For Your Benefit...

• Now ready — October Worship Rosters and Calendars. In the literature rack in the foyer.
• We have plenty of meeting fliers and business cards left. Take them and give them to others. Our meeting is 3 weeks away!
• The new quarter begins today.

Calendar

• Sept 30-Oct 5 — Clarksville (IN).
• Oct 7-12 — Oak Grove.
• Oct 19-21 — Eastland.
  

For this week:


Not an easy task for many of us. How do you talk to people so that you let them know God is very much a part of your life? How do you do it without being silly or obnoxious? How do you do it without making everyone in the room uncomfortable?

The answer? Start small. A few words in a conversation can have a big impact. Some examples:

• "God has given us a beautiful day!"
• "I'm sorry, I won't be there on Wednesday night. I'll be at church."
• "That reminds me of something the preacher said at church on Sunday."
• "My friends from church brought food over during my recovery."
• "We were looking for a house (car, job, school, etc) and God blessed us with this one."
• "God bless you."

A Minneapolis minister called ChemLawn to take care of his suburban weed-infested lawn, only to have them reject his lawn as a client because it was so bad. One member of his church volunteered to totally remove his old lawn and start a new one, an offer he was almost ready to accept when a former farmer gave him some advice: Don't worry so much about getting rid of the weeds. Just grow the grass, and the grass will take care of the weeds.

The minister took his prescription and did all he could to grow "the good stuff." After a couple of years, the lawn looked just as good as everyone else's.

The minister had to ask himself what would be his primary focus growing grass or killing weeds? Like the landowner from thel Parable of the Weeds in the Wheat (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43), he decided to concentrate on the positive — on growth instead of pouring time, energy and resources into killing off weeds.

Taking this tack not only concentrates our energies on the positive, it safeguards us from bad judgment calls. Sometimes what we would quickly suppose to be weeds turns out to be unexpected flowers in our midst. Jesus' parable intentionally takes responsibility for "reaping," for gathering and bundling together true weeds out of human hands and makes this a task for divinely directed angels. Differentiating between weeds and beneficial plants is not a human responsibility.

It used to be that when individuals suffered from sinus infections, allergies, asthma or pollen sensitivities, their physicians sent them to the arid Southwest. But transplants from the North began to miss their old environments. Fed up with front yards of weedy, scraggly sagebrush, junipers, cactus, and scrub grass, people began ripping up and rooting out the native vegetation and sowing great swaths of Kentucky blue grass, clover and timothy.

These regionally unsuited plants required huge amounts of precious water, demanded gigantic infusions of nutrients into the thin desert soil, and provided a new home for mites, ticks and mosquitoes that had previously been unknown in that region. Most ironically, however, these plants brought with them their familiar loads of pollen and other airborne goodies that soon had all the Southwest sinus refugees sneezing, coughing and wheezing as though they had never left home. By getting rid of the "weeds," they created an environmental disaster.

Without a doubt, there are honest-to-goodness, downright worthless weeds out there — growing within the ranks of our congregations, our city governments, our local schools, our elected public officials. They get elected or appointed or promoted by pretending to be good seeds anxious to contribute to the welfare of others. But they soon reveal their true weed-like nature, selfishly producing nothing but thorns and chaff.

The parable of the wheat and the weeds counsels us not to waste our time and energies on these profitless people. "Don't let the turkeys get you down" might be another way of offering similar advice. We all know how soul-sapping it can be to attend a planning session or organizational meeting whose membership is rife with "weeds." Addressing every negative comment they throw out, dodging every nasty barb intentionally zinged into the discussion, fighting for space to root positive plans and observations, makes for an exhausting encounter that tests one's stamina, sanity and sanctity.

Doesn't it sometimes seem that the weeds outgrow the grass — that no matter how fast and furiously you grow fresh grass, the weeds outrun and out-create the good growth? That is not the promise of the gospel. Remember that in the allegorical explanation of his parable, Jesus defines the field of weeds and wheat as nothing less than "the world" — not just polite, educated, middle-class Americans; not just those who share a common ethnic heritage or economic status with us; not even just those in the church.

Jesus does not intend the body of Christ to be a hothouse flower. It is to live in the world, among the weeds, learning how to survive in the presence of their negative impact and energy. Pulling the weeds is not the church's business. Growing wheat, growing bread for the world, growing souls is the task of each Christian and each church.