When the Process Becomes God

Reflections on the Parable of the Weeds—Matthew 13

There was a man named Francis Smith. On Sunday, the Hartford Courant told his story under the headline “Truth Goes to the Grave,” because he had just died—after nearly seventy years in a Connecticut prison, the longest sentence anyone can find in American history.

Both of the witnesses who put him there recanted. A third man confessed to the killing. There were claims of coercion, of bribery. And still the courts would not let him go. The Connecticut Supreme Court upheld the conviction—not because the evidence held, but because the process had been followed. The process had been fair. The process had been observed. And so a man very possibly innocent stayed behind bars until he died there.

Trust the process. Even if it means a man rots in prison.

I had this sermon written before I opened the paper. But there it was—the whole thing, in a single case. Because the parable of the weeds is about exactly this: who gets to decide what is yet to be.

You remember how the story goes. A man sows good seed; an enemy sows weeds among it; the servants ask, shall we go and pull them? And the master says no—lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Wait for the harvest. The sorting is not yours to do.

Now hear how many voices say otherwise.

The philosopher says there is no harvest—history just goes on, always becoming, never arriving. There is even a theology of it. They call it process theology, and it ruled pulpits like mine for a hundred years: God is a process, we are a process, there is no yet to be because we are always becoming. Hollywood says the same thing in plainer words. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. And the courts say it too—trust the process, and if the process buries an innocent man, so be it, the process was followed.

Every one of them is doing the servants’ work. Every one of them has picked up the sickle the master forbade. Because to deny that God will close the age is to decide you must close it yourself. Deny that God declares what is yet to be, and you will arrogate that right to your own hands. You will play God. And playing God is how you get a man dead in prison on the word of witnesses who took their words back.

This is not a small temptation reserved for Marxists and judges. It is the churchman’s temptation most of all. How many of us, the day the scales fell from our eyes, wanted to fix everything and everyone now? To clear the field, pull every weed, purify the church by Tuesday? I have wanted it. I thought once it was my calling to purge the institutions and save them. Wanting to do God’s own gathering for Him has launched every schism in the history of the church. No church but the one we make for ourselves.

But the master’s no is not cruelty. It is mercy. He is not telling you the weeds aren’t weeds. He’s not telling you they can become wheat. He’s telling you they will be bundled and burned—and He says so plainly. He is telling you that the burning is His, at His harvest, and that you were never asked to do it. You cannot legislate the new creation into being. You cannot pass a law to inaugurate the kingdom. And the day you are told you cannot—that is the day you are set free from an impossible task.

None of this excuses the policeman from his beat or the preacher from his pulpit. The officer still arrests the criminal; the court still tries him; the preacher still preaches. We do those things out of obedience—not to close the age, not to build heaven on earth, but because they are our given work, and doing it is how a town stays livable at all. What we may not do is mistake our work for God’s. The magistrate punishes the guilty; he does not sort the elect from the reprobate. That sorting is yet to be, and it is not ours.

The earth itself, Paul says, was subjected to futility—but in hope. That is the hope the process can never give. The Marxist has no harvest. The socialist has no harvest. The humanist has no harvest; for him it goes on and on and on, and that is not hope, that is bondage to decay dressed up as progress. Our hope is that God will bring the age to a close on His own terms, in His own hour, the way He always meant to—that the weeds will be gathered, that it will not go on like this forever, because it cannot.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

Not the process. Not the fate we make. Not the field we clear with our own hands. The glory that is to be revealed—because there is a harvest, and the Lord of it is not us.

Adapted from a sermon preached July 19, 2026, by the Rev. Jake Dell at First Congregational Church of Woodbury, Connecticut.