The first time I heard this analogy was in Tennessee. I’m going to blame the Bible belt for it. Nearly a decade ago now (sheesh time flies), my best friend who I sometimes call my wife and I were on a road trip and Knoxville was our first stop. The friend we stayed with spent a lot of our visit debunking various religions, reiterating the analogy that the ingredients in rat poisoning are mostly harmless except for a very small dose of poison–was it arsenic? I don’t know. A small of something that kills rats. This was to demonstrate that we can’t pick and choose what we want from other religions and throw away the bad stuff, because a small amount of lies spoils the whole religion and makes it poisonous. Something like that.
I’d nearly forgotten about this illustration until a couple Sundays ago, when the pastor at my church told a story with the same sort of analogy as a punchline: A young girl asks her father if they can watch a movie that’s rated R, and the father says, “Why is it rated R?” She explains that there’s a little bit of sex and violence but it’s supposed to be a really good movie. He says, “Okay, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll watch that movie if, after it’s done, you’ll eat some brownies we’ll make together.”
The girl is like, “Awesome!”
So before they put the movie in, the father starts making brownies and he tells the daughter to go get some dog shit out from the yard. She does. He puts it in the brownie batter. The punchline: a little dollop of dog shit ruins the whole batch. (See below for my pastor’s context of this story, which is different than the guy in Knoxville’s…)
I’m willing to say that sometimes, life does work this way–if a hair gets in my restaurant meal I am going to be grossed out and ask the server for a re-do on my dish. I’m not convinced, however, that God works this way with sin in our lives. Here’s why: The harvest analogy.
Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God is like a wheat field where the farmer lets the weeds grow with the crop, knowing that come harvest time, he’ll separate the weeds from the good stuff. He’ll toss the weeds into a fire. He’ll use the wheat for some bread. Lots of people like to say this is about hell, and sure, maybe it is, I have no idea, but I see it also in my own life here on earth. For me, walking with God means that every six or seven years or so, I go through a harvest period. In this case, something drastic has occurred which has made me have to rethink my faith, my relationships, my family. And I ask God–how did it get this way? And then I reflect, through various conversations with folks, about how I ended up where I am. I understand that there have been wonderful things happening to me and my faith (I love God more and I love people more and I’m less depressed) because of the events that led me here since the last time I had to go to God in a crisis. Meanwhile, I see lots of lies about God and how he goes about his God-business have also accumulated. I ask, “Why did you let that junk go on?” as many of us do when we are wondering why God allows suffering. This time, I asked the question right before I read the harvest analogy, which just happened to come up in Matthew, which I’ve been reading again since the New Year.
This is what the Kingdom of God is like, for me at least. My relationship with God is one where I hit the wall, where shit hits the fan, and instead of turning away from God, I go to him and ask me to sort out what’s left. What’s left is a lot of weeds and a lot of wheat. He helps me to see what is what, I pick out the good, productive ideas from the bad, destructive ones, and I grow in my knowledge and insight.
This is a life-long process, I think, for myself as a believer. Eventually, we are to believe, God will give the destructive stuff a good destroying and that will be the end of it. But until then, this is how it’s been and probably will be again.
I’m hesitant towards the rat poison analogy because it sets us up for some real exclusion of people. Because what if the field analogy works on an individual level, and what if we are rejecting someone because we have spotted a weed in their thinking? Sure, we should try to pull it out, but also trust that if the person is trusting God, a time will come, likely in this life, when he will harvest them into better people. If the rat poison analogy holds, we must reject those in whom we we detect the tiniest bit of poison. And who among us is completely poison-free?
I will end this by saying that though I think sex and violence can be in a really good movie (what is better than The Wire? and what has more sex and violence?) I actually liked the sermon a lot that I heard at my church. It wasn’t about people, but our words. It was a reminder that a poorly constructed thought can do a huge amount of damage–in other words, watch your words. Words count. As a writer, I do need to hear this as much as possible.
Meanwhile, as a believer, I think it’s important that I trust God with the weeds in other people’s lives and be careful about how I use the rat poison analogy.
