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[Sermon] No Time to Waste

Pastor Hector Garfias-Toledo



There's no other God who cares for all people, and God's judgment is always a reflection of God's mercy. When we rush to judge and to punish on our own terms, we waste the very time God has given us to join in healing and transformation. Drawing on the parable of the wheat and the weeds and the book of Wisdom, Pastor Hector explores why our instinct to separate the righteous from the unrighteous can trap us in the same cycles we're trying to escape. The unjust are undone by their own turning away, not by our verdicts. Our call isn't to ignore injustice, but to act in ways that reflect God's patience and mercy rather than our own. This is an invitation to stop wasting time on judgment and start joining God's mission to make all things whole.



Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.


Grace to you and peace from God: Abba, Father, Mother, Creator, and the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Lord — the compassion of God and the patience of God made flesh among us. And we say, amen.

 

As I was listening to the story again, after having read it several times before today, I was thinking of one of the forms of interpretation we learn in seminary, which is allegorical interpretation. When we hear stories in the Bible, allegories are a way where we identify with one of the characters in the story. And I think that most of the time, through history, the church has tended to do that type of interpretation. Every time we read a passage in the Bible, we immediately tend to ask: who am I here? Am I the soil, the seed, the weed? Am I like Jesus? Am I going against Jesus? Am I like the disciple? Am I like the rocks? Am I like the birds? Who am I in all of this?

 

As I was sharing with you last Sunday, sometimes that type of interpretation leads us to try to identify, of course, with the person or character in the story who seems to have the correct answer, the best attitude, or the best behavior. And that leads us, unfortunately, in our interpretation of scripture, to a point where we become judgmental toward others. Because if I'm the best in the story, who are you? You're the one who's wrong, and I'm the one who's right. Judging is easy to do.

 

You don't need to show your hands, you can show a finger if you want. Have you ever had any trouble judging anybody? I see a couple of fingers there. Somebody did double, like this. I'll say, okay, I won't go there. It's easy to judge. It's easy to judge from a distance.

 

In the past few days, as you know, one of the most prominent politicians in the US, and I say prominent for many reasons, died. One of the first things that came to my mind as I heard this was: well, it seems like that's been a favor for the world, because this politician used to be one of the worst warmongers, imperialist foreign policy lawmakers, and he died. And the tendency of somebody who has been affected by policies, by behaviors, by words, and by actions beyond the borders of this country because of people like him is to judge. It's so easy to judge the political failures, the imperial outreach, and especially their fall. And me, like maybe many others around the world, in the community, I gloat. I condemn, and I feel justified.

 

Last Sunday, after the worship service, and I'm going to put you on the spot here, Wayne, but I think we have a good relationship, and you and I have good theological conversations. Wayne approached me and told me it was great to hear an approach and a perspective on the parable of the soil where I focused on the soil and the importance of the soil in the story. But Wayne, you brought up and complemented the story by saying that at the same time, in the gospel, most of the time the gospel puts us on both sides. Not only as the soil. Sometimes we are the seeds, and sometimes we are the soil.

 

Our agreement, I believe, and we can have this discussion after worship, is that the message of the gospel we receive is always leading us to see ourselves as both. Not only one or the other. We remember in our conversation that in our Lutheran tradition, we understand ourselves as sinners and saints. We understand communion as Jesus being, yes, present physically, but also spiritually. We Lutherans, I think, have come to the agreement that we cannot always have the right side all the time, and we need to live in this complex life where everything seems mixed and difficult to understand, and that it's okay for us to live in that mess, to live in that weed and that wheat together.

 

Today's readings, I believe, help us hold two equally true realities together: that God is the ultimate judge, and that God is radically merciful. In fact, one commentary titles this section we read in the book of Wisdom, one of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books, as "the moderation of God." The challenge this passage presents to us is that we normally crave a single, simple answer for everything: black and white, you are wrong and I am right. We want to pluck the weeds immediately, gloat over our enemies, and act decisively. The danger in doing so is that we inevitably blur the line, because it takes only a slip for a victim to become the victimizer, and for the oppressed to become the oppressor. Righteous anger easily curdles into destructive revenge.

 

We see this in some of the psalms, the old laments. If you read Psalm 5, Psalm 10, Psalm 17, Psalm 35, Psalm 58, Psalm 99, and maybe some others, the psalmist is saying: God, help me get these people, my enemies, make them suffer. Right?

 

But at the same time, we cannot deny that that's part of us too. That sometimes we are the wheat, and sometimes we are the weeds, hoping that God will just zap those we hate, dislike, or who have hurt us badly. So the central question for us is: how do we confront real injustice without falling into the pit of self-righteous destruction? Here is where the book of Wisdom reorients us. Instead of building arrogance over the demise of the Egyptians and the Canaanites, the words in the book of Wisdom invite us to marvel at God's sovereign reign and mercy.

 

So these parables, these stories, my siblings in Christ, as I was saying earlier, aren't so much about who we identify with. As I said last Sunday, the question is what we make of them. Because there is a greater spiritual truth here than leaving church knowing whether I was the disciple, the weed, or the harvest. The focus isn't on the fall of the unjust. The focus is on God's patient treatment of both the just and the unjust.

 

In these scriptures, my siblings, we hear the words of the covenantal love and righteousness of God, where we learn that injustice is inherently self-destructive. The unjust are punished by the very means they used to sin, and sin is when we work against the new order that God has established in Jesus Christ. Their own turning away becomes their own trap. And here is where I bring again the wise words of our theologian in residence, Rachel Tobin, who used to remind us in Wednesday Bible study that we are not punished by God for our sins. We are punished by our sins, because we cannot accept the forgiveness that God has already given us.

 

Jesus tells us about this in this story. The servants see only one side. They impulsively want to solve the problem immediately, reactively. They want to fix everything by plucking the weeds. But Jesus guides us to wrestle with the complex, messy reality of creation, where good seeds and weeds grow together, and there is a harvest, and a furnace, and a gnashing of teeth.

 

And Wisdom reenters here: "It is only when they know your power that you punish those who rebel. But even when, with all your great power, you judge us, you judge with mercy and guide us with great kindness, for your strength is yours to exercise as you choose." God judges in mercy. Divine power is always exercised with forbearance and mercy. God is utterly free, not bound to our timelines or our tribal preferences.

 

God's moderation was not only for Israel's sake at that time. God's moderation was meant to teach them then, and it's meant to teach us today, the expansive, reckless love that extends even to traditional enemies, as we read in the book of Isaiah, chapter 19, where God says—and listen to this, because maybe we forget sometimes that God may bless the people we don't like, or the groups we don't like, or the people we think are wrong—"Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage."

 

Why? Because God is, as God told Moses, "I will be who I will be." Free from our constant attempts to conform the divine to our chosen battles. Whether we lean right or left, or middle, or somewhere in between, Wisdom reminds us that God's judgment is a reflection of God's mercy. God doesn't need to justify divine decisions to anyone.

 

So what do we do with injustice? What do you think we do with injustice?

 

I said last Sunday: our call is not to live in a kumbaya world while the world is falling apart and pretend we're fine. We do not ignore it. We act. But in our actions, we reflect God's mercy rather than executing justice on our own punitive terms. It is God's forbearance that shapes our judgment. And that's why you hear me constantly saying, I believe our faith is not politics, but our faith shapes how we live out our politics in our daily lives.

 

When we see the injustices happening out there, when we see corporations abusing people, when we see people in power crushing the oppressed, when we see political systems imposing imperial power over other nations, we cannot remain silent, and we cannot pretend it's not happening. But we are not going to fall into the trap of becoming exactly what we are fighting against. Because in that case, what is the purpose of doing that? Jesus will say: I didn't come into the world to keep things going the same way they have always gone.

 

The call is to see with God's eyes.

 

A few months ago, as you know, I've been training as a coach in one of my coaching classes. There was one coach who, when he was asked to pray, always ended with this: "Help us to see. Help us, God, to see how you see. Help us to feel how you feel, and help us to love the ones that you love."

 

Ultimately, God's intent for all creation is freedom: liberation from the compulsive urge to condemn, to turn away, and to fix everything ourselves. And the challenge is to drop our petty verdicts and to join God's mission to heal, to transform, and to make all things whole. For there is no other God but you who cares for the whole world, and you need not justify your decisions to anyone. And that, my siblings, is the good news, that God has given us the forgiveness, and the power to be patient with others, as we read in the last part of the book of Wisdom, as David was reminding us.

 

And with that, we are sent into the world to be church for the next six days. And we say, amen.

 
 
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