Wheat Privilege
Wheat Privilege
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Christian Community Presbyterian Church
Bowie, Maryland
July 12, 2020
How many of you have not heard this two-part gospel reading before? Raise your hands. Hmm. That’s what I expected, I don’t see any. The first part is usually called the “Parable of the Sower.” It’s one of the more familiar of Jesus’ parables. Matthew, Mark, and Luke have versions of it. It is immediately followed by the disciples asking why Jesus spoke in parables. Jesus responds and then offers an explanation of the parable, the second part of this morning’s reading. The curious thing is that this is the only parable that Jesus ever explained. In Mark’s and Luke’s telling Jesus then offered a purpose for parables:
“No one after lighting a lamp hides it under a jar, or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light. For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. Then pay attention to how you listen....” (Luke 8:16-18)
Jesus’ parables often had multiple levels of meaning. He used common images, but he had the annoying habit of using the parables to poke righteous indignation at religious people behaving badly. The parables were designed so that the individuals that Jesus desired to bring to repentance identified with a particular character. Then Jesus would turn the metaphor upside down. Zap! Let’s examine the parable to see where we fit into it.
The parable could be called the “Parable of the Soils.” The four different soils are key to what happens. Let’s step back from the parable and think about land. Remember when maps came in books rather than on your phone? Boundaries between counties, states, and nations were lines separating areas of different colors. But if you look at Google Earth, none of those lines or colors appear. Land is just land. What can be seen from space is often what human beings do to the land: canals, reservoirs, deforestation, strip mining. Human beings change the land.
Early in human social development communities gathered, cleared some land, and built huts around the edges of the cleared land. This land was used for grazing and was called the commons, because it belonged to everyone. Over time some people prospered (honestly or not) and some didn’t. Those that were more successful became owners and those who were less successful became peasants.
Before standard measurements were adopted, fields were laid out, marked by trees, boulders, and creeks. My father-in-law farmed about 40 acres which were separated into fields by tree rows filled with brush. The tractor path ran along some of the tree rows. In the center of several fields there was a tree or two which marked piles of rocks plowed up over the years. Dad claimed that he grew more rocks than crops. So you can see that the imagery Jesus used was accurate.
Dad used mechanical planters so seed was planted on the arable acreage only. Farmers in Jesus’ day had to plant by strewing seed by hand, so seed inadvertently landed on the paths, among rocks, and in the weeds, with the results that Jesus described. A pessimist would lament the wasted seed (since seed was precious). An optimist would tout the bounty of the successful harvest – thirty, sixty, hundred fold return on the planting. I am going to call that “Wheat Privilege.”
Before we rush into Jesus’ explanation of the parable, let’s parse it ourselves. Farm land in its original state did not come ready to plant. That’s why there were paths, tree rows, and rock piles along side the good soil, not to mention low areas which were wet at the wrong times, drowning the plants.
Let’s imagine that the field represents creation. None of the fields in Jesus’ day were big, but for easy math purposes, I will say that the field contains 100 acres. About 2 acres are taken up in paths, 13 acres in rock piles, and 17 acres in tree rows and weeds. There’s another 5 acres that is soggy bottom unplantable. That leaves 63 acres of what is good soil which will produce a crop yielding, depending on the weather, 30, 60, or 100 bushels of grain for every bushel planted. Even with the haphazard method of seed sowing of the farmers Jesus observed, it behooved them to maximize the application of seed to the 63 acres of good and minimize strewing on the aggregated 37 acres of non-productive soils. Again, that’s wheat privilege.
Now before you start complaining that you aren’t farmers (I know that you aren’t) or that I have turned into a CPA (which I am not), let’s move those numbers to something that might be more familiar to us. The percentages of the soils which I gave you are the percentages for the racial ethnic demography of the United States.
The 2 acre path land compares to the 2 percent of the population who are Indigenous people, the people many of whose ancestors were forcibly relocated as Europeans hungrily ate up the land from sea to shining sea. Many of them were relocated as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, ultimately to the badlands of the Dakotas, the prairies of the Great Plains, and the desert wilderness of the southwest. The 1838 Trail of Tears was the forced march of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole tribes from the southeastern states to land that the government knew very little about.
The abusive treatment of Indigenous people continued as late as the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline standoff, this year’s southern border wall destruction of sacred ground in Arizona, and limited medical response to Covid-19. All the Indigenous people have is beaten down paths, barren ground, all for the privilege of the wheat.
The 5 acre unplantable area compares to the 5 percent population that identifies as Asian, some of whose ancestors were enslaved to build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, harassed with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, interned following the attack on Pearl Harbor, or now abused with derogatory appellations for the Covid-19 virus. They have been treated like unfarmable ground, used, ignored, degraded, all for the privilege of the wheat.
The 13 acres of rock strewn ground corresponds to the 13 percent of the U.S. population which is Black or African American, many of whom are descendants of the nearly 400,000 Africans transported on the Middle Passage from their West African homelands between 1619 and the end of lawful importation of enslaved people in 1807. At the time of the nation’s founding each of the thirteen colonies had enslaved Africans. In 1859, on a bet, the last shipload of Africans were secretly brought into Mobile, Alabama, on the Clotilda. The last enslaved Blacks were emancipated June 19, 1865 in Texas, two and one half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox.
Following the breakdown of Reconstruction after 1877, Jim Crow laws were enacted – even in the northern states – to segregate and debase Blacks and prevent their full participation in the American dream. Between 1882 and 1968 upwards of 5,000 Blacks were lynched in the United States. Blacks were the people who were victims of the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, Massacre and the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, Massacre when 35 square blocks of the Greenwood district – Black Wall Street – were torched, resulting in an unknown number of deaths.
Woodrow Wilson enforced strict segregation of U.S. government offices and the military during his presidency. Parts of the New Deal denied services to Blacks and the World War II G.I. bill withheld education and financial benefits to Black veterans. In the span our own lifetimes we have seen conspiracies to red-line neighborhoods, sit-ins, bombings, beatings, assassinations, unjustified killings, aggressive incarcerations, fractional wages, and inadequate safety nets. Rocks, nothing but rocks. As James Weldon Johnson wrote:
"Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died...."
Rocks piled up for sake of the wheat.
The 17 acres of tree rows and weeds represent the 17 percent American population of Hispanic and Latino descent, some of whose ancestors lived in the area spreading from Texas to Pacific California before English settlers ever landed on Atlantic shores, and whose place names easily roll off Anglo-Saxon tongues: San Francisco, Las Vegas, Tucson, Albuquerque, Durango, San Antonio. Some Latinos plant and harvest the crops we delight to find in our grocer’s produce sections. Others process our meat, mow our lawns, whack our weeds, and clean our homes and motels, yet they are kept in the weeds for the privilege of the wheat.
That leaves the 63 acres that produce lavishly because the collective 37 acres aren’t permitted to. It’s wheat privilege. The 63 percent – most of us are part of it – are privileged. And we rejoice in that. We puff up our chests and bask in the glory of being the good soil. It’s almost like Joseph’s childhood dream in Genesis 37 – his sheaf grain standing up and the sheaves of his brothers bowing down. Wheat privilege in a different way.
Jesus never identifies the sower in the explanation reported by the gospel writers. The implication is that it is God because the seed is identified as the word. But how easy it is for people – from Jesus’ first hearers all the way to gospel readers today – to see themselves as the sower: I am in charge of my own life; I am master, mistress of my own destiny; I chart my own course; my life produces thirty, sixty, one hundred times what I put into it. I am blessed, I am privileged.
God didn’t intend the field of life to be one of wheat privilege. The psalmist sang: “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it” (Psalm 24:1). The prophet Isaiah, 55:10-11, proclaimed:
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
God did not create the field and parcel it out into 2% path, 5% wasteland, 13% rocks, 17% weeds, and 63% useful. We have rutted out access paths to the fields, piled up the rocks, and divided fields into sections and allowed trees and weeds to overgrow so that we can keep the harvest all in one area, our area. That’s wheat privilege.
That is systemic racism. The 224th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) met virtually two weekends ago. The commissioners adopted a statement in response to the human crisis that has caused turmoil in our country since Memorial Day. The Assembly’s statement reads in part,
“Systemic racism is more than an individual act of hatred. It is state-sanctioned violence that dehumanizes all people of color. Whether through police brutality, mass incarceration, denial of democratic rights, health inequalities or generations of dispossession, systemic racism has denied the humanity of black, brown and indigenous people since the very founding of this country.”
Systemic racism also dehumanizes people of no color. We are less human when we fail to honor, respect, and encourage the humanity of people who are not us.
But if the seed is the word, then the words of the Lord root out systemic racism. In another powerful parable Jesus announced, “...as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” What are we doing to Jesus? What are we doing to each other? What are we doing to ourselves? Are we producing thirty, sixty, one hundred times the input? Or have we contaminated the word because we have gerrymandered the field and rigged the life of the field to our advantage? Have we betrayed the word and mutated it into our own image and to our benefit? Have we imposed the will of our flesh on the flesh of others of God’s people?
Paul the apostle wrote to the Romans in 8:5-10:
[T]hose who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God...and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you....[I]f Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
The Spirit hovers over the whole field, all 100 acres, all 100 percent of God’s people. Now is the time to reconfigure the field. Now is the time to share the wheat privilege.
Recommended Reading:
Saunt, Claudio, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (W. W. Norton, 2020)
Gibson, Carrie, El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019)
Kendi, Ibram X., Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Bood Type Books, 2016)
Isenberg, Nancy, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (Viking, 2016)
Prothero, Stephen, Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose) (HarperOne, 2016)
Jenkins, Jack, American Prophets: The Religious Roots of Progressive {olitics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of th Country (HarperOne, 2020)
Wallis, Jim, Chrit in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus,(HarperOne, 2019)
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Christian Community Presbyterian Church
Bowie, Maryland
July 12, 2020
How many of you have not heard this two-part gospel reading before? Raise your hands. Hmm. That’s what I expected, I don’t see any. The first part is usually called the “Parable of the Sower.” It’s one of the more familiar of Jesus’ parables. Matthew, Mark, and Luke have versions of it. It is immediately followed by the disciples asking why Jesus spoke in parables. Jesus responds and then offers an explanation of the parable, the second part of this morning’s reading. The curious thing is that this is the only parable that Jesus ever explained. In Mark’s and Luke’s telling Jesus then offered a purpose for parables:
“No one after lighting a lamp hides it under a jar, or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light. For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. Then pay attention to how you listen....” (Luke 8:16-18)
Jesus’ parables often had multiple levels of meaning. He used common images, but he had the annoying habit of using the parables to poke righteous indignation at religious people behaving badly. The parables were designed so that the individuals that Jesus desired to bring to repentance identified with a particular character. Then Jesus would turn the metaphor upside down. Zap! Let’s examine the parable to see where we fit into it.
The parable could be called the “Parable of the Soils.” The four different soils are key to what happens. Let’s step back from the parable and think about land. Remember when maps came in books rather than on your phone? Boundaries between counties, states, and nations were lines separating areas of different colors. But if you look at Google Earth, none of those lines or colors appear. Land is just land. What can be seen from space is often what human beings do to the land: canals, reservoirs, deforestation, strip mining. Human beings change the land.
Early in human social development communities gathered, cleared some land, and built huts around the edges of the cleared land. This land was used for grazing and was called the commons, because it belonged to everyone. Over time some people prospered (honestly or not) and some didn’t. Those that were more successful became owners and those who were less successful became peasants.
Before standard measurements were adopted, fields were laid out, marked by trees, boulders, and creeks. My father-in-law farmed about 40 acres which were separated into fields by tree rows filled with brush. The tractor path ran along some of the tree rows. In the center of several fields there was a tree or two which marked piles of rocks plowed up over the years. Dad claimed that he grew more rocks than crops. So you can see that the imagery Jesus used was accurate.
Dad used mechanical planters so seed was planted on the arable acreage only. Farmers in Jesus’ day had to plant by strewing seed by hand, so seed inadvertently landed on the paths, among rocks, and in the weeds, with the results that Jesus described. A pessimist would lament the wasted seed (since seed was precious). An optimist would tout the bounty of the successful harvest – thirty, sixty, hundred fold return on the planting. I am going to call that “Wheat Privilege.”
Before we rush into Jesus’ explanation of the parable, let’s parse it ourselves. Farm land in its original state did not come ready to plant. That’s why there were paths, tree rows, and rock piles along side the good soil, not to mention low areas which were wet at the wrong times, drowning the plants.
Let’s imagine that the field represents creation. None of the fields in Jesus’ day were big, but for easy math purposes, I will say that the field contains 100 acres. About 2 acres are taken up in paths, 13 acres in rock piles, and 17 acres in tree rows and weeds. There’s another 5 acres that is soggy bottom unplantable. That leaves 63 acres of what is good soil which will produce a crop yielding, depending on the weather, 30, 60, or 100 bushels of grain for every bushel planted. Even with the haphazard method of seed sowing of the farmers Jesus observed, it behooved them to maximize the application of seed to the 63 acres of good and minimize strewing on the aggregated 37 acres of non-productive soils. Again, that’s wheat privilege.
Now before you start complaining that you aren’t farmers (I know that you aren’t) or that I have turned into a CPA (which I am not), let’s move those numbers to something that might be more familiar to us. The percentages of the soils which I gave you are the percentages for the racial ethnic demography of the United States.
The 2 acre path land compares to the 2 percent of the population who are Indigenous people, the people many of whose ancestors were forcibly relocated as Europeans hungrily ate up the land from sea to shining sea. Many of them were relocated as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, ultimately to the badlands of the Dakotas, the prairies of the Great Plains, and the desert wilderness of the southwest. The 1838 Trail of Tears was the forced march of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole tribes from the southeastern states to land that the government knew very little about.
The abusive treatment of Indigenous people continued as late as the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline standoff, this year’s southern border wall destruction of sacred ground in Arizona, and limited medical response to Covid-19. All the Indigenous people have is beaten down paths, barren ground, all for the privilege of the wheat.
The 5 acre unplantable area compares to the 5 percent population that identifies as Asian, some of whose ancestors were enslaved to build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, harassed with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, interned following the attack on Pearl Harbor, or now abused with derogatory appellations for the Covid-19 virus. They have been treated like unfarmable ground, used, ignored, degraded, all for the privilege of the wheat.
The 13 acres of rock strewn ground corresponds to the 13 percent of the U.S. population which is Black or African American, many of whom are descendants of the nearly 400,000 Africans transported on the Middle Passage from their West African homelands between 1619 and the end of lawful importation of enslaved people in 1807. At the time of the nation’s founding each of the thirteen colonies had enslaved Africans. In 1859, on a bet, the last shipload of Africans were secretly brought into Mobile, Alabama, on the Clotilda. The last enslaved Blacks were emancipated June 19, 1865 in Texas, two and one half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox.
Following the breakdown of Reconstruction after 1877, Jim Crow laws were enacted – even in the northern states – to segregate and debase Blacks and prevent their full participation in the American dream. Between 1882 and 1968 upwards of 5,000 Blacks were lynched in the United States. Blacks were the people who were victims of the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, Massacre and the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, Massacre when 35 square blocks of the Greenwood district – Black Wall Street – were torched, resulting in an unknown number of deaths.
Woodrow Wilson enforced strict segregation of U.S. government offices and the military during his presidency. Parts of the New Deal denied services to Blacks and the World War II G.I. bill withheld education and financial benefits to Black veterans. In the span our own lifetimes we have seen conspiracies to red-line neighborhoods, sit-ins, bombings, beatings, assassinations, unjustified killings, aggressive incarcerations, fractional wages, and inadequate safety nets. Rocks, nothing but rocks. As James Weldon Johnson wrote:
"Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died...."
Rocks piled up for sake of the wheat.
The 17 acres of tree rows and weeds represent the 17 percent American population of Hispanic and Latino descent, some of whose ancestors lived in the area spreading from Texas to Pacific California before English settlers ever landed on Atlantic shores, and whose place names easily roll off Anglo-Saxon tongues: San Francisco, Las Vegas, Tucson, Albuquerque, Durango, San Antonio. Some Latinos plant and harvest the crops we delight to find in our grocer’s produce sections. Others process our meat, mow our lawns, whack our weeds, and clean our homes and motels, yet they are kept in the weeds for the privilege of the wheat.
That leaves the 63 acres that produce lavishly because the collective 37 acres aren’t permitted to. It’s wheat privilege. The 63 percent – most of us are part of it – are privileged. And we rejoice in that. We puff up our chests and bask in the glory of being the good soil. It’s almost like Joseph’s childhood dream in Genesis 37 – his sheaf grain standing up and the sheaves of his brothers bowing down. Wheat privilege in a different way.
Jesus never identifies the sower in the explanation reported by the gospel writers. The implication is that it is God because the seed is identified as the word. But how easy it is for people – from Jesus’ first hearers all the way to gospel readers today – to see themselves as the sower: I am in charge of my own life; I am master, mistress of my own destiny; I chart my own course; my life produces thirty, sixty, one hundred times what I put into it. I am blessed, I am privileged.
God didn’t intend the field of life to be one of wheat privilege. The psalmist sang: “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it” (Psalm 24:1). The prophet Isaiah, 55:10-11, proclaimed:
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
God did not create the field and parcel it out into 2% path, 5% wasteland, 13% rocks, 17% weeds, and 63% useful. We have rutted out access paths to the fields, piled up the rocks, and divided fields into sections and allowed trees and weeds to overgrow so that we can keep the harvest all in one area, our area. That’s wheat privilege.
That is systemic racism. The 224th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) met virtually two weekends ago. The commissioners adopted a statement in response to the human crisis that has caused turmoil in our country since Memorial Day. The Assembly’s statement reads in part,
“Systemic racism is more than an individual act of hatred. It is state-sanctioned violence that dehumanizes all people of color. Whether through police brutality, mass incarceration, denial of democratic rights, health inequalities or generations of dispossession, systemic racism has denied the humanity of black, brown and indigenous people since the very founding of this country.”
Systemic racism also dehumanizes people of no color. We are less human when we fail to honor, respect, and encourage the humanity of people who are not us.
But if the seed is the word, then the words of the Lord root out systemic racism. In another powerful parable Jesus announced, “...as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” What are we doing to Jesus? What are we doing to each other? What are we doing to ourselves? Are we producing thirty, sixty, one hundred times the input? Or have we contaminated the word because we have gerrymandered the field and rigged the life of the field to our advantage? Have we betrayed the word and mutated it into our own image and to our benefit? Have we imposed the will of our flesh on the flesh of others of God’s people?
Paul the apostle wrote to the Romans in 8:5-10:
[T]hose who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God...and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you....[I]f Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
The Spirit hovers over the whole field, all 100 acres, all 100 percent of God’s people. Now is the time to reconfigure the field. Now is the time to share the wheat privilege.
Recommended Reading:
Saunt, Claudio, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (W. W. Norton, 2020)
Gibson, Carrie, El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019)
Kendi, Ibram X., Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Bood Type Books, 2016)
Isenberg, Nancy, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (Viking, 2016)
Prothero, Stephen, Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose) (HarperOne, 2016)
Jenkins, Jack, American Prophets: The Religious Roots of Progressive {olitics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of th Country (HarperOne, 2020)
Wallis, Jim, Chrit in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus,(HarperOne, 2019)
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