, or take a class, or read a book which promises the solution to some problem we are wrestling with. We aim to be fitter, happier and more productive, and we try to weed out those parts of ourselves that we don’t want other people to catch a glimpse of.  Because it is far too hard to live with the truth that we are in equal parts gifted and failures, wise beyond measure and bent double with our own anxieties. For every unselfish thing we do, there will be some small moment of compromise at someone else’s expense. For every generous act, there will be some deficit in our ability to love and be loved.

It is tempting to see salvation as part of the self-improvement game.  God picks us up, dusts us off, weeds out the inadequate and sinful parts of ourselves and in exchange for our promise to try harder, generally makes us a better person. But it is much trickier to accept that God knows us in every detail, and loves us anyway.  Most of us would rather be fixed like broken toys, than loved exactly as we are. Yet with all the tangle of our talents, our bluster and our mistakes and all our noisy self-reliance, God loves us . We are wheat and weeds together, and we are deeply loved. That is the startling and terrible promise of God.