I am convinced that there has never been a better time to be the Church. Never. Because our mission has never been clearer. Not to imitate the culture, not to withdraw from the culture, but to transfigure the culture, to become a community where the light of Christ is so visible that other people begin to recognize themselves as beloved, too.
We can assume that what God wants and what other Christians want is some holier or wiser or just more put-together life than ours. But what we celebrate at this altar every single week is the thoroughly spent life of Jesus. The body and the blood of a life that even at that terrible extreme of human experience could still be blessed and used by God for the healing of this world. The body stripped of everything that still blesses, still heals.
Once you begin to see Christ in another human being, you cannot unsee him.
A weed is not bad in and of itself. A weed is just something that is unexpected or unintended, and that means that, of course, at some point in our lives, we are all weeds.