A friend of mine grew up on a farm and told me how rye seed can often get in among the wheat and play havoc with a farmer’s plans for harvest. Now rye, in other contexts, is a wonderful grain but to a wheat farmer it is a weed. I suppose if the farmer was really compulsive, he could get out there and carefully pull out the rye before he harvests the wheat. A more grace-filled model, and a whole lot easier way, would be to harvest the whole bunch together and say,

"That rye might add a nice little touch to Myrtle’s bread this year."

If a weed is really just a plant in the wrong place, think what that means for the life of the church. Why, suddenly those folk we’ve always thought of as troublemakers and agitators may actually begin to look like beautiful flowers. It seems to me that whenever the church says, "You don’t belong," it stops being the church.

Another friend of mine once told me, "Whenever you draw a line in the sand and say, 'We’re in and you’re out,' Jesus will be standing on the other side of the line."

There has been a dreadful tendency on the part of a great many of us to want to draw lines. How interesting to think that in drawing the lines of the church, we may have locked Jesus outside.