Scripture: Matthew 13:1-23, Romans 8:1-11
It’s July 13. We are just
about halfway through summer, if we measure from Memorial Day to Labor Day or
the school calendar. I hope you are having a good one. Looking out over the
congregation this morning, I know that there are those among you who are
struggling and that some of you are grieving. Our thoughts and prayers are with
you. But for all of us, I hope that summer can be a time to let down as we vary
the rhythms of life. It is a time to get away, to rest, to vacation, to head to
the mountains, the lake, the beach. It is a time if we are intentional about
it, to slow down and maybe, just maybe, to take time to listen in a new way, to
see things we have failed to see before
In the gospel lesson today
Jesus is at the beach, but he’s not on vacation. The crowds have come to him, pressed
in on him so much that he gets in a boat, pushes off from shore and teaches from
the boat.
Biblical scholar, Tom (NT) Wright
tells of a group trip to the
“We
were amazed. His voice came to us across the water, clear and crisp in the
morning air. The steep banks of the inlet acted like a well-designed theatre
with perfect acoustics. We stood there listening, imagining a crowd many times
larger than ourselves listening to another voice from another boat 2,000 years
before. Jesus had discovered a perfect way to speak to several hundred at once,
and to have them all hear what he was saying.” (Matthew for Everyone, Westminster John
Knox Press (2002) at page156).
Well, in fact, that may be
exactly what Jesus was doing. But the irony is that although the people could
hear with their ears what Jesus was saying, he spoke in parables that even his
disciples didn’t understand. But for us the story he told is one of the most
familiar and well known of all of the parables of Jesus and it is one of the
parables depicted in the beautiful stain glass window in Winship Chapel. Go by
and see if you can find it
Jesus tells of a sower, or
farmer, going through the field flinging seed. Some seed lands on the path,
hard packed earth and birds swoop in and take it away. Some lands on rocky soil
which initially takes root, but it is too shallow and dies, scorched by the sun;
other seed lands among weeds and this seed begins to grow and then is choked by
the weeds. Still other falls into good soil and it is this seed, because of the
deep, clean fertile soil, that produces the harvest, thirty, sixty, one hundredfold.
And then Jesus exclaims “Let
anyone with ears, listen!”
Later, his disciples ask him privately
why he speaks in parables. (You know, Jesus often perplexed the disciples and
sometimes he perplexes us as well). But Jesus explains the teaching, comparing
the seed to the word of the kingdom and its hearers to different types of soil
or ground.
The parable is about hearing,
receptivity and comprehension or understanding.
The same word may be spoken
but whether it is truly comprehended depends on the receptivity of the hearer.
The same seed may be sown but whether it produces fruit or harvest depends on
the condition of the soil.
It’s true, isn’t it?
Receptivity makes a huge difference, doesn’t it? People can hear or read the
same words but interpret them entirely differently. Have you ever received a
group email and then watched the “reply alls” as they come back. How people
respond often depends on their particular point of view. Sometimes it seems
like people have received a different email, and when you add to that how quickly
we are to impute undisclosed motives to the sender, it can often get out of
hand. Email is great for some things, but often it is still best to pick up the
phone or to meet face to face.
The same words, events or
circumstances can produce very different reactions or responses in different
people. In his recent book “The First to Follow” compiled
and edited by his widow Ann, John Claypool repeats a story told by Dr. Alfred
Adler, an Austrian psychologist. Listen:
“A well-dressed business man
got off the train in
“I’ve never had a chance in life. My mother
died when I was young, and my father was cruel and irresponsible. Things got so
bad that, finally, my brothers and sisters and I were taken away from my father
and put in a state run orphanage. I was getting along pretty well when World
Was I broke out and, one evening, a battle developed around our orphanage. A
shell hit my dorm, and I had to flee to save my life, in the middle of the
night. I have never seen anybody in my family since that time. It has been like
that from the beginning. Every time I manage to get on my feet, circumstances
knock me to the ground. If what has happened to me had happened to you, you
wouldn’t be asking me such a question.
The well-dressed man said, “You
know, it is strange to me that you should say that because, as you tell your
story, it does parallel mine. My mother died when I was young, and my father
was cruel and abusive. The authorities had to take me and my brothers and sisters
away from him to live in an orphanage and, when World War I came along, a bomb
hit the dorm where I was living. Yet,” he added, “I always had the feeling that
I wasn’t a victim. I always believed that I could fight back, somehow, and not
just make the best of things, but make the most of them.” Well, they began to talk,
and you have probably guessed already that they discovered they were blood
brothers. Separated for years by the accidents of war, their lives had
mysteriously intersected again.” (The
First to Follow, The Apostles of
Jesus, Morehouse Publishing (2008) at pages 127-128).
Claypool goes on to say in
reference to these brothers “This different choice of responses to the same
situation is the ultimate mystery of the freedom and power to choose that each
of us is given.” (page 128)
Another way of putting this
truth is that how we respond to what happens to us, how we hear, and our
comprehension all depend in the first instance on the state of our own hearts
and minds. That is the grid through which we hear, the lens through which we
see.
But back to the parable of
the sower and the seed, the word of God and those who hear. Those hearers who were
like the soil that was the path, the hard packed dirt, there was nowhere for
the seed to go. Left exposed out in the open, the birds, or evil one
swoop down and carry it away. You know, sometimes our
hearts are so hardened that the word of God never has a chance. It never even
enters in. It can’t even break the surface.
But then sometimes we are
like the stony or rocky group, the seed falls in a place where there is shallow
ground and it sprouts up, but has no depth of root and it is scorched by the
sun. So too with us, there are times in our lives when we are enthusiastic
about the things of God, but then the root hits rock, troubles and hardships, and it
withers and dies in the heat of day.
And then sometimes the depth
of soil may be adequate, but filled with thorns or weeds that crowd out and
choke the word and it dies. And so it is with us, we fail to clear the soil of
the daily cares, busyness and worries. How easily they choke our love for God
and our desire to follow. And the life of God within us withers.
We have all been there,
haven’t we?
Henri Nouwen said it, “Our
lives are like overpacked suitcases bursting at the seams. In fact, we are
almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that
there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promise, unrealized
proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done
or said.”(Making All
Things New: An Invitation to the Spiritual Life, HarperSonFrancisco (1981)
at page 23)…”Worrying causes us to be “all over the place,” but seldom at
home.” page36.
And is it really necessary to
speak to the matter of money, the lure of wealth and its pull on us and how
deceitful it is? How often do we say to ourselves in our
secret hearts “Oh just a little more and then everything will be alright.”
We need to confess as one writer has said that “money has captured our hearts.”
And that is what it comes
down to again and again -- our hearts and whether they will be good soil for
the word of God, whether our lives can produce a harvest.
But how do we become good
soil, what must we do? How can we clear our hearts, prepare the soil, so that
the roots of God’s word will planted deep in our hearts?
Perhaps here is where Paul
can help us. In Romans 8, Paul says we are to set our minds on the things of
the Spirit as distinguished from the things of the flesh or what we might know
as our selfish desires. Paul says we are to attend to the Spirit of Christ who
dwells in us. It is Jesus Christ, after all, who is the word of God. He is the
sower and the seed. (Emil Brunner, “Sowing
and Reaping, The Parables of Jesus” (John Knox Press,
(1965) at page 13).
Eugene Peterson in his
translation of these verses in Romans in “The Message” puts it this way:
“Those who trust God’s action
in them find God’s spirit is in them – living and breathing God! Obsession with
self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us into the open,
into spacious, free life. ..Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this
invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what you
are talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells –even though
you still experience all the limits of sin -- you yourself experience life on
God’s terms.”
On the cover of our bulletin
we state that our purpose is to be and become a community of grace that is
“Open to the Spirit.” And what might
this mean for us individually and together? To be receptive
to the Spirit?
To slow
down, to listen to God and to each other. To learn how to pray. To
read the Scriptures, indeed to soak in them. To keep our hearts and
minds open, receptive. To ask God like the psalmist did, to search our hearts,
to make us aware of the evil within us, our prejudices and all that keeps us
from allowing the word to grow to harvest in us.
To confess our sins and to
receive each other’s forgiveness and God’s, remembering that there is “a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.” Wider than we can even imagine.
To pray
that we would see as God sees, to pray that our ears be open to hear the Spirit
speaking to us. To
keep coming to worship.
And if all this seems too “spiritual”
or removed from everyday life, take heart, and remember that the Spirit is the
Spirit of Jesus Christ. Jesus lived a fully
engaged life and so should we.
Listen to the words of late theologian
Shirley Guthrie. He was a much beloved and longtime professor at Columbia
Seminary. And with this we close.
“If we want to know what it
means to have the Spirit dwell with in us, the Gospels say, look at Jesus. He
is our prime example of the life of a Spirit-filled person.
And what kind of life is that?
Not the kind of life people in his time (or in ours) expected of a “spiritual”
person. He went to parties, ate and drank and had a good time. He talked more
about how people got their money and what they did with it than about their
sexual purity. He was as interested in the health of their bodies as in the
state of their souls.
He was the friend and
associate not just of pious and morally respectable people but also of the
immoral, unbelieving sinners. He defended the cause of those who were rejected
by polite society and despised by the religious establishment. He believed that
human need takes precedence over strict conformity to the law. He came to serve other people, not to assert his
moral and religious superiority over them.
He loved his own and God’s
enemies and did good to those who hated him. He
trusted and served the God he called Father even when it did not pay off in
personal success and happiness. He prayed even when everything he had worked
and hoped for was denied him and he felt forsaken by God. He did not come to
make people “feel good” and give them everything they wanted; he came to tell
them about the coming rule of God’s justice and compassion in the world, and to
invite them to give up everything
they had to follow him in the costly service of this coming kingdom.
His is the
kind of life that is the result of God’s Holy Spirit coming to dwell in a
person. If we want to know who the Holy Spirit is and what the Spirit does, and
therefore what a truly Spirit-filled person or a Spirit-filled community looks
like, we have to look first of all at him.
The Spirit is by definition the Spirit who dwelt in Jesus, comes from him and continues the work he began.” (Always Being Reformed, Faith for a
Fragmented World, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville (1996) at page
82).
Friends, by the Spirit we
have the great privilege of being engaged together in continuing the work that
Jesus began. Let’s keep our eyes on him.
May the Spirit give us ears
to hear and may the Word of God, Jesus Christ himself, find good soil in our
hearts!
Thanks be
to God!
Alleluia!
Amen.