KGL+
Sermon
Trinity Church Boston
Year B Proper 11
July 19, 2026
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together always be acceptable in your sight, O God our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
As Eloise once put it, I am a city child.1Eloise remains one of my favorite books of all time—not only because I grew up in New York City, but because she is a delightful anti-hero for all ages. I have probably quoted her (and this particular quote: ‘I am a city child.’) previously, and most likely will continue to do so. If you haven’t read the book, this quote is from p.2: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=984220795696455 And one of the lingering reminders that I remain one despite living in surburbia is that I have no green thumb when it comes to gardens, or plants, or living things which have roots, leaves and a mind of their own.
During the pandemic though, with plenty of time at home and under the light veneer of desperation for a family project, we cleaned out our suburban backyard containing decades of debris, creating needed space for our children (and their parents) to get out of the house. While my husband Chris did most of the heavy lifting, he set me to work getting rid of the weeds—an easy enough job to do for many.
The problem was, church—I didn’t know what a weed looked like. In fact, for someone who hadn’t tended the earth in any concentrated way, weeds were a convenient way of covering up dirt in my eyes—they weren’t harming anything that I could see, and they filled up those empty spaces of dirt with, if nothing else, a pop of free-to-us greenery, brightening the backyard up.
Chris got used to me asking regularly, ‘Is this a weed?’ as I would point to a green thing on the ground. ‘Is this a weed?’2I have no idea that this exact phrase was a Vine from 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdOnaWRBvjc Hat tip to the brave choir members who alerted me to this total coincidence, and restrained themselves from laughing during the sermon.
What I discovered about these green shoots all over the place was that the nature of a weed was to take over. As I pulled these lively green pops of life up, I more often than not discovered a network of tangled roots beneath them—covering the entire backyard, weaving in and out of other plants and trees, unyielding when prodded and averse to letting go. I would often start pulling a weed on one end of the backyard, only to find that I had traveled yards and yards when I got to the end root. Those innocent looking leaves were in fact part of some sort of mafioso-network infiltrating our backyard, choking off any space for another plant to take root.
And even worse? I discovered that some of my favorite spring plants in our backyard were weeds. Dandelions? WEEDS. Those lilies of the valley? The flowers most biblically connected? Y’all, they TAKE OVER. Until I had to look underneath, I had no idea that something so beautiful could also be throttling their neighbors.
Jesus is teaching still, in the Gospel of Matthew, and this parable comes on the heels of the parable of the sower last week- where the sower threw seed into the expected and unexpected places.3Matthew 13: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp10_RCL.html#gsp1 Jesus continues with this parable, the parable of the tares, the wheat which is unexpectedly sown with weeds—weeds, by the way, which look exactly like wheat. The servants are aghast at their arrival, and quickly blame others for placing the bad seed in the fields. They offer to pull the weeds up for the landowner, who refuses, saying that to pull up the weeds would pull up the wheat itself.
For a long time, I had assumed that weeds were ugly things. Mentally, I put a Disney spin on them, that anything good was to be beautiful, and anything bad was clearly to be ugly. When watching tv shows with our younger children, it is clear who is bad and who is good—everything from their voice to their clothes renders their inner nature distinctive. We know from the outset who the ‘bad’ people are.
But real life is not so. Weeds do not always proclaim themselves. That same invasive lily of the valley graces wedding bouquets and inspires perfumes and named in at least one camp song, if not more.4This is an earworm, but after serving for four summers at the Barbara C Harris Camp as chaplain, yes, I know this song by heart and had NO idea that Jesus’ strength was weed-like: He’s my rock, my sword, my shield
No movie or television show is one where the good guys are always good, and the bad guys always bad. No one would watch that, and it wouldn’t resonate with those of us who know all too well that good and bad are neither distinct, nor static dimensions.5While it wasn’t intentional, this phrase may have also been inspired by Blue Traveler’s ‘Run-Around’: “Shake me and my confidence/ About a great many things/ But I’ve been there I can see it cower/ Like a nervous magician waiting in the wings/ Of a bad play where the heroes are right / And nobody thinks or expects too much / And Hollywood’s calling for the movie rights / Singing “Hey babe, let’s keep in touch”, hey baby, let’s keep in touch”—the ‘nobody thinks or expects too much’ is pretty spot on.
And the dichotomy isn’t just about other people (though we spend an awful lot of time trying to make it that way). It’s in ourselves. In each of us, there is wheat and weed. In each of us there is light and shadow, sometimes intermingled in such a way that we cannot lift up one part without the other. Nested in our best intentions, we find the tenacious roots of those parts of ourselves which fend for themselves first, surviving by disallowing other life to grow. And both parts can pop up as bright green shoots of life, causing each of us to ask about ourselves, as I did: Is this a weed? Is this a weed?
Where is Jesus pointing us in this parable? If we can’t do the clear cut, and morally satisfying, work of weeding out what we consider to be bad, what is our role in building up the kingdom of God?
Jesus is pointing us to the fact that humanity is more complicated than we believe we are. Jesus does point out that evil is real and insidious and to be reckoned with, and that also, somehow—God is in the middle of all of this. The presence of evil does not preclude the presence of God. In 3
fact, it demands it. God shows up, even when the roots are entangled, and especially when the roots are entangled, and stretch the whole way across the yard.
And we—we don’t have a great sense of what is ‘good’ sometimes and what is ‘bad’. As Barbara Brown Taylor put it, “Turn us loose with a machete and there is no telling what we will chop down and what we will spare.”6Taylor, Barbara Brown. “The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons on the Gospel of Matthew” We humans have a lot of grace and grief within us, and sometimes our notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are not as clear-sighted or immune to self-interest as we might prefer them to be.
My work with backyard weeds has not ended. Even now, I can feel those weeds popping up again, thanks to the sun, rain and soil, the very same things which are feeding our basil plants and tomatoes (or at least the two of them which will manage to grow after a whole season). Their modus operandi is to keep spreading. Knowing that there are weeds ever-present and impossible to pluck up whole-scale has changed my attitude towards our space outside. I can’t get all the weeds, but I can water our non-invasive flowers and plants especially carefully. I can pay attention to that which shares the ground, and that which drains all the water. I can notice within myself, those places which claim all the light, which absorb all the nutrients, which creep into others’ spaces.
And God, the gardener, the grower, the creator, is in the middle of it all. God doesn’t live in an easily-parsed B-movie world, type casting each of us into either hero or villain roles. God lives in the very entanglements, lives with us, and loves us, weedy as we might be, with the same abundance as the sower who throws seed every which way, placing hope even in the more incredulous of places. This is the good news, my weedy friends. This is the kingdom of heaven.
Amen.