“In gathering the weeds you will
uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow until the harvest.”
You know, you can’t make this stuff up.
To chants of “USA! USA! USA!,” Adam Kwasman, an
Arizona state legislator and Tea Party congressional candidate, joined
protesters in Oracle, Arizona, this past week in an attempt to block buses
carrying migrant children to a local YMCA
camp. The kids were earmarked to take up temporary residence at the camp.
Picture this: The protesters ─ along with Kwasman ─
are waiting for the buses to arrive, ready, as a Daily Kos blogger described a
recent anti-marriage equality rally, “to
explode out of the vitriolic rage that comes from losing endlessly.”
Kwasman ─ ever the
vigilant patriot ─ catches sight of that icon of American culture and innocence:
a yellow school bus crammed with squirming kids. And he tweets (channeling “Incoming
Bogey, 10 o’clock high!”): “Bus coming in. This is not compassion. This is the abrogation
of the rule of law.”
Then all hell breaks loose. Kwasman, demonstrators,
camera crews converge on the school bus.
Kwasman later hyperventilates, “I was able to
actually see some of the children on
the buses and the fear on their
faces.”
Well, duh. Who among us wouldn’t be on the verge of
a “Depends moment” if we saw an angry mob converging on our school bus? Read:
“Kwasman, you’re one scary guy!”
Well, he was one unlucky guy … because ─ with the cameras rolling ─ turns out the
bus was filled with YMCA kids as American-as-apple-pie headed for bliss: a
parent-free, care-free stint at summer camp.
As for the fear on the kids’ faces, a reporter said
they were bouncing off the walls of the bus, juggling their iPhones with giddy
abandon to preserve forever the fever-pitch moment. Imagine, come September:
“What I did on my summer vacation!”
The ultimate in irony (or is it farce)? The Los Angeles Times reported, “As of Wednesday,
no buses with migrant children had arrived at Oracle, Arizona.”
Too bad the would-be congressman went off
half-cocked … prompting us to ask, “What’s wrong with this picture?”
Answer? Jesus nails it in his “Parable of the Wheat
and the Weeds.”
To recap: A wheat farmer
is handed a tricky situation. His workers discover that the competition has
sown weed seeds into the farmer’s pristine wheat field. Word to the too-worldly-wise:
this “weed” is not marijuana. When you hear “weed” here, do not ─ I repeat, do not ─ think marijuana! And now that I’ve planted that ear worm, we
can move on.
The saboteur’s seeds
aren’t just any kind of weed. In the parable’s
original language, the “weed” is actually a copycat: darnel. It looks just like
wheat when it’s growing ─ in some places it’s called “false wheat” ─ but once harvested and
consumed, it’s pretty toxic. We might have a case of attempted murder on our
hands here! Or worse, if it achieves wider distribution, a class action suit.
Problem is: it’s only at
the harvest that you can make a definitive finding as to what’s the genuine
wheat and what’s the toxic knock-off.
So the workers approach
the farmer with alarm. “Boss, major weed infestation. We need a plan and we
need decisive action … now!”
But the farmer is a
realist. Going after the wheat look-alike now
would be decisive, but premature. In other words, yanking up the toxic elements
immediately would solve the weed infestation problem alright, but the
collateral damage would be too great. The whole field ─ acre upon acre of uprooted
wheat and weed ─ would look like a
war zone. And that would play right into the saboteur-neighbor’s hand. No
harvest.
So, the farmer defers taking action. Why? Because at this stage he just doesn’t know enough.
Weeds and wheat are growing together and you can’t tell them apart. That means you
don’t know how each plant will turn out. When
will you know? That’s a long way off. For now, live and let live.
So, what’s Jesus’ point?
Beware the weed-pulling
impulse! … when the buses are rolling in at 10 o’clock high (“USA!
USA! USA!”) … or at other times when we catch people in the act of not living
the perfect lives we’ve charted for them.
Why wait?
Because activating the weed-pulling impulse would condemn our alleged
perpetrator-neighbors without engaging our charity.
It would condemn them outright
without factoring-in our own accountability.
And it would condemn the
targets of our moral rage irresponsibly.
First, condemning our
neighbors without charity. At this point, we may have a pretty clear lock on
the way we think God wants the world to operate. Suspiciously like our own.
Imagine that.
At this point, we may
think God has deputized us judge to make the world a better place by
withholding from these people the love ─ or at least the slack ─ they are due
as our neighbor … or by denying them their rights and a hearing … or in extreme
cases, by executing them.
What does Jesus have to say
to that? “Mind your own business!” … because, first of all, God isn’t done with
those so-called evil-awful-people-over there yet.
And God isn’t done with
each of us yet!
The sixth-century writer
Philoxenus put it this way: “We should be slow to judge others, because God
judges us infinitely more leniently
than we judge one another.”
And then, condemning
alleged perpetrator-neighbors without factoring-in our own accountability. That
is, without an action-plan. In the parable’s case study, an action plan that will
prevent the saboteur from corrupting the integrity of the wheat field next season.
In our own context, that
would look like roundly condemning human-made climate change ─ going after Big
Oil, carbon-spewing industries (like fossil-fuel-burning utilities), bloated
energy-consuming agribusinesses, gas-guzzling automakers ─ condemning the
polluters without changing ourselves first. Read: without taking steps to
shrink our own carbon footprint by
taking an open, no-holds-barred, hard look at the cars we drive, how we drive,
where we drive … the environmental impact of the food we eat (how it’s grown, where
it’s grown, the costs of putting it on our dinner table) … the homes we live
in, light, heat, and cool.
In other words, it looks
like engaging in “carbon shaming” ─ all talk, all condemnation ─ without
holding ourselves to account by becoming full-blown, responsible citizens: highly-vocal
and organized environmental activists in our homes, in our parish, and in the
public square.
And that points to weed-pulling
─ condemning others ─ irresponsibly: launching into finger-wagging and
tongue-lashing without first sniffing out the facts.
Now, at first glance, the
parable might lead us to conclude we should throw our hands up and do nothing at
all ─ ever ─ even in the face of
patently reprehensible behavior. Well, that doesn’t accord with common sense.
And it doesn’t fit the moral imperative Jesus teaches elsewhere in the Gospels,
the moral imperative Jesus himself lives.
Meaning: Clear cases of
abuse, such as spousal and partner abuse, child and elder abuse,
and (yes) capital punishment? All open
to fact-finding, not open to debate …
because abuse of this sort or any other can never be shown to love God, our
neighbor, or ourselves.
Fact-free, irresponsible condemnation, then: What
does it look like?
Adam Kwasman’s fizzled
stunt. And what triggered the stunt? The crisis at our borders ─ 57,000
children fleeing villages, towns, and cities, primarily from Honduras and El
Salvador, since October.
Now, freeing themselves
from the burden of facts, many folks like Kwasman are conflating this recent migrant
surge with long past-due immigration reform. For example, should long-term
undocumented immigrants be deported … given an option to attain citizenship … or
be granted some other permanent status that would allow them to stay in this
country legally?
This is not the issue
we’re talking about here. For the most part, the children ─ some accompanied ─
are surrendering en masse to border
agents. In general, this isn’t a surreptitious, illegal-border-crossing
immigrant crisis. It’s an overt humanitarian crisis. The kids ─ most of them,
it appears ─ are legitimate asylum-petitioning refugees and not merely those
seeking better economic opportunity here (which might be grounds for
deportation).
What are the legitimate
refugees fleeing? Endemic gang violence. Kids being forced to join gangs. And
if they refuse, they and their family members face retaliation.
They are fleeing, as
well, murder, pervasive rape, and being pressed into human trafficking
enterprises. They are fleeing places like San Pedro Sula, a city in Honduras with the world's highest homicide rate. From January through May, 2,200 children had fled San Pedro Sula for the relative safety and security of the US.
And ─ fact ─ the children
aren’t just being “sent” here. As of this week, about 43,000 of them have been
released to relatives or sponsors around the country, according to officials at
New York’s Administration for Children and Families, a division of the state’s
Health and Human Services.
And yet, condemning the
children irresponsibly has become a cottage industry for those immune to pesky
facts and untroubled by the humanitarian impulse firmly-embedded in the
Christian Gospel.
Take the Florida
congressman who says these aren’t migrant children arriving in waves at the
border. They’re “gang members,” he says, “thieves, rapists, and murderers.”
Or another congressman, who thinks the kids should
be turned back at the border because they might be carrying the Ebola virus. Um,
Congressman, Ebola virus hasn’t been found among the populations of the Western
Hemisphere. You could look it up: http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/pdf/fact-sheet.pdf
And then there’s the prominent anti-immigration
activist who says he has iron-clad proof that this is a Commie Chinese plot.
Why the Chinese? It’s not immigration; it’s infiltration, he says. The Central
American migrants are being shipped here ─ by the Chinese ─ to overthrow the US
government.
I mean, what do you say?
You say, “Beware the weed-pulling impulse!”
Beware knee-jerk condemnation: weed-pulling without charity … weed-pulling without
personal accountability … fact-free weed-pulling.
Because, Jesus says, “in gathering the weeds you will uproot the wheat along with them. Let
both of them grow until the harvest.”
Amen.
