9 PENTECOST, PROPER 10, YEAR A

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE

THE REV. ANNE STANLEY

13 JULY 2008

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Genesis 25:19-34; Psalm 119:105-112; Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

My garden this year is pretty good, if I do say so myself. I planned it all out ahead of time, with diagrams of where everything would go. I got good Fedco seeds. Last fall, David and I put boards together for raised beds for most of the vegetables. I made sure the soil was churned up properly and fortified with good mulch, before I planted the seeds ever so carefully. I followed the directions in my gardening bible and on the seed packets themselves. Beans and peas ring the periphery outside the raised beds. There’s good fencing to keep out our dogs. Only the carrots have failed utterly. Very strange….Cutworms? It’s a mystery. But on balance, it’s been great.

How much easier it would have been, though, to have gone out one fine day, like the sower in today’s parable, and simply flung the various seeds around, watching them land wherever the wind took them.  No plotting and scheming, no worrying, no watching and waiting.  Can you imagine it?

 This reckless sower got what he deserved, it seems: failure, or nearly so. Crop failure for the seeds that dropped on the pathway at his feet and the birds came and ate them up, failure for the seeds that fell on rocky soil and never had a chance, failure for the seeds that landed among the choking thorns. Success only for some of the seeds, the ones that managed to land on good soil. Random luck.

If this parable is not only about vegetable gardens but also the spreading of the kingdom of God, how much more discouraging and bewildering it is!  Failure for us, we might think, as hearers of the precious Word of God. As in: are we rocky soil? Thorn patches?

Discouraging, too, if we think of ourselves as the sowers. As in: How are we doing? Does our preaching and witness bear fruit or does it land with a thud and never grow?

Today’s parable is bewildering. And with its reckless sower, totally counterintuitive! Which is what Jesus intended, I realize. Here’s what we need to know, as one wise writer once put it. We need to remember that Jesus’ parables are never prescriptive; they don’t lay everything out and tell us exactly what to do, detail by detail, like a play script. Jesus’ parables, rather, are descriptive. They describe the Kingdom of God, they tell us what God’s realm is like, and when Jesus finishes talking, we are left scratching our heads. Or maybe we’re even annoyed. His enemies, remember, wanted to kill him. Jesus’ parables don’t give us step by step directions; they leave us with the job of figuring out for ourselves how we are to behave and how we are to live within the realm of God.

Today’s parable describes the kingdom of God as full of failure but also, don’t forget, with success. Not huge success, but some success. Some seeds yielding a hundredfold, some sixty, others thirty. Not astounding, but success nevertheless.

Today’s parable is about ordinary life and ordinary activity, some of it seeming failure, other parts more successful. Life as we know it. The extraordinary part of story is the sower. The one who scatters the seed with reckless abandon, neither planning where to sow it or worrying overmuch about the results. Who strikes us as wasteful and weird, but then, it’s Jesus’ story.

Is this how God behaves? Is this what Jesus is getting at? Casting his word wherever the wind takes it, confident that it’ll “take” in some places and not in others? Knowing that the full kingdom will sprout in the fullness of time in spite of current hurdles?

Is this parable a description of God’s activity, with an invitation for us to go and do likewise? Without fear?

Is this parable a hint for us not to fret about our own life with God and with the church? Not to fret in reluctance, for example, over pledging our time or our skills or especially our money for fear of how it might be used, that doing so would be too much of a risk and that we would lose control over how it’s spent? Not to fret in hesitation over “wasting” paper on Sunday bulletins, which are only gathered up after each service and tossed away (even though they are recycled)? Not to fret over the Beehives that get sent out but don’t get read? Not give up because so few people come to Morning Prayer during the week, or to the Wednesday Eucharist? Do we worry about those things or do we behave like the sower, who sowed anyway, with confidence that some of the seed would grow? We just never know when or how much will “succeed”---or why, except that somehow God is in it?

Do we worry about ourselves, about the “soil” that we ourselves are? Or do we accept the fact that there are times when we are like rocky soil? And times when we are more fertile?

Kate Braestrup is a writer who also happens to be an ordained chaplain to the Maine game wardens. In her book, Here If You Need Me, she describes her job and her faith, as she travels with the wardens and law officers into forests and to ponds and hills looking for lost people, often children, sometimes finding them still alive, sometimes finding simply their bodies. In a most poignant way she reminds us that struggle is inevitable in our lives, death is assured for each of us. But that love, as the Bible also tells us, is stronger than struggle and stronger than death and that love, which is God, is laced through our lives now, as well as in death. She describes that presence of God as poking through even the most dreadful scenes she’s encountered, love appearing in the people who turn up to help in the rescue, love that turns up in the people who pour out to help the bereaved, love that turns up in the care that the wardens take even for each other in this dangerous and tricky work.

The kingdom of God is all about us, you see. The ordinariness of our lives even now. And we, in our own efforts to give and to receive gladly, to cast and to grow seeds, can be God’s hands and hearts in helping God’s sowing work.

So let us be as reckless and worry-free as the sower was, who scattered seed here, there and everywhere, knowing that some of it would take and some of it wouldn’t. I can always get carrots that grew well in someone else’s garden, even if they didn’t sprout in mine. And let us be confident that even apparent failure isn’t always failure. Remember the birds who ate the seed that fell along the sower’s pathway. Is there not a possibility that the birds actually might help  out?  The birds eat some of the seeds, and the digested seeds pass through the birds and then the birds deposit them somewhere. And lo, some of those seeds grow after all!