The Reverend Richard Greenleaf, Sunday July 19th, 2026

A Sermon

The Reverend Richard E. Greenleaf St. George’s Chapel

Long Cove Road

Tenants Harbor, ME 04860 19 July 2026

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost /Proper 11/1 HE IIA

Genesis 28:10-19a Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Collect of the Day

Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Good morning!

It is a pleasure to be with you again this year.

For those of you who do not know me, my name is Richard Greenleaf

and for 31 years

I served as a chaplain and a member of faculty at St. Paul’s School

over in Concord, New Hampshire.

But what I want to begin with today is a story not from then

--not from my long experience as a boarding school chaplain--but with a story from a role

much more pertinent to my life now, and that is as a grandparent,

This is very much with me because my wife Jenny and I

are fresh off a week with our daughter

and her 11-year-old daughter, Ashley, at our home down in Kittery, Maine, something that has become an annual

July event for us.

The story I want to share with you, however,

is not from our grand-daughter’s most recent visit but from a visit about 4 or 5 years ago,

when Ashley was around 6 or 7.

She arrived, per usual, with great fanfare and hugs and then proceeded to the kitchen looking for snacks,

when she spied a very large, 5 lb. bag of Dum Dums, you know those little lollipops

that come in a variety of colors and flavors.

“Wow!” she cried. “Are those for me?”

I should tell you that at that time we had recently moved my then 92-year-old father-in-law Bob

into a nearby assisted-living memory-care facility, and one of Bob’s great delights was Dum Dums.

So Jenny, Grammy, had to explain,

“Well, actually, those are for great-Grampy,

but I’m sure he won’t mind sharing some with you.”

To which Ashley responded, “Can we sort them?”

A bit surprised,

Jenny said, “Sure!” and began to set out a number of bowls

into which to sort the great variety of Dum Dums.

And, as if there this were not enough, Ashley decided that they had to count the number of each flavor

and record the results on a chart.

This turned into quite the exercise,

which Ashley seemed to take increasing delight in,

to the point where she

turned to her grandmother and exclaimed, “Isn’t this great, Grammy?”

“This is the best day ever!”

I should note

that Ashley is not OCD.

But she does have a great love of ordering things--

--things like her large collection

of life-like plastic animal figures,

which she likes to organize in various ways: by size, by color,

by species and family . . .

or by whatever story

she happens to cast them in at a particular moment.

Where does this come from, this impulse to rank and sort,

this urge the poet Wallace Stevens called our “blessed rage for order”?

I should also note that Ashley comes by this honestly, in that her father is a PhD chemist

and her paternal grandfather a professor of electrical engineering, both of them very orderly

in thought and habit.

And surely, in this life

the ability to distinguish one thing from another is the foundation of learning,

both rational and moral.

Even Sesame Street teaches this, with Cookie Monster singing,

“One of these things is not like the others One of these things doesn't belong

Can you tell which thing is not like the other By the time we finish our song?”

and series of numbers, or letters,

or shapes

are displayed on the screen

with one item in each series being different

for children to identify.

And this capacity

can be essential to survival.

It has been noted

that even the avant garde musical composer John Cage who championed the beauty of the random

in sound

was punctilious in his hobby as a mushroom hunter, because his very life depended upon

his ability to distinguish the poisonous

from the non-poisonous

in his mushroom hunting.

And this morning,

we see Jesus trying to teach an assembled crowd, using a series of parables

to help them understand

just what the Kingdom of Heaven might be like

and not like.

In fact, the whole 13th chapter of Matthew is devoted to these parables,

parables of the Kingdom of Heaven,

many of which would be familiar if we were to dig into them.

What they have in common is helping Jesus’s listeners discern and distinguish

among the various accounts of the Kingdom of God

on offer at that place and time, accounts both Jewish and Roman.

In using these parables,

Jesus is trying to develop in his listeners a kind of discernment

that is nothing less than wisdom itself!

But here,

in the parable of the wheat and the weeds, Jesus seems to do the exact opposite,

he appears to totally reverse field.

Rather than having the Master tell his slaves

to sort and gather the weeds from among the wheat, he has the Master tell them,

‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.

I don’t think I have to tell you that we live in a time

when the impulse

to gather and burn the weeds is great.

We live in a sometimes ruthlessly meritocratic society that seems to rank and sort

everything:

Intelligence, money, power, beauty. Talent, influence, and access.

So much so

that some despair

of even competing.

Religiously,

we rank and sort

among who’s got God’s story right, pitting religion against religion, race against race,

“we” against “they,” all against each,

all of it making our “rage for order” more “blasted” than “blessed.”

But here,

in this parable, Jesus says, “No.”

Jesus says, “Stop!”

Jesus says, ‘Let them grow together until the harvest.’

And Jesus uses this image

because the weeds of which he is speaking are darnels,

that, according to one source, is

“a grassy weed that acts as a "Vavilovian mimic" of wheat, meaning it evolved to look and grow exactly like wheat to avoid being weeded . . During their early stages, darnel and wheat are indistinguishable.

Both grow bright green, upright stalks, which makes it nearly impossible to pull the darnel without tearing up the wheat roots.”

And it’s toxic!

In classical Greece, it was known as the “plant of frenzy” used in the rites of Demeter and Persephone’s followers.

The Roman poet Ovid called it “eye-blightening.”

In medieval Europe it was used

as a medicinal plant, as an anesthetic, and to slow menstrual bleeding.

But most often, it seemed to be baked into what was called “dazed bread” or brewed into beer

to give those basics an extra kick.

And Darnel shows up in Shakespeare, particularly in King Lear,

where Lear wears it in his crown of weeds,

made up of “all the idle weeds that grow in our sustaining corn.”

One scholar even notes that

the symptoms of Lear’s madness

are similar to the symptoms of darnel poisoning

and wondered if Shakespeare had meant to insinuate that Lear had been eating the plants in his crown, and if his madness was, in part,

a self-inflicted drunkenness.

And yet

Jesus says of wheat and darnel, ‘Let them grow together

until the harvest.’

Maybe because wheat and darnel, like human beings

--like us-

cannot be accurately ranked cannot be sorted

in any final way

before the harvest. The true and the false.

The healthful and the toxic The good and the bad.

Inextricably mixed up, both in the human family and in ourselves!

This is not a call

to abandon our human responsibility for moral discernment.

But a moral reminder

that only God knows the heart,

and only God can foresee the harvest.

A moral reminder that in the end we may find

that the Divine Sower has sown only good wheat.

Amen.