“If you don’t want to get weeded out, if you don’t want to get pulled like a weed . . . you’ve gotta serve the purposes of industry. And what . . . Psalm [37] is saying and what [the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain] are saying is, ‘No! Don’t do it! Don’t conform to the development! You were not made for that kind of life! You were made for beauty and entanglement, for [an] ecosystem of abundance! You were made for a different world than the one that you see now, a world that is far more eternal than the foolishness and arrogance of this generation that thinks this . . . factory is going to last forever, right?!’ And as unlikely as it seems, that world of . . . factories and all, I mean, it’s, it’s going to disappear and the original world will come back to this place again, right here in the same spot. So, hold the ground, right?! Even though it’s painful, even though the current regime will punish you for existing here in faithfulness, stay, find the cracks, be faithful the way that you were made to be . . . .[S]omeday humans will abandon this plot of land and the land will return to some natural state. Maybe it will look different than it looked before, but it will return to some natural state. Maybe in a hundred years, maybe in a thousand years, who knows when it’s coming, but those buildings are not eternal and someday they will deteriorate and despite their best efforts, you know, the micro-organisms are going to eat all the wood in those buildings and years of water and wind will eventually tear away the concrete, and weeds will find their ways into the cracks, the roots will tear open the concrete. You know, I love the image of a tree growing through a sidewalk and just the way that, you know, that thing that seems eternal, this concrete, just gets blown up by the roots of trees—someday, somehow that land will begin to accumulate topsoil again, birds and insects and rodents will find their nesting places. . . . [S]lowly, but, you know, with painful and great effort and work over 100 years, maybe more, the land will return to some natural state. It’ll come back and I hear Psalm 37 promise something similar, reminding us that the current configuration of the world is not going to stand forever, that the wicked will not always prosper, the ones who have claimed the land will fall on their own swords, right, they’ll wash away their own topsoil and they’ll be left with nothing but names on stones. They’ll bring about their own destruction, their pride and abundance [are] temporary, their rule will come to an end, they’ll exhaust their resources and they’ll come crashing down and the violence they commit will be returned on their own heads and out of the ruins that they leave behind, when all of this goes away, that old forest, the thicket, right, the undesirable grasses and brush and bushes, the rodents and the birds and bugs, the weeds—the meek—will inherit the land. Don’t fret faithful ones! Don’t worry about the apparent success of the ones who do wrong. Don’t be envious of the success of the ones who do wrong! Don’t be envious of their temporary prosperity, their shiny buildings and their clean sidewalks, don’t get shortsighted and fall into their way, right? Stay faithful! Keep finding those cracks in the sidewalk and the abandoned alleys and the crawl spaces and the unprotected perches and keep finding your home in this land and keep chirping and cricketing and digging and all, you know, digging your little gopher holes . . . . Like, they will punish you for your weedy-ness and your buggy-ness and your chirping and your rodent-ness. Be even more weedy and more buggy and more chirpy and more rodenty! Like, be stubbornly faithful! That’s what’s going to keep you in this land. And someday that’s what’s going to return this land [to what] it’s meant to be. It’s your land and it will come back to you! The world you see around you is bound for destruction! Sin and death have already been defeated and the weeds are rising up! We are those weeds, hopefully, right? The call of Jesus and the call of this Psalm is to be those weeds who do what we know how to do, put down our roots, you know, we reach towards the sky, we bear our fruit in season and then when they pull us out, we start again the next year, not worrying about, like, the landscape garden over there that has sprinklers that water them every morning and a gardener who spreads fertilizer—you know what I mean?—not worried about the indoor plants; they have enough air conditioning and all that stuff. Like, don’t worry about all the other stuff! That stuff won’t be. Just keep trucking along loving one another, committing yourself to prayer, growing in patience and perseverance, rooting out anger and lust from your heart, returning evil with good, sharing what you have, serving God and serving one another, lifting up people who are around you, showing them care and love and forgiveness, instead of anger and lust and resentment. Love them and care for them, right? Be satisfied with where the Lord has planted you and be faithful there and trust that the Kingdom is coming! Don’t fret as the Psalmist says, “Depart from evil and do good so you shall abide forever. For the Lord loves justice. He will not forsake his faithful ones. The righteous shall be kept safe forever but the children of the wicked shall be cut off. The righteous shall inherit the land and live forever. Amen?
“Let’s pray. God we thank you for the promise of the return of your way to this world and the way that you have already pronounced its coming in and through Christ and I pray that you would help us to be weeds in this world, that we would be a thorn in the side of the development of this world, of the rule and reign of sin and death, that we would be the rats that [chew] holes in their electrical wires, that we would be birds that nest all over the place and lay eggs in the high places and the weeds that break the sidewalk and we would be the faithful in this place who are just bursting for [and] ready to reclaim this land as soon as you clear out the reign of sin and death. Give us the hope and the courage to be who you made us to be! Make us weedy! Make us rodent-y! Make us chirpy and buggy! Make us those stubborn people who refuse to allow the world to pull us into wickedness and who are determined to be faithful and loving in a world that punishes those things. We pray this all in Jesus’s name. Amen.”
Chris Nafis, Living Water Church of the Nazarene, February 20, 2022