“Weed, Feed, & Seed”

Hebrews 12:1

Let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

Matthew 5:39

If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

1 Thessalonians 5:11

Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing..

Bad Gardener

I’m really not much of a gardener. Part of the reason comes from living in Texas and Oklahoma for the first eight years of my ministry. In Oklahoma, it took a lot of work to get a good lawn to grow. It’s what the men all talked about during the fellowship hour after church—their timetables and formulas for weeding, seeding and feeding their lawns. What a hassle!

My solution was found in the garden section of Kmart. We’ve all seen “Weed and Feed” products, but I found one that would weed, feed, and seed—one bag to do everything.  Pour the bag into a spreader, walk the yard and spray the formula according to directions, and in a few weeks your lawn would like a golf course. Imagine my disappointment as my Oklahoma lawn floundered. It ended up looking less like Augusta and more an old, lion-skin rug that had worn through.

From literal gardens to proverbial, I want to say that our hearts are gardens. We’d like to bear a good crop and produce fruit for the harvest. We, the Church, are in the growing season of history—and individually, we are all seeking to grow in Christ and make him known.

As healthy as the gardens of our hearts may be, we must all admit to our need for some weeding. Weeding can be tedious work and therefore a great temptation to neglect, but if the garden is not weeded, the whole lot can fall into total neglect and the weeds can take over completely.

The text says to lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, so what does it mean for us to weed the gardens that are our hearts?

Weeding

First, consider what we and Christians throughout history have attempted to do each Lent. Traditional, Christian piety would have us weed the sins out of our lives. Get control: out with the bad, in with the good. Quit eating junk food, stop smoking, stop drinking, try to be more honest and direct with people—you all know the list—and it’s likely the same list you’ve been working on since you were about fourteen years old. For all our weeding, the weeds keep coming back, don’t they? It’s hard to set some things aside because no matter how hard we try, we can’t get deep enough.

Trying to weed out our sins is a lot like pulling nutgrass. Usually, when you try to pull it out you  only get the tops. Sure, it looks better, but the roots stay alive and the weeds return again and again. When we weed just the visible surface, we do ourselves no favor. Real weeding goes deeper, down to the source of the weeds.

We would do well to think of our sins more deeply. Like nutgrass, we can’t just deal with the visible tops without going for the roots. We should not think of sins as bad habits and bad behaviors so much as we should think of them as bad attitudes. Bad attitudes are the root cause of those habits and behaviors. Our sins are not those bad behaviors themselves, but the reality of our general misalignment from the will of God.

Think: Bad attitudes, not bad deeds.

Bad deeds are merely the fruit of deeper issues: chiefly, our distance from God. We act out in ways we may even know to be self-hurtful and sinful because of stuff going on deeper—underground where the roots are. Again, our sins are bad attitudes more than bad behaviors.

The real weeding happens when we acknowledge that Christ forgives our sins—all of them. He gives us his own righteousness in baptism. He righteousness is counted as ours, which means God forgets our sins—and they are really and truly forgiven. Whereas God has no problem forgiving and forgetting our sins, we do. Our problem is that we don’t forget them as easily—perhaps not at all—and this is the real problem. So here is a worthy place to begin weeding.

We only too well remember the things that we have asked God to forgive and forget. The memory of old sins creeps up and we feel the shame all over again. How on earth are we going to convince anyone in the world that God forgives sins if we won’t let him forgive and forget ours?

This may be the hardest part of Christianity for some. We keep regrowing the weeds that God would pull out by the roots. We do not need to keep reminding God of what he has forgiven us; we must rather receive that forgiveness knowing that it is truly over and done with.

Part of the reason for this may be that we are not very good about forgiving others. We’ll say we forgive but we won’t forget; and we ought to forget. Forgive and forget. By forget I don’t mean that we lose all cognitive activity of the past, nor that we fail to learn our lesson, but rather that we must forget relationally. When you forgive someone—really and truly announce forgiveness to them—you permanently forfeit the right to ever bring it up again. Ever. That is forgetting. You may want to bring it up, but when you forgive you must also forgo the remembrance of the sin.

Forgive and forget: just as God does for us.

To make it stronger, consider: whenever you linger on an old sin that God has forgiven, it is an insult to God. Who do you think you are to doubt his forgiveness? Was not the price of his son’s death by crucifixion enough for you? If you doubt his forgiveness, you may not have it. Confess it, receive forgiveness that is true and deep—right through the roots—and let it go.

Seeding

When we talk of seeding, we are likely to think of the Parable of the Sower who goes out to sow the good seed of the gospel. We’ll get to that in a few weeks, but we’ll at least preview it here.

Jesus’ story of a man sowing seed all over the place—good ground, bad grounds, rocks, path—would have drawn some laughs from the farmers of his day. Back then, you couldn’t just run down to the hardware store and buy a big bag of seeds. Seeds were terribly precious—gathered painstakingly, counted, carefully preserved, and protected. Ancient farmers in Israel would never fling handfuls indiscriminately; rather, they knew every bit of fertile soil on their bit of land which had been handed down generation after generation. They planted carefully and painstakingly because farming was never easy. 

When seed is precious and farming risky and difficult, you don’t throw it onto ground that is rock hard, where birds wait to eat it, or thick with thorns; it’s just not smart to sow there.

I want to show you a clip of something many of you will find disturbing. It’s a few years old—from 2008, I think—and I’ve watched it many times. It’s about a group of Christians who gathered in the Castro District of San Francisco during the Proposition 8 push.

[Video]

What happened to these young Christians is terribly wrong. To have been punched and kicked just because you were praying or singing—not even preaching—is crazy. But, I have to wonder if in some degree they looked like they were asking for it. What they did was intentionally provocative, but not necessarily helpful.

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” —Matthew 10:16

Jesus tells us to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. They got the doves part right, but was it wise? You have to be ready to take a few hits when you jump into the fire, and then be prepared to turn the other cheek.

When it comes to turning the other cheek, our intention is to respond to aggression with non-resistance. The end purpose is not to draw infractions, but to communicate a positive, winsome witness. I wish that prayer group would have spent one more hour strategizing before hitting the streets. 

Feeding

As to feeding, I’ll remind you what kind of a gardener I was. I wanted one bag, one application, apply-and-forget-about-it gardening. Unfortunately, gardens don’t work that way. It’s one thing to weed and seed, but it may be most important to tend to what we’ve planted. Water, sunlight, protection from  bugs, covering from frost—all these are more the work of gardening that simply weeding or planting.

Americans invented one-night-stand evangelism. In the first and second Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, we birthed a particular kind of evangelism that has shaped American Christianity. The circuit-riders, revivalists, and soul-savers—sweeping into the countryside with circus tents and a traveling band—one night only, bring the whole family. Hot August nights and big name preachers swept through towns to set the country on fire.

“Tomorrow may be too late! You only have tonight—right now! Choose this day whom you shall serve: God or the Devil! Fear the wrath of God; it could drop tonight! Now, as the organ plays ‘Just as I am,’ you come forward and give your life to Jesus. Say the Sinners’ Prayer and you will be guaranteed eternal life in Heaven with God—pass up  this invitation and, well, let’s not go there.”

This kind of hot-sales/seal-the-deal evangelism does not exist in the New Testament. There are no high-pressure, turn-or-burn tactics used. Usually, evangelism happened in community. Paul did not save souls; he started new churches—new congregations where more than two were gathered.

The problem with circuit-rider evangelism is that it is only one piece of the operation: it is planting. The care, the watering, the light, the debugging and protection from frost are all what happens in community. It is best to sow seed where you have the opportunity to tend it. Go back to it again and again: water, fertilize, pull weeds: tend the garden.

Evangelism must be relational.
         It must be communal.

Many evangelists want to play soul-saver and rack up points against other evangelists. They want to add notches to their Bibles marking all the people they’ve converted. This is evangelical ego—not the work of the Holy Spirit. Again, the biblical model is the one which shows that Christ saves through his Church. The Church is Christ’s provision for salvation and conversion. The Church is the good soil wherein Christ grows every seed to its full maturity.

We need to see ourselves together, collectively, as God’s instrument through which the good news of Christ’s salvation is proclaimed. The Church is the body into which Christ unites us, and we are watered, fed and fertilized in the Word, and in the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

The Church is the theater for conversion, which is enacted by Holy Spirit (people save and convert no one; only Christ saves and converts). The Church is the fellowship within which we belong and become deeply-committed, ever-growing, deeply-connected, and ever-sharing followers of Jesus.

This is our mission...†