THE FIFTH SUNDAY after PENTECOST

July 17, 2011

Text: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Pastor Dale G. Bauer

A classic Broadway production is West Side Story, the music to which many of us are familiar (I guess). One of the songs is titled, “Somewhere.” It is sung by the two main characters, Tony and Maria. They are in love, but they are members of two different New York gangs, the Jets and the Sharks. The Jets are Anglo and the Sharks are Puerto Rican, the latest wave of immigrants to New York City. The gangs guard their own turf, no matter the cost. In this highly polarized situation, Tony, a Jet, and Maria, the sister of a Shark, fall totally in love. But it is frustrated by antagonism of the two groups, Anglo and Puerto Rican. The hostility between the two groups ends in the death of Maria’s brother and her beloved, Tony. Truly tragic. That quality is picked up in the song, “Somewhere.” It goes like this:

There’s a place for us,

Somewhere a place for us

Peace and quiet and open air

Wait for us, somewhere

There’s a time for us;

some day a time for us

Time together with time to spare
Time to look, time to care

Some day, somewhere,

We’ll find a new way of living

We’ll find a way of
forgiving, somewhere

There’s a place for us,

A time and place for us.

Hold my hand and we’re
halfway there.

Hold my hand I’ll take
you there,

Somehow, some day,
somewhere

The play is inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It is the tragedy of two young Italians, Romeo and Juliet, deeply in love but kept apart by two warring
Italian families. Both end up dead.

Both stories shall live forever in literature because they tell the truth. Love is powerful and good, but it lives alongside hate and evil. Tragedy as a word is overused these days. It was given to us by the Greeks. It meant far more than something bad happening, like some horrible natural calamity like an earthquake. Tragedy always happened between human beings, tribes, and nations. There was circumstance coupled with human weakness and blindness and sin. It suggests that we are complex beings with flaws of all kinds.

Jesus reminds us of the pervasiveness of tragedy. We’re back in the garden, so to speak. We’ve heard Jesus describe what happens to seed sown: much of it doesn’t make it to harvest. Now he turns to what happens when a fine seed is sown and we wake up and find it infested with weeds. The good, bad, and tragic are intermixed. When the gardeners want to pull up the weeds, the master suggests that it might be unwise, because it would damage good wheat. But he says, at harvest, the good
and the bad shall be separated.

Tells me some very important things as I sojourn life.

One: Sin and Evil are Real. It goes without saying. And that’s the problem. We don’t talk about it much anymore. A great biblical scholar in the sixteenth century wrote an essay called “The Bondage of the Will.” In it he suggested what other Christian giants had said: our will is so captivated by sin that apart from the Holy Spirit no one can say “yes” to God. All of our motives are contaminated. Remember the words of the confession: If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. That’s not only the truth, but it is a direct quote from Scripture. It doesn’t mean we are not loved and valued by God. We are just flawed and we have demonstrated that over and over again.

Two: Good and Bad Live Side by Side. The heart of the image Jesus uses is that the Kingdom of God is not fully present. We do not live in paradise. Ours is a broken world, waiting for the fulfillment of the Kingdom. As some say, the kingdom is and is not yet. We believe that the Kingdom of God began in the resurrection of Jesus. It is
unfolded in acts of love and mercy, but it coexists with the weeds, with evil from within and without. A German theologian I had to read in seminary, Wolfhart Pannenberg, said that in a real sense God chooses not to rule all in all. God isn’t fully God, not yet. Abraham Heschel, a rabbi and theologian, once said that for reasons he could not understand, God chooses to be self-limiting. Now that flies in the face of God being omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. It puts a lot of stress on the idea of predestination or foreordination. I simply like to believe creation is broken.

Three: It’s Gonna Get Fixed. The parable of the wheat and the weeds promises a separation of the wheat from the weeds. Christ Jesus has promised to return and fully
bring in the kingdom of God. When that will happen and who the characters will be, I cannot know. I just trust that it will happen.

When I read the book of Revelation, I don’t look for timelines or who the four horsemen of the apocalypse might be in my day and age. I read it because it is clear that there is a struggle going on between good and evil, and there will always be that struggle, until the day when God rules all in all. He will be judge and finally creation will not longer groan and there will be a new Jerusalem.

Romeo and Juliet will be together some day beyond death itself. Maria and Tony will find that place in the kingdom of God. Somewhere, some day, there will be new way of living. Paul calls it hope. We can all live by it, now.

Amen.