Weeds in the life of faith
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Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
July 19, 2026—Proper 11A
You, every last one of you, are children of the kingdom. You, who want to live a faithful life; you who are working on your relationship with God; you who are fairly sure you wish to follow Jesus: You are the wheat that is growing in the field. You are the little ones that Jesus speaks about, over and over, and so desperately wants to protect.
“O ye of little faith.” Imagine if you could hear that spoken tenderly, rather than as an accusation. As if Jesus is as loving, and perhaps amused (and, okay, at some points, as frustrated), but still, as understanding as a parent, when they’re teaching their child something for the very first time.
We are children in the faith, and throughout the gospels, we can hear Jesus whisper the invitation: Grow, little ones, grow. You are the wheat. You are the fruit of the Word the Sower scattered so lavishly in last week’s parable. Rooted in Jesus, nourished by Jesus, formed by Jesus. Remember that.
But if we are the wheat, who or what is the weeds? What is it that springs up around us, threatening our growth and obscuring God’s kingdom?
Perhaps that question is better asked as, “What is it around YOU, that threatens your faith, inhibits your growth, gets in between you and God?” Because there isn’t going to be just one answer to that. What nurtures one person’s faith might be irrelevant to another’s, and downright damaging to someone else’s. We are a complicated species, each with our own life experiences, our own temperaments and passions, our particular tendencies to sin, and our own potential for healing. Thankfully, as we heard last week in the parable of the Sower, Jesus can take root just about anywhere and anyhow.
What was most threatening to my faith when I was younger was the idea that faith meant the ability to believe a whole list of cut and dried theological facts. I had grown up in the church, and dutifully recited the Nicene Creed every week for all that time, but now I was in college, and I was studying scripture and the history of the early Church and I was getting a sense not only of how theological doctrines developed but also the ways in which the Church allowed itself to become a tool of empire and patriarchy. And I have to tell you, I was having none of it. Or, well, less and less of it, until I could no longer recite the Creed without feeling like a hypocrite, so I stopped.
Which soon meant I could no longer go to church at all. Because I was 20, and I found any level of hypocrisy intolerable.
The weeds, for me? Well, certainly some of the weeds were my own arrogance, allowing me to declare intellectual victory over 2000 years of Christian scholars (none of whom could possibly have seen what I saw, right?). But that naivete was reinforced by those who promote that idea of faith in the first place: that faith is about belief is about accepting the factuality of certain ideas. As though it’s a party trick: “I know this all sounds incredible, but that’s the impressive part: the ability to believe something that can’t be proved.”
But that’s not the impressive part. Faith is not in a competition with science, and belief isn’t about accepting religious ideas as facts. It’s about the truth of what it is to live in a world like this one: a world in which things are born and grow, and they can break they will die, but that is not the end of the story. Faith is concerned with meaning and transformation, with failure and redemption, with love and hate and everything that swirls around and between.
So, when God gave me back the gift of faith, it was with a cosmic smack upside the head, telling me that the underlying truth of death and resurrection, sin and the power of forgiveness, the astonishing possibility of transformation, were far more powerful than any of my intellectual concerns about how the early church councils looked at scripture and came up with doctrine.
And those Christians who insisted to me and the world that what really matters is the acceptance of a list of theological concepts, up to and including “Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior”? They were weeds, threatening to choke my childlike faith.
I can’t claim to have completely overcome these weeds. They still threaten, with their certainty and insistence (whether joyful or grim) that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, and there is only one way, and if you could just declare allegiance to their version of the way you’d be fine. And they sometimes make it hard for me to keep loving the Bible, in all its messy potential for liberation. And their Jesus, with all his exclusionary claims, can feel unrecognizable and deeply unattractive to me.
I’m clearly not the only one. Over my decades as a priest, I’ve had countless conversations with people who struggle against these weeds who have told them what faith is supposed to be. On the more benign side, they worry that their questions and doubts mean that they aren’t really good Christians. But no human can know the full reality of God. We’re all just glimpsing a part of the whole, which means their questions and doubts and even outright rejections are simply part of the ongoing formation of the faith of the Church. So, they should come on in. They’ll be in good company.
Toward the more toxic end, I’ve met more than a few who’ve been so abused by church teachings about homosexuality, or a particular view of salvation (that the sole point of Christianity is getting into heaven, and pretty much everyone is going to hell) that have been expressed with such vehement authority that nothing else can break through. And so, despite anything I might say to them about the Love of God and what salvation might actually mean, they cannot stay in the Church. Their ability to trust Jesus is dead in the water.
Or, rather, dead in the field. Choked out by the weeds of certainty and absolutism. Weeds that can be very hard to distinguish from the wheat of a faith that is rooted in Jesus.
Which is when I find myself agreeing with the servants, who see the weeds and want to destroy them, want to root out the things that threaten all that is good and flourishing. That urge is strong, and it takes real effort to listen to Jesus. To hear that our urge to destroy what we believe to be bad will end up destroying much that is good as well. Because we can’t always tell the difference. And honestly, most things (most people) in life contain both good and evil. And yes, because it just isn’t our job.
Our job … is just to grow. Is to sink roots into Jesus and try not to worry about those voices telling you you’re not pious enough, not certain enough, not devoted enough. Or whatever it is the weeds are trying to make you think or do; however it is that you’re being seduced, deceived or distracted.
While all the while, Jesus is the soil, is the seed, is the gardener who is simply whispering love words to you, over and over. “Grow, little one, grow.”
May it be so, Amen.