One Of These Things

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

One of the songs from my childhood which refuses to leave me is "One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other." You know, the one from Sesame Street from a while ago. Back when it was okay for Cookie Monster to gobble an unlimited amount of cookies. Here's a link if you need to hear the song.

The song is meant to teach children to recognize patterns. A football, baseball, and soccer ball are not in the same pattern as a television. However, the song doesn't discriminate against the television, it only helps the child recognize it isn't a part of the pattern.

The same can be said with people. Today's passage introduces us to the idea that bad things are always mixed in with the good things, and in time we'll be able to recognize the bad things and hopefully get rid of them. The bad things aren't part of the pattern of living a good life nor helping others live one.

It isn't easy to recognize the patters. About a year ago there was a game everyone had on their smartphones. The game, at least in my opinion, is based on the Sesame Street song and challenges the player to pick the theme, or pattern, the four pictures are trying to represent. The first 20 or so groupings aren't too difficult, but the game quickly begins to make your brain go into overdrive.

Just like the game, sometimes the themes we try to live by in our lives aren't so easy to pick out. Let's take this ethical question I once had posed to me. There is a village in the Conga which was recently discovered. The people in this village have been living in their ways and with their beliefs for 10,000 years. One of their practices was that if a child was born with deformities they would take it to a cliff overlooking a river and throw the child into that river so as not to invite evil into their lives. Is this wrong?

Of course, coming from a western-influenced set of beliefs, I said yes. One of my classmates, an indigenous woman, said no. I argued that what this village was doing is murder. She argued that what this village did was how they kept evil away. I argued that they need to be educated that a child with deformities doesn't "bring" evil. She argued that to this village, there was no other truth except that allowing the child to grow up in their village would be nothing less than destruction for their people.

Who is right, who is wrong?

After sides began to formulate among the other classmates and the debate began heating up, the professor asked us to focus on a new question: Who is ultimately responsible for making the decision?

The point our professor was trying to make is that when others try to immediately introduce their own beliefs into someone else's world-view, we are no better than what that class was becoming - people who choose sides and proclaim their way was the right way. Instead, if we learn the reasons why the people in their village did things in their way, try to understand them instead of change them, and if we slowly introduce our beliefs and modern medical discoveries (emphasis on slowly), then maybe, just maybe, together everyone could come to an understanding of what is best for that village.

It takes time to gain that kind of understanding, and in doing so the weeds have to grow with the wheat. Then, when the harvest is ready, the choice of what doesn't belong in the pattern will be made.