The Ancient Farming Trick Behind One of Jesus' Strangest Parables

Why are there weeds mixed in with the flowers? Every visitor to our sunflower field asks the same question.

Jesus asked it too, and for centuries the church has answered it by pulling up people it was never meant to sort.

ABOUT THIS SERMON

In this sermon from Pleasant Valley Church of the Brethren in Weyers Cave, Virginia, Pastor Harry Jarrett walks through Jesus’s parable of the wheat and the weeds using two years of hands-on lessons from an actual sunflower field. Along the way, he traces the parable’s real cost through Anabaptist history, the persecution of the Radical Reformation, and the execution of Michael Sattler, before landing on a harder, more personal question: what happens when we stop trying to weed the grief out of our own lives.

SCRIPTURES REFERENCED

* Matthew 13:24-30 — The Parable of the Weeds

* Matthew 13:36-43 — Jesus explains the parable

BOOKS WORTH EXPLORING

* The Patient Ferment of the Early Church — Alan Kreider

* The Wounded Healer — Henri Nouwen

* Martyrs Mirror — Thieleman J. van Braght

CHAPTERS

00:00 What can a messy sunflower field teach us about faith?

00:58 Why did Pastor Harry let the weeds grow with the flowers?

02:09 What is Jesus really saying in the parable of the weeds?

02:45 What is the parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13?

03:39 Why couldn’t anyone tell wheat and darnel apart?

04:50 Why did this parable terrify a persecuted early church?

05:42 Who was Michael Sattler, and why was he executed?

06:23 What happened during the Munster Rebellion of 1534?

07:56 Why did the landowner refuse to let the weeds be pulled?

09:09 Do we secretly wonder if the person next to us is wheat or darnel?

09:44 What has every purification campaign in church history actually done?

10:52 What did Alan Kreider mean by “fervent patience”?

12:23 Does “the end of the age” really mean judgment day?

13:42 What does the word “kindom” mean, and where did it come from?

15:32 How did a sunflower field prepare Pastor Harry for grief?

16:49 What did Henri Nouwen mean by a “wounded healer”?

18:06 Good news: Pastor Harry’s fourth grandson was born

18:34 What are we actually asked to do with what we can’t sort out?

LINKS

Church website: https://pleasantvalleyalive.org/

Daily devotional: https://pastorharryjarrett.substack.com/s/daily-devotional

Substack newsletter:

Faith at Work podcast:

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