Proper 10, Yr A

July 10, 2011

Well, it’s summer in Madison. Life has slowed down just a bit, except on the square where summer means a never-ending succession of events that disrupt parking and help to keep attendance down at Grace. Though, truth be told, we use it as a convenient excuse, that and the heat. Chances are, even if there were plenty of parking for anyone who wanted a spot, our attendance would still be lower in the summer than in the rest of the year. That’s the way it works in pretty much every other church.

It’s summer, and we have entered, at last, the long months of what in the Catholic liturgical calendar, is called ordinary time. From now until the beginning of Advent, we will be paying close attention to Jesus’ ministry as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew. We will also be hearing, week by week, stories from the Hebrew Bible, where this week, we hear of the birth of Jacob.

Summer, Ordinary Time, also means that we will hear a number of Jesus’ parables, beginning with the familiar one we heard today. Because we will be reading a number of the parables over the course of the next months, it might be helpful to remind ourselves of what the parables are and why they are important. Parables are stories that Jesus used to explain the nature of the Kingdom or Reign of God. In fact, he introduces several of them by saying the “Reign of God is like… and then goes on to tell the story. So the first thing to note is that the parables are meant to teach Jesus’ listeners, what the reign of God is like.

The second thing to note is that the parables are meant to be surprising; they are meant to challenge the listener to look at the world from a completely different perspective. This may be difficult for us, because many of us have heard these stories countless times, we could probably tell some of them by heart. But it’s important for us to try to recapture the strangeness of the parables in order to make them live again, and in order to discover what Jesus meant by preaching the Reign of God.

To do this, I am going to tell you the story of the sower again; this time without the editorial context in which Matthew put it, and without the second half of the story, the interpretation that Jesus offered his disciples when they asked him what it meant. It’s likely that these words of interpretation were not said by Jesus himself, but were the attempt of Christians a generation or two later, to understand the story and to put it in a meaningful context for this new community of faith.

So here is probably what the parable sounded like in its original form:

“Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”

Now, hearing the story in this way should raise numerous questions, but in case you think its meaning is obvious, let me ask you two questions. The first is, are any of you vegetable gardeners? If so, would any of you behave the way the sower does in this parable?

I could ask it another way. Are any of you farmers; well unless we have visitors, I know the answer to that question; but since we’re in Wisconsin, I assume most of you have some familiarity with modern agricultural practices, and you know that no farmer even in this day and age would act quite like the sower does in this parable. But do you know how farmers in the days before modern agribusiness did their work? I’ve heard stories about how my grandfather carefully selected his seed corn from the biggest ears, so I know how important that seed was to him and farmers before WW II. I’m also a historian, so I’ve read about how European peasants, and yes, Palestinian peasants in the Roman period operated. Of course the seed for next year’s planting came out of this year’s harvest, and even when harvests were relatively good, there was a difficult choice to make between having enough grain to make flour to feed one’s family, or saving enough seed to make sure you would be able to plant a crop in the next season.

In other words, this sower is behaving in completely non-sensical ways. Given the value of the seeds, he would not be so careless as to allow seed to go to waste by flinging it on rocks, or on a compacted path, or among weeds.

The sheer profligacy of the sower’s actions only become clear when we interpret it against this backdrop of subsistence farming and the annual reality that there might not be enough grain to feed one’s family or to sow the next year’s crop. Seen this way, the sower’s actions are so out of character, so unpredictable and unnatural that we can begin to tease out the parable’s meaning from those very actions.

For it is the case, that seen in this light, there is often, perhaps almost always, unexpected and unpredicted behavior in the parables. Yet, this reality may not bring us any closer to their meaning. Jesus often introduces his parables by saying, “the kingdom of God is like…” So how is the kingdom of God like a sower who acts irrationally and unexpectedly, with such extravagance and profligacy? Or, to put it another way, what does this parable tell us about God, God’s vision for the world and for human community?

Asked in this way, the parable invites us to imagine, to believe in a God who acts in ways completely counter to our values and expectations. We live in a world in which religion, especially Christianity, seems to be consumed with establishing barriers between those who are in and those who are out, between true and false belief, moral and immoral action. Many of us may be repulsed by such forms of Christianity, but that is the public face of our faith. Yet the God of Jesus Christ is not a God who puts barriers between us and them. Far from it. Jesus Christ preached a gospel of inclusion and welcome; the kingdom of God he proclaimed imagines a world in which all creation is embraced by God’s love.

As hard as that is for us to conceive as we look out at a broken and hurting world, it is often even more difficult to imagine when we look inside ourselves. We are often apt to hear words of judgment on our selves, our actions, know our own broken and hurting selves, and assume that God rejects us. But that’s not the case either. Whatever we have done in the past, all of the hurt and brokenness we have caused, indeed all of the hurt and brokenness that we experience in our own lives, all of that we can bring to God, and find love and acceptance.

To experience that love is what God’s reign is all about; to know, and love a God whose love towards us is as profligate and expansive as the seed thrown by the sower on good and bad soil, to love that God is what our faith proclaims. That message, God’s expansive love and accepting love, is also our duty to proclaim and share in this broken and hurting world.