In the Gospel lesson for Sunday, Jesus tells the parable of the wheat and the weeds. A field is found to have both wheat and weeds growing in it. When the workers ask the owner if they should uproot the weeds, he tells them not to, because they would uproot the wheat as well. He tells them to leave the weeds to grow along with the wheat, and at harvest time they will be separated and the weeds burned.

If there's ever been a better metaphor for the church, I don't know what it is! For some reason we expect the church to be the gathering of the pure and holy, and we're shocked when we find out that church people are just as likely as anyone else to be small-minded, hypocritical, selfish, and power-hungry.

Over the course of history there have often been attempts to "purify" the church by casting out those who are unworthy. These attempts always fail, because the church is made up of sinners like you and me.

It's precisely when we begin to think that we're the good ones and those others are the bad ones that we begin to damage the church. It's only when we admit that we ourselves are a mixture of good and bad that we begin to realize that we must be tolerant of others even when we don't agree with them.

The important thing to remember is that God will take care of the separation of good and bad at the end of the age. We don't have to do that -- and it's a good thing!
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