Weeds and Wheat ~ July 19, 2026

Sermon for Emmanuel Church, Dublin, NH | The Very Reverend Gideon L. K. Pollach | P11A

Now, I know there are some here who are too young to remember this commercial, but some of us may remember it. Do you remember that commercial where two people run into each other, and one says, "You got your peanut butter in my chocolate?" And the other one looks and says, "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter." Some of us are obviously old enough to remember. Both people are outraged at the end of the commercial — until they taste what's happened.

Now, it's a funny memory. And it may not be the most obvious sermon illustration, but it's sticky. It sticks in the mind the way peanut butter sticks to the roof of your mouth.

How many years do you think have passed since that commercial ran? Twenty, maybe? Forty?

Anyway — stay with me. It's not quite the picture I need for this sermon. In that commercial, the difference between chocolate and peanut butter is obvious, and the result is delicious: Reese's peanut butter cups. But the gap between that commercial and this Gospel is pretty much my whole sermon. So stay with it.

The chocolate and the peanut butter can always be told apart. They know exactly what they are. The wheat and the weeds in our parable do not come with labels — either to themselves or to the gardeners.

So here's a better image, maybe. Picture the beautiful mouth of Cold Spring Harbor, where I normally spend my days. A spillway runs from our freshwater pond into the harbor's mouth, and it brings fresh water into the salt water of the harbor, and the brackish margin climbs and recedes with the tide, twice a day.

Now, a chemist can measure the salinity of that water to the decimal point. But no one — not the veteran kayaker, not the chemist, not the Great Blue heron waiting in the shallows — can draw a line and say: Here is where the brook ends, and there is where the sea begins.

Because once mixed, they do not unmix. And I'm sure you've stood at the edge of something like that, where two things that used to be separate quietly became one, with no way to restore the separation.

And the parable hinges on this. It hinges on the idea that you and I can tell wheat from weeds — or at least assume that we can. But we can't.

And the householder knows this. This isn't a confession about poor eyesight. It's an epistemological claim, because the difference between weeds and wheat is unclear by sight. It's unclear by science. It's unclear even by evolution. And this lack of clarity is the whole point of the parable.

Now, the Gospel tells us this story: a householder sows good seed. An enemy comes at night and sows not just any weeds, but a weed called bearded darnel among the wheat. Not next to it — among it. Tangled root to root.

Bearded darnel is a grass that mimics wheat almost exactly while it's young, and it's mildly toxic when ground into flour. So this is agricultural sabotage. And worse — attempted murder. Or, at least, attempted discomfort.

When the plants come up together, the gardeners, being good employees, want to separate the weeds from the wheat. But the householder says no. Not because he's soft on weeds.

In the growing season, before the grain has formed its head, wheat and darnel look identical. You cannot tell the difference.

The plants are visually indistinguishable until the wheat's mature head grows heavy and then droops under its own weight. Darnel, by contrast, stays upright. And this is not a generic weed problem. It's counterfeit grain, sown deliberately to poison the householder.

The point is this. You and I are not reliable witnesses to what is growing in us. Weeds look like wheat. Wheat looks like weeds. Too cautious, too zealous, and we ruin both.

Here's what sharpens the discomfort a little further. Darnel, the specific weed in this passage — Lolium temulentum, I looked it up; oh, it doesn't matter — darnel did not come by its disguise naturally. It evolved.

Biologists call it mimicry. For thousands of years, farmers pulled the weeds that looked like weeds. The darnel that looked like wheat survived.

The darnel that survived reseeded, and what reseeded looked more like wheat.

Generations of cautious gardeners did not merely separate the wheat from the weeds. Across centuries, their caution helped manufacture better weeds. It made the wheat, too. Every generation that tried to purify the field only taught the counterfeit wheat to hide better.

And sometimes, the difference between wheat and weeds is just a matter of time.

Now, last week I told you about my Good Friday garden. Cosmos and zinnias, scattered onto the ground on Good Friday, an agricultural statement of faith and hope. I shared that I'm living right now — and through my whole ministry — in the interval between sowing and knowing. And I realized this week that I could have saved you a lot of time and summed up the whole sermon in just one sentence, like this: Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. I just couldn't see it yet.

And the same claim comes back this week.

Two weeks running, the same claim, because we need to hear it twice. When we look at the weedy, tangled, hard season of our lives and we can't find the wheat in it, we conclude it's not there. But the householder knows better. We think we are looking at all weeds. The householder knows better. Wait — because we don't know. We don't know yet. Only time will tell us what is weed, and what is wheat. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I want you to jump in my time machine with me, and come with me to Friday, January 23rd of this year.

As some of you know, I helped to lead our search for our next bishop in the Diocese of Long Island, and that search I was leading had just ended. The candidates had been handed on to the next committee and were publicly named. And my calendar, which had been overly full since this time last summer, was suddenly empty of vitally important and time-sensitive meetings. I had seriously injured my back in October, and that injury was not yet fully addressed on January 23rd, and because of it, I still couldn't spend my restless and suddenly empty afternoon the way I wanted.

It was too cold outside — so cold that the pond behind our church was completely frozen. Locked in, gray, and still, and it looked like nothing was happening there at all. I had too much unused mental energy and nowhere to put it. And I was a bit panicked about it, to be honest.

So I sat down, and I wrote about the pond, our companion. How the ice looks like absence, but how underneath it, where I could not see, I knew that the fish were still there, moving much more slowly. The snapping turtles were waiting out the freeze, buried deep in the mud. I knew that the seeds were in the sediment, already holding the promise of May. The pond wasn't idle. The pond was busy — in a way that we could not see.

So I wrote this little reflection — a little thing, maybe 500 words. I called it Beneath the Ice. I named it a Sunday Reflection, because it was going to go out on Sunday. And I sent it out to my mailing list, not expecting much, because that reflection came from boredom and a hurt back, not inspiration.

That was January, and since then I've written one a week, plus a couple of bonus ones. I think there are now twenty-five or twenty-seven of them.

Now, here's the thing. In my twenty years of ministry, these reflections have been the most positive thing I have ever done. More positive than any effort to curb the opioid overdose epidemic on Long Island. More positive than our efforts to successfully unlock green energy financing for nonprofits. More positive, even, than the meditation garden we built — which is still missing its central feature, a sculpture.

And here is the detail that tells you more than the popularity: no one — not one person — has criticized my reflections. Not one email, not one raised eyebrow at coffee hour. And if you've spent any time in church, you know that is rarer than most things we call miracles.

Frustration, pain, and a little bit of boredom led to the most widely supported initiative in my ministry, and I never would have guessed that would be a recipe for success. I didn't think I was sowing anything. Not weeds, not wheat.

But here's what I'm learning. The weedy parts of our lives are not evidence of God's absence. They may be exactly where the wheat is growing. We have no idea.

This parable was never really about weeds. It's about how our caution makes us sort too early, judge too early, decide what a season means before it is finished with us. And sometimes, we would rather lose real wheat than risk one more weed left standing.

The householder is not being patient with the weeds. He's being careful with the wheat.

And this is the character of God. God is willing to let the field stay tangled for a while longer, trusting a harvest that none of us, however careful, can yet see.

So let's go back to my memorable Reese's peanut butter cup commercial. "You got your peanut butter in my chocolate. You got your chocolate in my peanut butter." Of course, if you are me, that's the best accident in the world — not despite the collision, but because of it. A good Reese's peanut butter cup is better than nearly anything else — as long as you're not allergic to peanut butter. And maybe that's the harder version of the joke, the one I couldn't tell you at the start: God isn't scandalized by what's tangled together in us. God may just be delighted by it — the way I am delighted by a candy that nobody meant to make.

So this week, as we navigate parts of our lives that feel like they're not productive — or worse, overgrown with worry — lives that feel ineffective, lives that feel like they're all weed: resist the self-judgment. Because we can't distinguish the grain yet. Something may be forming under there — something that we can't recognize as wheat for a while. And in the meantime, just keep growing. Good, bad, indifferent, tangled as we are, until the harvest.

Maybe I've got weeds in my wheat. No, wait — reverse that. Maybe I've got wheat in my weeds. Either way, life is just like that.

Inseparable. Amen.