Isaiah 55: 10-13
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Sower and Seeds and Soil, Oh My!
Isn’t that a beautiful bit of language from God
Spoken through the prophet Isaiah?
“Just as from the heavens the rain and the snow come down…
“making fertile and fruitful…
“so shall my Word be…
… a grand and magnificent promise.
It sounds like “Not to worry…it will all turn out well in the end”
[Only in lovely poetic language]
Are there times when that just sounds entirely too simple…too naive to you?
It does to me.
It must have to Isaiah’s audience
Isaiah’s audience…the people of Israel…have given up
They are wailing loudly and with conviction “Our God has failed!”
Their homeland invaded
Their king imprisoned
Their temple destroyed
All of them…living as refugees under foreign occupation
How does a promise of comfort, redemption and return sound to these people who have
Given up…thrown in the towel and ceded the victory to the enemy.
The link between the First Reading and the Gospel isn’t always perfectly clear
Our parable of the Sower, the Seed and the Soil certainly isn’t as straightforward and comforting as Isaiah’s words
It must be that Isaiah’s response to the people
turns to the natural world…the circle of seasons…the rhythm of life
not simply for illustration
but for Wisdom…Wisdom related to the Word of God
the Word that goes forth from God’s mouth
The story of Jesus,
as told through the lens of St. Matthew
and from the perspective of the Matthean community,
facing times a bit similar to those facing Isaiah’s people
…destruction of the Jerusalem, Temple
…Christians navigating their increasingly marginalized place in the Jewish religious world
…many living as refugees outside their hometown
Jesus, in the gospel of Matthew
Speaks into this context by way of a seed parable
Today marks the first Sunday in Parable Time!
Next week the gospel reading will begin
“Jesus put before them another Parable…
and then there will be another…
So it is a good time to ask
What is a parable?
We don’t really have a literary category to match the ancient parable
It’s not quite an analogy (though Matthew gives one in the interpretation)
And it’s not quite a fable which typically ends in a pithy moralism:
Slow and steady wins the race...from The Tortoise and the Hare
Here is a favored definition by the New Testament scholar, CH Dodd:
At its simplest…A parable is a metaphor or simile
Drawn from nature or common life
Arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness
And leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application
to tease it into active thought.
Upon hearing this parable
We ought to get ARRESTED…
And CONFUSED…
And TEASED
into active thought and reflection…
that’s our job today;)
It’s not too hard to see the two distinct parts in today’s reading?
Part 1: There is the parable proper
Part 2: And then there is the interpretation
To me the parable proper is about the Sower
Sure there are vivid descriptions of the places where the sower sows
…tossing out seed willy-nilly
But it is a kind of “just-the-facts” narrative.
A sower did this
and then these kinda bad things happened
Then this Wow thing happened.
in the last line about the fruitfulness,
which is bountiful in the extreme!
But I don’t know…
The WOW thing is still about a return on only 25% of the work of the sower.
I’m not a farmer…but taken all together…I’m a little underwhelmed.
But then
In the interpretation
The focus is squarely on the soil.
You might have a similar memory
This is such a familiar parable
…found in 3 of the 4 Gospels
that I actual remember the gist of the homilies I’ve heard
And they follow this simple formula:
· Strive to be good soil
· And then do THIS: Donate to the ‘fix the roof’ campaign, volunteer for the soup kitchen…etc…
You know what I mean.
We can do better
The interpretation part tells us that What is being sown…is the Word of God…
But what is meant by that…exactly?
Does it mean The Bible itself…the 66 books written over centuries?
Isaiah’s understanding seems more dynamic and alive than that
For the evangelist John, the Word was with God eternally
and took flesh in Jesus
Jesus…IS the Word of God
You know how we say that a book has come out in a movie?
Well, in Jesus, the WORD came out in a person
And then, in the post-easter Church
Chrisitan communites understood themselves as
Missionary communities
As carriers of the ‘Word of God”
Following in the footsteps of Jesus
Their lives were the message…the Word of God
When we hear “Word of God” in this passage
It’s that
the life of Christ and handed over-
In the power of the HS…
To the church/the Body of Christ/all of US
And Here, my friends,
is where I am beginning to sense some “TEASING into active reflection”
I only have my own contemplation here
But I hope it will work for you in some way as well
I can see myself reflected in each of the 4 soil-types:
Hard and compacted…
sure sometimes I am just closed-minded, not in the mood for growth or change
Rocky…
Sure, I like that idea…until it makes too many demands of me/don’t ask me to go deep
Thorny…
This is the most persistent…Too busy, too preoccupied, too…too everything
And…Good Soil…
Sure, I have my good days;)
Taken all together, I say to myself…
75% Inhospitable versus 25% fertile high-yield
Crap!
And to that God says,
Yes! 25%!
That is totally enough!!!
That teases me into active thought and reflection
I can hear about myself
I can hear about my hard, rocky, thorny shortcomings
…And my good soil times
I can hear it and believe it and maybe feel a bit disappointed in myself…
But I can’t only hear that…
I MUST MUST MUST make space to hear the PROMISES!!!
Against all the messages that bombard us daily
Messages telling us that there isn’t enough
Isn’t enough money,
Not enough clean air and water
Not enough safety and security
Not enough recognition or prestige
Not enough ---- fill in the blank
And politicians…red, blue, purple striped politicians
Play on this…compounding it…
naming what is wrong
What is lacking
What we ought to fear
And into this, God speaks.
God who scatters seed ALL OVER THE PLACE
God who scatters with abandon and…dare I say wastefulness?
Why?
BECAUSE…there IS enough
There is enough seed, enough grace, enough love
And
We ARE enough
Now this is where I’d like the TEASING to stop
With all that abundance!
I wish it did;) But it doesn’t
The tougher teasing is in knowing
that precisely because God loves me/us
Loves us as we are right NOW
Precisely because of that
God has high hopes for who we will become tomorrow or the next day/month/year
The Word of God…that is the life of Christ
Is, in fact, embodied in us…individually and as a community.
Knowing and believing that there is enough and that I am enough
I am being teased into praying and acting myself into the person God made me to be.
For me…I can only speak for myself here
For me…I am being teased into
Standing more boldly against fear and scarcity
And all that feeds prejudice, racism, greed, and violence
My commitment is to make that concrete in my life
Let anyone with ears listen:
God, who loves us RIGHT NOW, as we are
Is lavishly loving us into something new!
