Of Coffee and Rhubarb

Read me! Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

So one day, legend has it, this goat herder was out tending to his herd of goats. He lets them wander and discover, as goats are wont to do, and they begin nibbling at these bright red berries hanging from the limbs of a short shrub of a tree. They run and prance around for a bit, and then he leads them home, safe and sound, into their little goat pen, to bed for the night. Except the goats can’t seem to settle down. They can’t seem to get to sleep. They’re energetic and restless. Wild. The next day, the goat herder takes them back out to graze, they nibble those berries once again, and then the same thing happens: the goats are full of energy and can’t seem to settle down for the night. This goes on for a bit, and the herder recognizes the pattern. These goats are gaining energy from these berries. 

Fast forward a thousand years or so, and you can drive up to the nearest Starbucks and shell out five bucks for a triple grande one pump vanilla caramel macchiato. But so much had to happen for those goats nibbling berries in the mountain shade to turn in to Frappuccinos and Lattes and the daily necessity in order to drag ourselves out of bed in the morning. No cream or sugar. Just black for me to start out my day, thanks. I mean, think about the process, the discovery, the trial and error that had to come about in order for us to get to what we now know today as coffee? 

First they took the leaves of the coffee tree and boil them up and drink the concoction, saying it had medicinal benefits. Then, they tried eating the berries. Then they took the seeds out of the berries. They dried the seeds in the sun. Then they roasted the seeds over a fire, slowly, rotating it constantly for an even roast. They discovered that light roasts had a bright, acidic taste, and the longer, dark roasts came out smooth and chocolatey. Then, they ground them up to just the right grind, boiled up some water, poured it over the grounds, let it steep, filtered out the grounds and the result is the delicious, necessary goodness we now call a cup of coffee. 

Hundreds of years of trial and error. Hundreds of years of observing and harvesting. Hundreds of years of sipping and tasting, of measuring and timing, of roasting and grinding, to make the perfect cup of steaming, black, deliciousness that has become a morning necessity for most of us. Coffee. Entire cultures have been formed over the enjoyment of the stuff. We spend so much time together appreciating it. We stand in line for it. We pay good money for it. We create community around it. We share it with each other as we tell the stories of our lives. But think about its transformation. It went from a random weed growing beneath the shade trees of an African jungle to a delicacy we’re now willing to pay a premium for. 

I think about all kinds of plants that have gone through this process. This transformation. How did people discover that dark cherries were so tasty to eat on their own but the lighter, tarter yellow/orange ones were best in pies? How long did it take for humans to discover the sublime deliciousness that is chocolate? And then how long did it take for them to marry it with peanut butter?  

And I wonder, especially, about rhubarb. What a weird plant. What a weird food. How long, after how much trial and error, after how much sickness, did it take for them to discover that the leaves are poisonous, the roots are inedible, but if you take the stalks, boil them up, add a ton of sugar and then mix it with some strawberries, it makes a pretty decent pie? 

What had to happen, what process had to take place, in order for this weed to become a food? 

I’m thinking, a lot. A lot had to happen. Trial and error. Time and cultivation. Observing and watching and tending and trying. Mistakes. Starting over. Trying again. Having a sour taste in our mouths, adjusting, spitting out, chewing up, enjoying, remembering, repeating, again and again and again. 

The weeds in our passage today are especially sinister. It is thought that Jesus is referring to a specific kind of weed, the “Lolium Temulentum,” commonly known as darnel, poison darnel, darnel ryegrass or cockle. It thrives in all the same places that wheat thrives, and, before its ears show up, it looks exactly like wheat. It’s not until it has matured, along with the wheat, that one can tell which is which. And the difficult, scary thing is, this weed, if eaten, if mistaken for wheat, will make you pretty sick. You can get drunk and nauseous from it, and it can be fatal. 

I guess not all weeds end up as neighborhood cafe mochas and blue ribbon winning strawberry rhubarb pies at the fairgrounds. 

But the point of Jesus’ parable is that we can’t tell the good from the bad. Only God can.

This passage is a doozy. And we don’t do well with these catastrophic apocalyptic texts. At least I don’t. We like nice Jesus. Not weeping and gnashing of teeth Jesus. So this parable of the wheat and the weeds is difficult for us to parse out in our post post-modern worldview. Then again, maybe this parable was just as difficult for the farmers and land workers who heard this parable straight from Jesus’ mouth. We all want this to clearly equal that. We all want to know who is in and who is out and what it is that we have to do to keep ourselves on the right side. We want to be able to clearly sort, label, plant and pull. 

Jesus is talking to a bunch of peasants in an agrarian society. They live and work and eat and drink and wear the land. They struggle with the land. They curse it when it doesn’t produce their needs. They bow in gratitude when it feeds their families. The land is all around them, stuck under the fingernails and staining their hems. It’s in their bones. It keeps them alive and it’s where their bones will rest when their lives are done. They take from the soil, and then they return to it, become it, feeding the next generation of weeds and wheat alike. 

And this is a difficult life, mostly subsistence farming, producing just enough to survive one more season. It's a delicate balance of immense work, trust, and a little luck that the weather holds out. And it is also cultural. These folks have designed their calendar, the rhythm of their days, their festivals, their dowries, their family structure, all around the land. 

And here is Jesus telling them to let it all grow.

To stop the struggle. 

To quit pulling the weeds. 

I wonder what they would say or think about what Jesus is telling them here - even just from an agricultural perspective.

Would they think: 

• “youre crazy. That would never work. The weeds and the wheat will be fighting over resources. They'll fight over sun and soil and room and water and nutrients. They’ll choke each other out. And weeds are resilient and pervasive and stubborn. They’ll win out every time.” 

or

• “yes, of course, don’t pull them, you might pull out your crop,” just as Jesus says.

Or

• would they consider themselves experts enough to know the difference between a germinating wheat sprout and darnel ryegrass? 

• Would they wonder if it is “easier’ to separate the weeds and the wheat before or after the harvest? If you do it early, there aren’t any stubborn roots. And any of us who has tried to pull a dandelion out by the roots can attest to that stubbornness. And if they’re small, they won’t germinate and spread their seed even further, making an even greater mess. But if you wait, you know which is which and you can pull with confidence. Your crop will have strong roots to withstand the upheaval. Everything is clearly labelled “wheat” and “weed.” But then again you might have yielded a bigger crop if you hadn’t let the weeds take all those resources. All that soil and room and sun and rain. 

There’s risk either way. Risk if you pull them out. Risk if you leave them in.

It’s a real sticky wicket…

But.

What if what we think are weeds aren’t weeds at all? Ralph Waldo Emerson said that a weed is “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” 

Think about the strange things we love to eat.

Rhubarb

Coffee

Chocolate

Sugar.

Edible flowers to decorate our cakes and logs of goat cheese. Syrups made of essence of nasturtium to mix in our cocktails. 

Even dandelion and clover leaves have ended up in my high end bistro salads from time to time. 

We eat a lot that was once considered a weed. The difference is simply that one was planted in rows, and the other has covered the land with a chaotic insistence on survival. We haven’t tamed weeds yet. 

So I wonder.

Who have we written off? Who do we label as “weeds” that might not be weeds at all?

What is growing, wild and free, that we wish we could tame and control because we don’t understand it yet. Or part of it hurt us. Or made us sick. 

What have we yet to discover about these “weeds” that could feed us, give us joy, nurture and sustain us? 

The sibling who has hurt us?

The broken marriage?

The boy in the hoody?

The guy on the other side of the political aisle?

The one wearing a hijab? 

The one who hurt us and refused to apologize?

Ourselves? 

Jesus says “wait.”

Share the resources. 

Let it all grow.

Give it time. 

That thing that you hate about yourself might be just the thing that saves someone else.

The broken relationship that you think will never be repaired might heal and make a new thing.

The assumptions we make about folks we are willing to label “evil” and “broken” might, someday, surprise us. 

This is redemption. This is resurrection. This is grace. 

What is labelled “weed” might not be a weed at all. It might be the precious dandelions and the clovers that the bees need to make honey or that your toddler collects in his tiny fists for you from your back yard. It might be rhubarb or chocolate or coffee or a new friendship with someone with whom you have nothing in common. 

What is labelled “weed” by some might end up being Alexander Hamilton, or Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, John Lewis, or the surgeon performing your emergency appendectomy. 

And when the time comes, if the time comes, and the harvest needs to be sorted out, well, Jesus tells us that that is not our job. That’s God’s job. God decides who is wheat and who is a “weed.” And I have a feeling that the creator of the universe, the one who made the lilies of the field and the birds of the air and the dandelion and the japanese knotweed will show us all that God doesn’t make “weeds.” 

God makes good. We’re the ones who label them as useless, annoying, greedy grabbers of resources, violent, hopeless. We’re the ones who do the labelling, and Jesus says, “wait,” cut it out with the labelling, because you don’t know what this will grow in to. You don’t know the power of God’s grace and transformation. 

Sure. This absolutely doesn’t absolve us from our failures and hurts and sins and violence. But it does leave room for change. Because if we pull them all out now, they’ll never have a chance to change, and that’s not our decision. If we pull them out now, we’ll never discover the potential that lies within them. 

Let’s let God sort out who’s a weed and who’s a wheat. I think we’ll be surprised. I think we’ll discover that there’s a whole lot of weeds - maybe even in ourselves - where we thought there was wheat, and we’ll discover that there’s a whole lot of wheat where we thought there were weeds.  We just need to give it time. And let God do that work. 

Some weeds, yes, will do us harm. Some weeds will make us sick and nauseous and drunk and might even kill us. It’s a dangerous world out there. 

But Jesus’ point is that we, as humans, can’t tell the difference. What we pull up now might have the potential to become a dark chocolate stout tart drizzled with cherry compote, or a rhubarb galette with a buckwheat crust, or that warm cup of strong black coffee that you need to get yourself out of bed in the morning. If we start labelling and pulling all the weeds, just think about what we’ll miss. 

Thanks be to coffee.

Thanks be to rhubarb.

Thanks be to God.