Sermon on July 19, 2026
“Stay in Your Lane“
By: The Ven. Margaret Grayden
If you’ve been out and about lately, riding a bike or driving a car around Davis, you may have noticed that many of our streets are not in good shape—crumbling pavement and lane lines so faded in some places as to be practically invisible. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I learned how to drive, one of the phrases I heard a lot was “Stay in your lane!” This, it turns out, is good advice, not only for driving but for many other activities in life. I’ve also heard that admonition in secular workplace trainings and in my formation to be a deacon in the Episcopal Church. Perhaps you’ve heard it too, or even said it to others.
Avoiding the temptation to veer over into someone else’s business or to opine on something you aren’t really qualified to address is an important part of living in community. That said, it’s really hard to stay in your lane if you can’t see the markings, or worse yet, if there aren’t any markings at all. And there are times when one does have to move out of one’s lane for a moment—to avoid a greater danger, such as a hazard in the road or an oncoming vehicle. But that is a matter of judgment. And I think that is what Jesus is getting at in the parable at the heart of today’s Gospel reading. There is a time and place for human judgment, but we must always remember that God is the ultimate judge of good and evil in human beings. We veer into God’s lane at our peril.
In last week’s parable—what is often called the parable of the sower but might more accurately be called the parable of the soils, since the emphasis is on the kind of soil the seeds fell on—all of the seeds were “good.” The critical factor determining whether the yield was thirty-fold, sixty-fold, or a hundred-fold was the nature of the soil, not the nature of the seed. In this week’s parable, the key factor is the seed itself because it turns out that not all of the seeds that have been planted are good seeds. Some of the seeds sown are not wheat but rather tares, or weeds, sown by an enemy.
The weed in this parable is likely darnel, also known as “wheat’s evil twin”[1], a poisonous ryegrass that looks just like wheat when it first sprouts. What’s more, as wheat and darnel grow, the plants intertwine. If you try to separate them before harvest, you risk damaging the fruit of the good seed, the wheat. If last week’s parable focused on the nature of the Word of God, or faith, and how the Word takes root in people, this week’s parable addresses the paradoxical nature of the reign of God. Jesus uses this parable to teach His disciples (and by extension, all of us) that good and evil will coexist on earth, side by side like wheat and weeds, and that it is God who will separate the good from the evil at the appropriate time, in the final judgment.
One of “the sufferings of this present time”—to use Paul’s phrase from the Letter to the Romans—is that there are what look to be a lot of weeds out there in the landscape. To be clear, some of these weeds are in our internal landscape; others are in the external landscape of the communities, nations, and world in which we live. Weeds of injustice, weeds of inequality, weeds of racism, weeds of exploitation of the earth and all that is within it, weeds of fear of the other, and quite frankly, weeds of hatred. Sometimes when we take what Walter Burghardt calls “a long loving look at the real”[2], we find ourselves overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems, and are simply paralyzed, unable to act. Other times, we feel a very human and natural impulse to take immediate and decisive action to root up the evil weeds where we can, to live out the promises we made at baptism to “seek and serve Christ in all persons,” to love our neighbors as ourselves, to “strive for justice and peace among all people,” and to “respect the dignity of every human being.”[3]
In these times when we feel a strong impulse to act, the challenge is that the lane markings aren’t always clear. It can be hard to discern exactly what is for us to do here and now, and what we must leave to God to address in God’s time. It’s worth noting that the first impulse of the workers in the parable is to take immediate action—they come to the landowner and ask if they should gather the weeds. The landowner knows that to do so would risk the health of the wheat, so he leaves it to the experts (the reapers) to separate the wheat and the weeds at the time of the harvest. Now, that’s fine if we are just talking about literal wheat and weeds, but Jesus explains that the wheat (good seed) represents “the children of the kingdom” sown by the Son of Man, while the weeds (bad seed) represent “the children of the evil one” sown by the devil.
So what we are really talking about here is distinguishing between good and evil. And this is where it becomes important to stay in our lane. There is a crucial difference between judging specific human behaviors as good or evil, and judging specific human beings as good or evil. As Christians, we are called to name evil human behavior and to do what we can, when we can, with the gifts that we have been given, to address that behavior—to be repairers of the breach, instruments of reconciliation. We are not called to judge whether people are good or evil—that’s God’s lane, not ours. Unfortunately, we see a lot of that kind of very human and yet very dangerous judgment these days, particularly in the rhetoric of some proponents of Christian nationalism.[4]
At a time when I feel a strong impulse to take immediate and decisive action in so many areas, the parable of the wheat and the weeds centers me in the need for patience and wise discernment about whether, when, and how to act. Paul reminds us in today’s excerpt from Romans that “…if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” I find that sense of patient hope in the knowledge that the God who knows us, who dwells with and in us, is well acquainted with the wheat and weeds of our lives and of our world. God knows our hearts, our longings, our unconscious assumptions and biases, and still loves us unconditionally, in all our imperfection. May that divine love in which we are grounded carry us through the hard work of pruning that lies ahead.
AMEN
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wheats-evil-twin-has-been-intoxicating-humans-for-centuries, retrieved on 7-16-26.
[2] Walter J. Burghardt, “Contemplation: A long loving look at the real,” Church, Winter 1989, p. 15.
[3] From The Baptismal Covenant, The Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 305.
[4] To learn more about the Episcopal Church’s view of Christian nationalism, see the webinar “Essential Conversations: The Sin of Christian Nationalism,” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmNX8mlh2Ps. See also The Crisis of Christian Nationalism: Report from the House of Bishops Theology Committee (Church Publishing, Inc., 2024).
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