Weeds, a sermon by the Rev. Charles James Cook, Professor of Pastoral Theology, given on March 1, 2007, in Christ Chapel

Text: Luke 4:1-13

A former colleague in ministry once told a story about an event that happened to him not long after he was ordained a priest. He was living in New York City in one of those wonderful, quaint, and dilapidated old brownstones near General Theological Seminary. Being a creature of habit, he performed a sacred ritual each morning before leaving for work – namely, after dressing in his clerical attire, he would walk down the steps of the front of the building, and with watering can in hand, carefully refresh the flowers that he had so carefully planted in clay pots on each side of the steps. It added a dimension of beauty, of contrasting color to the concrete and bricks layering almost every other structure in sight. This liturgy of watering the plants gave him a sense of pride, accomplishment, and a degree of personal fulfillment – he was contributing something important, however small the project might be. It was always just the right thing – the appropriate action – to send him on his way to work in God’s vineyard.

Nothing causes an Episcopalian more distress than to have a familiar ritual interrupted, the familiar shattered by the unfamiliar. And so it was to be for this young priest of the church, on what seemed to be a normal sunny weekday morning in early August. Bob made his traditional decent down the front steps, watering can in hand, and leaning over one of the clay pots, he slowly and deliberately poured a stream of water over the geraniums. Suddenly and without warning, the little stream of water splashed into a human hand, palm up, as if to form a cup from which to drink. This palm-shaped cup was dirty, coarse, and worn from either a lifetime of hard labor, or living on the streets, or perhaps even both. It certainly was not a hand that held sacred vessels made of sterling or folded fair linen that would catch the residue of tawny port on any given Sunday morning. No, this was a hand of the world – of a world in which surviving another day was accomplishment enough. It was then, and only then, when the water simply dripped from hand to flower, that Bob looked into the face and eyes of this unexpected guest. With a face that somehow matched the palm of his hand, the stranger looked at the priest and said with a crackly voice, “Hey Father, how about a little water for the weeds?” And then, with nothing more than a faint and crooked smile, he was gone.

Like a song that suddenly enters your mind, replaying itself over and over for no sane reason at all, the words swirled around in his head: “Hey Father, how about a little water for the weeds?”

Reynolds Price paints the scene. “For more than a month, Jesus walked alone in the desert past Jericho , the crags and wastes of the hot Dead Sea , Earth’s deepest pit. He thought his way the best he could through what he’s seen and heard that dusk with John the Baptist above him in the cold brown river, God’s meaning for him and the time he’d have. The time felt short.”

“Vipers, jackals, a starved lion and swarms of flies crossed Jesus’ path in the sun-struck days. A flock of ravens circled his head too famished to caw but even when his own hunger sapped him and he was sleeping nights in gullies with no more cover than his seamless coat, no creature more than sniffed his hand or licked the dry soles of his feet.”

“What came nearer to harming Jesus in those days was the tempting spirit that came his way in numerous forms.”

Tempter: “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus: “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

Tempter: “If you will worship me, I will give you all the kingdoms of this world.” Jesus: “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.’”

Tempter: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the Temple ...God will command his angels concerning you, to protect you.” Jesus: “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

When the Tempter had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

It is, on the surface, the consummate exchange between darkness and light, good and evil. Jesus, famished and weak, holds the Tempter at bay. Like the raging demons in other narratives, the Devil actually knows who Jesus really is – he simply wants to see how this form of power and authority can be used. This story is, of course, a Sunday School teacher’s dream – it’s the one you wait for in and out of season. No nuances, no subtleties, no hidden layers of meaning – just a good old fashioned morality tale in which the Son of God slam dunks the fallen angel, the Prince of Lies, and takes home all the marbles in the name of Divine victory. It’s the story where the punch line – the one that grabs the heart, mind, and soul – is ever so clear: When faced with temptation, something you shouldn’t do – just say no.

But such a isogesus of the story won’t work – at least not in the very human and painful moments of the valley of the shadow, where the way is not often clear and the choices confusing at best. In such moments, the Fallen One will always whisper, ever so persuasively, that he and only he will make our own fall a soft one, cushioned from any harm, if only we follow his advice. The Tempter, you see, offers an interesting theological premise – you can experience resurrection without the cross, a heresy as old as when the first followers of the Way proclaimed Jesus as Lord.

Back to the encounter in the wilderness. On reflection, has it ever occurred to you that the Tempter’s suggestions aren’t really all that bad? As one theologian puts it: “What’s so wrong with suggesting to a hungry man at the end of a long retreat that he make himself a stone sandwich, if he has the power to render it digestible? ...Likewise, it was not necessarily mischievous to urge Jesus to jump off the Temple and make a spectacular landing. As the Grand Inquisitor pointed out, people need to have some proof of power if they are to believe...Even the suggestion that, in return for Jesus’ loyalty, the Devil would hand over to him all the kingdoms of the world is not, on the Devil’s principles, such a bad idea. It’s simply rather sensible with-my-know-how-and-your-clout – we’d really do some good kind of offer. After all, God, who was supposed to be running things, wasn’t doing a very obvious job of it...No, the differences between Jesus and the Devil do not lie in what the Devil suggested, but in the methods he proposed – or, more precisely, in the philosophy of power on which his methods were based.”

There is another dimension to this encounter in the wilderness – namely, Jesus does not reject the Tempter’s suggestions at all, but rather decides to implement them in a radically different form. Instead of turning stone into bread to feed himself, he, in turn on another occasion, accepts the gift of some bread and fish, and feeds not himself but the hungry multitudes – their hunger satisfied materially and spiritually. Instead of jumping off the pinnacle of the temple in a display of grandiose showmanship, he touches the untouchable, heals those who were thought to be beyond the pale of restoration to wholeness, and invites the social castoffs to dine with him at table. Instead of striking a political bargain to gain the kingdom of the world, he draws all the kingdoms to himself as he is lifted high on the wooden beams of a cross. For the Devil, the exercise of power is always a personal issue; for Jesus, power is never personal, something to be possessed, but given away. In the wilderness, the desert, Jesus’ true power is exhibited in what the world considers mere powerlessness.

There is really very little debate that the central focus of Jesus’ teaching and mission is the proclamation of the Kingdom or Reign of God. He believed that this Reign of God had its birth, its dawning with his own life; his own presence; his own core of being. Many have tried to define God’s reign in a variety of forms – mostly to support their own self interests. What we do know is that the Reign of God includes so much because it encompasses all human relationships and all of life – “physical, spiritual, personal and interpersonal, communal and societal, historical and eternal...with our neighbor, the stranger, with nature and with God. It implies a total offer and a total demand.” Living for the reign of God is not one life choice among many; it is life itself. So, you might appropriately ask, “What does it look like? How would we know the Reign of God in this world?”

Not long after Jesus’ encounter with the Devil in the wilderness, Luke gives us a clue, somewhat of a blueprint. Jesus returns to Nazareth , and goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath, and reads from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.” That’s a radical text for an out-of-town preacher to choose; much less to your own people. But when the poor receive good news, those in bondage are set free, the blind are given their sight, the oppressed are empowered, and the light of God overcomes the darkness in this year of our life – then the Reign of God is very near. And who is called to work for the Reign of God? Jesus chose the text. Isaiah wrote the words: “Here am I, Lord. Send me.”

Immediately after his baptism in the Jordan , we are told that Jesus was led by the spirit, driven by the spirit into the wilderness. Why not into some other place? Why not the towns and villages, where the creature comforts abound and there is at least an affirming congregation to hear your message, and the potential placement in a pastoral cure, and a rectory with a study in which to read and pray, and eventually, God knows, a pension fund that would support him into old age, where he would continue in wisdom, and publish manuscripts that would be read in the ages to come? Why the wilderness? Why go where there are no assurances, where the only known is the unknown, where fear abounds, and life is a struggle? Why venture into the land of rocks, brambles, bushes, and weeds? Because that’s where God called Jesus; that’s where God calls us.

A young priest stands with a watering can, refreshing geraniums in a clay pot, and a stranger reaches out his hand to cup the water. Is the moment simply something of chance? Is it baptism? Are the words spoken by the stranger the ramblings of confusion, the bizarre stream of consciousness of delusion from one living on the streets? Or could it be a call from God?

My friends, in a world that is thirsty, hungry, and impoverished in so many ways – materially and spiritually – where are we to go, and to what place are we driven by God’s Holy Spirit? It’s time, more than time, for a little water for the weeds.

Resources :

The Holy Bible . New Revised Standard Version. Luke 4:1-13.

Capon, Robert. The Third Peacock. Harper & Row. San Francisco . 1986.

Ellis, E. Earl. The Gospel of Luke. Thomas Nelson & Sons. London . 1966.

Price, Reynolds. Theology Today. Vol. 51, No 1, An Apocryphal Gospel. April 1994.