Boxes, Boxes, and More Boxes

By Rev. Ethan Brown

Pastor and Minister of Care & Discipleship

Boxes. Right now, they are everywhere. We use boxes to block our dog, Ellie, into the kitchen and another set to keep her out of the playroom. To get into bed I squeeze between the mattress and three large boxes. I charge my phone on a box and our Wi-Fi extender sits on top of a box lined up perfectly with our router across the house by the AT&T technician. Basil has been inside boxes and on top of boxes all while we try to keep him from getting squashed under other boxes. And our basement is a mound of broken-down cardboard boxes.
 
One day they will all be gone, but we couldn’t have moved without them. Getting all of our stuff from Virginia to Georgia was much easier when carried in boxes of similar items grouped together, or at least that was the idea. At times we have opened a box and just stared down in it wondering how this collection of dog toys, porcelain elephants, theology textbooks, and kitchen utensils ended up together in a rather shaken box. It would be so much easier to unpack if everything showed up in the correctly labeled box.
 
In our passage for this Sunday, Matthew 13:24-30, this human desire to label and separate by category is on display as Jesus tells the parable of the Wheat and Weeds. The field that had been scattered with good seed is full of weeds as well as the hoped-for wheat. Despite the servants' desire to immediately remove the weeds, the sower plans to wait till the fullness of the harvest so that no wheat will be lost. Waiting for identity to be revealed would prove important to the hometown neighbors of Jesus who wrote him off as merely a carpenter’s son a few verses later. Here we are called to patience, to wait to know and be known. The patience for growth and maturity. The patience to allow time to bear the fruit of love and grace. Life is a mixed-up box of all kinds of people, both life-giving and those choking out our life, yet we continue together on this shaken-up journey called to patience, hope, and love. Somewhere in that is the definition of church. Thanks be to God.