Sowing Seeds

Sower by Vincent Van Gogh

The Sower by Lee Lawrie

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

While I was growing up in the country back in rural Northeastern Pennsylvania, we had large yards around our home;  front, back and sides.  In the big back yard, we always had a garden.  Actually there were several gardens; some with flowers some with vegetables.  I remember clearly planting the vegetable gardens:  corn, and zucchini, and lettuce, and beans, and tomatoes, and so on.

Most of it, of course, was planted from seeds in the spring. And what I remember was that we would create long furrows in the dirt.  And then, according to the directions on the seed packets we would put one or two seeds every few inches.  As spring wore on to summer and the chance of frost was but a memory, the seeds would sprout and small plants would appear in the soil.  We would weed to eliminate any competition for the rain and nutrients in the soil. With enough care and tending, by the end of summer there would be fresh corn, zucchini, lettuce, beans, and tomatoes. 

Of course, all this was done by hand; we dug up the garden and hoed the furrows and placed the seed in by ourselves; a far cry, I’m certain, from the practices of modern agribusinesses.  Our little plot was nothing compared to the acres of farming that requires tractors and other machinery to do what we did by hand.  But the basis of the growing process remains the same:  create rows of holes in the dirt where seeds can go.

How different from the method that Jesus describes in his parable of the seeds.  Then,  the seeds were scattered by a sower who flings the seeds across a field, much like the statue of The Sower by Lee Lawrie which sits atop the tower of the Nebraskan capitol building or the painting by Van Gogh.  No straight rows, no holes dug.  Just hurl the seeds and wait. 

And it was that waiting period that Jesus talked about.  Some seeds get flung on a pathway with soil too compacted for any roots to take hold so they become bird feed.  Some get flung in rocky soil, where there isn’t enough room for their roots and the sun scorches them.  Some are thrown among thorns and weeds which allow the plant to grow a little but soon crowd out the young plant and choke it off.  Finally, some of the seeds get tossed onto good soil: no rocks, no weeds or thorns and soil loose enough for roots to burrow down into the nutrient rich earth.  These seeds of course are the ones that provide for the sower and yield the grain or vegetables that they were meant to produce.

Now why would Jesus talk in parables, which can be hard to understand and difficult to comprehend?  Their meaning is as difficult to hold onto as grasping a fistful of sand.  It seeps out of every opening in your hand until you are left with a few grains of sand and air. 

Remember that Jesus was outside teaching this to the crowds.  Early on, such as at the time of the sermon on the mount, Jesus was direct, as he was with his disciples in private.  But why this switch to confounding parables at this point.

Possibly, Jesus’ renown was gaining attention in many quarters, including those arenas that would be a danger to his life, as we know happened.  In large crowds, there could be followers and supporters but there could also be spies for the religious authorities and even the empire.  In the NRSV Bible passage which we heard this morning, Jesus begins and ends this parable by saying “listen” a clue perhaps to his followers that they’re going to have to do some of the work here to understand what’s going on.  “Let anyone with ears, listen.”

Jesus does, later in chapter 13, go on to explain this parable to his disciples who come out and ask him why he’s talking so confusingly in these parables.  In his explanation, which we also heard this morning, he focuses on the seeds and what they do, where they land and how they are like us hearing the Word and reacting in various ways.  It’s not about judging what kind of soil others have landed in, though the temptation to do could be strong.  It’s about looking at the soil around you and where you yourself have landed that counts.  To the tiny Christian community that Matthew was addressing, surely these words would have been comforting.  In the face of opposition by the Jewish authorities and the great Roman Empire, surely they, those early Christians, must have wondered if they were going to survive, both individually and collectively.  Finding yourself in good soil gives hope.  And we, unlike seeds, have some say over what sort of soil we find ourselves in.

But what if it’s not all about us?  What if the parable is about the sower, who, in this case, is God?  As Barbara Brown Taylor says, “What if it is not about our own successes and failures and birds and rocks and thorns but about the extravagance of a sower who flings seed everywhere, wastes it with holy abandon…confident that there is enough seed to go around, that there is plenty, and that when the harvest comes in at last it will fill every barn in the neighborhood to the rafters?"  (from UCC Samuel website:  http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/july-10-2011-fifteenth-sunday.html) 

Where does that leave us with this parable, if we focus on God the extravagant sower rather than on us and on the soil in which we find ourselves?  That shift in focus, turns our attention to God’s grace and love which God flings about as if it weren’t the most precious thing in the world, even though it is.  God’s seeds are indeed God’s grace and love which the world, whether it realizes it or not, desperately needs.  God is profligate in distributing these seeds, even to us.

Of course, shifting the focus back to us for a moment, we can do what we please with these seeds of love and grace; we can hold onto them tightly and not let them out of our grasp or we can be find ways to pass them on, realizing that this God of ours is going to fling more seeds our way.  In a sense we become the soil, not the seed.  We can try to hold back the love and grace that God hurls about but if we are the good soil, we’ll allow it to take root and grow within us and then pass it on as a grown plant produces seed for the next generation of its species.

God will continue to fling the seeds of grace and love all over the world.  It’s up to us what happens to the seeds that come our way.  What will you do with your seeds?

All Saints Day

Interior of Central Synagogue

Leaf from Weeping Willow Memorial

Weeping WIllow Memorial

Luke 6:20-31

Our gospel reading this morning ends on a familiar note.  We know the verse as the Golden Rule.  A form of it is found in many of the world’s religions--it’s not unique to the Judeo-Christian tradition.  “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”  It sounds nice doesn’t it?  That’s because we usually interpret it as saying, “be nice and others will be nice to you.” 

But being nice is a luxury of those who hold the power, isn’t it?  Point out the inequalities of a power situation or the fact that someone is being oppressed and somehow you’re no longer very nice.  And then the Golden Rule goes out the window.  If he, she or they aren’t going to be nice, well, I don’t have to be either, do I?  It says so right in the Bible.

Reading through the passage immediately before this Golden Rule that Jesus sets down, it does seem that Jesus wants us to be not only nice but sort of doormats.  But if you think about it, he’s putting forth radical ideas.  Love your enemies?  Wow, who’d’ve thought?  Enemies are there to be hated, aren’t they?  What is Jesus trying to do?  Make us into saints or something?

Well, yes and that’s why these scriptures are set for All Saints Day, which was actually last Monday, but is often celebrated in worship on the Sunday following.  So here we are commemorating All Saints Day and we have fairly clear instructions from this passage from Luke on how to be saints and what to avoid if we want to be known among the saints.  We usually have All Saints Day to remember and recall but it’s also a day of looking forward.  But before we look forward, we do spend time looking back and pulling up memories.

During our time in Budapest recently, one morning we visited the Dohany Street Central Synagogue which was built in the mid-19th century and is the 2nd largest synagogue in the world.  It’s the main though not the only synagogue for the large Jewish community of Budapest.  The interior, to make an understatement, is ornate…and gorgeous.  Two balconies for the women surround the main floor.  Gilt ornamentation is readily seen wherever you look.  One of our guidebooks said it was built to affirm the Jewish community’s place in the life of Budapest; an attempt, as it were, to keep up with the Christians.  They even included a few items, such as an organ and a pulpit, that aren’t usually found in most synagogues evidently. 

Behind the synagogue is a memorial garden, built to remember those who died in the holocaust.  It includes a symbolic, ceremonial grave for Raoul Wallenberg, the Christian Swedish ambassador who saved hundreds if not thousands of Jewish lives with his diplomatic abilities and handfuls of cash to bribe the proper officials.  Wallenberg died in a Soviet gulag in the 70s.

The main focal point of the Memorial Garden is a metal sculpture that is in the form of a weeping willow tree.  Just like a live weeping willow tree, its branches hang gracefully, sweeping down, until they almost touch the ground.  If you look closely, on the leaves are inscribed the names of those Budapestians who died in the holocaust, hundreds and thousands of leaves and names, all helping us to remember.

I never want to trivialize the experience of the Jews during the holocaust.  That was a terrible, unfathomable era of our human history with great suffering and tragedy.  But isn’t that what today’s often overlooked holiday is about; remembering?  Don’t we each inscribe a mental weeping willow leaf with the name of loved ones who have gone on, who have led us closer to God and taught us about turning the other cheek?  For those of us who are Christian, today is a day when we wander in our own memorial gardens and take note of those leaves, pausing at each one to recall how they brought the Golden Rule to life for us.  We remember because as humans we are almost programmed to do so.  We remember the ones who lived out the beatitudes and brought blessing and joy to us.

We look forward today in one way; look forward in hopes of becoming one of God’s saints in the eyes and memory of another.  But we also look back.  We look back and remember; we look back and recall the love that we felt that was and still is a reflection of God’s great, unconditional love.  Because that’s who the saints in our lives are: those who reflected God’s love through themselves, often selflessly, often tirelessly.

In a few moments, we’re going to recall the saints of our lives.  After strolling through our own memory gardens, I’ll ask us to name the names we find on the leaves there.  In the meantime, take this weeping willow leaf as a way to help you remember.  Let it be a tangible reminder of the person or people who are inscribed forever in your memorial garden.  And remember.

16 November 2008

Matthew 25:14-30

The twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew is unrelenting. If you’ve got one of those bibles that prints Jesus’ words in red (which of course is how he spoke; in red), the entire chapter, all forty verses, is in red. It’s all Jesus, all the time.

This chapter is divided into three sections. We heard the first section last week. If you remember, that was about the wise and foolish bridesmaids or virgins, some of whom didn’t have enough oil for their lamps and are then locked out of the wedding feast due to their lack of prudence. You might recall, if you were here or read my sermon online, that I said that that parable was about the endtimes; about the waiting of the church, especially the early Christian church in the later decades of the first century. They were expecting Jesus back and a good follower of The Way needed to be prepared.

The middle section is what we heard today. It too is a parable that speaks of the endtimes and how the faithful (or unfaithful) will be treated when that moment arrives. And just as last week’s parable was not an etiquette guide for those going to weddings in the ancient Near East, neither is today’s reading going to be helpful to anyone who seeks to understand economics (and I understand that there are actually people who do understand economics). This story from Jesus is not about how to invest and I doubt if it will help anyone out in the current fiscal, um, shall we say, ‘unpleasantness’ in which we find ourselves.

I suppose you’re wondering about the final third of this chapter. Well, it’s the lectionary reading for next week. I don’t want to give anything away therefore so you’ll just have to return to find out what’s next. I will say though that the relentlessness continues and again, no one is let off the hook.

No, if you are looking for the easy-way faith, don’t expect to find it in Matthew twenty-five. It’s not for the faint of heart really. I should think that any new converts to the faith, if they read this chapter right off, would turn on their heels and run, if they knew what was good for them and if they really understood what was going on in these verses.

You can’t really blame Jesus though. Chapter 26, the very next words after all this chapter, begins with Jesus telling the disciples that he’s going to be crucified when they get to the observance of Passover in two days. He’s got a lot on his mind, I would guess, and the thick density of his disciples and followers may have been utmost; and by thick density, I’m not saying that they were crowded together into a small room, if you catch my drift. They’ve been shown as needing way too much explanation…they were a little slow at times in the uptake.

Jesus needed to pack plenty in his teachings in these his last days with them and knew it. So he hit them hard with the cold hard facts of faith, unsettling as it might have been. And of course Matthew knew his audience too. He includes these parables because this need to grasp the difficult parts of faith was paramount in the minds of the original audience of his gospel.


So…we have these three servants…or slaves as they are called in the translation we heard. One is extremely trustworthy and is given five talents. Another is a little less dependable it seems, at least in his master’s eyes, and is given two talents. And then there’s the third one who’s barely trusted and is given the least amount of all: only one talent.

I read one translation of this passage in which the translator changed the amounts to $5,000, $2,000 & $1,000 but I don’t think that does it justice. For one thing, it takes away from us our imagination of just how much we’re talking about here. Evidently, this parable is referring to ridiculously large sums of money. No master is going to trust any slave with these amounts…no matter how trustworthy and reliable. It’s a ludicrous story to begin with, with preposterous amounts of money involved. But that’s exactly Jesus’ point and we lose that sense if we assign too small a value to what we’re talking about here. God’s grace and care and love for us are also ludicrously out of proportion to our own dependability and soundness. We, mere slaves as it were in the ongoing history of faith and the realm of God, are entrusted with enormous, massive amounts of talents ourselves by God. They’re just given to us, handed over, undeservedly and unconditionally.

That, in and of itself, is a pretty good sermon to hear and I could stop right here right now and hope that you go away a little more convinced of God’s grace and that you are a beloved child of God. That’s not a bad message to get for most of us. And if you’ve ever dealt with the more rigid faith proclamations from pulpits across Christianity that repeatedly remind you and everyone else just how worthless you and we are, then this is a good message to take away.

But, alas, there is more. And if we stop here, feeling all warm inside about ourselves, well then we don’t quite get the whole of it. So hold onto those warm feelings and remember that indeed you are loved; loved enormously, stupendously, beyond all reasonable expectations by God.

But let’s turn back to our parable for this morning. The master, this spendthrift, beneficent master, goes away. We don’t know why, we don’t know where but we do know it was for a long time. And in this absence these three slaves treat their talents differently. The first two trade and invest and are able to not only increase but double the amounts they were given. The third one though just buries his; he puts it in a safe place. He doesn’t want the responsibility or the work involved in doing what the other two are out doing.

We all know what happens next. The master returns and asks for an accounting of the money. The first two bring the original amounts that they were given (I guess we would call that the principal today) as well as the amounts that they got in return for their efforts. And they are handsomely rewarded as they are invited into the joy of the master. But our third slave…well, this third slave digs up the one talent that had been buried and returns it, and essentially tells the master that he’s not all that easy to deal with in the first place and here’s the money back but nothing more.

The master is outraged…infuriated…livid. From a theatrical point of view, I actually think he overplays this scene. “What’s the fuss?” I want to interject, “you got your money back. It wasn’t frittered away or spent on cheap booze, easy sex, or even the latest electronic gadgets. Relax, would ya?” Of course, part of that is my discomfort with conflict and my desire to help the underdog, but there’s 21st century therapy for that sort of thing.

But the master reacts as he will, as all masters and mistresses do, and takes the one lousy talent, gives it to the slave who originally had five and then orders that this third slave be thrown out; out into the outer darkness. There’s wailing there and there’s gnashing of teeth; it’s not a pretty place to be.


So, how’s that warm feeling inside you doing now? Has it chilled a little perhaps? I know mine has; it does everytime I hear this parable, from when I first remember hearing it in Sunday School in the basement of that rural Methodist church until this very day.

Then, back in the Orange Methodist Church Sunday School, a rather young Gerry Brague heard this story and felt badly for the third slave, thinking the master had done a great injustice to my new friend, this third slave. I didn’t get the fact then that parables meant more than they are. I wasn’t always perceptive of the line between fact and fiction (I thought cartoon characters were real people for quite a long time) and wasn’t very aware of the moral-to-a-story device.

Of course now I have a degree after my name; letters with periods. So I not only am able allegedly to dig deeper into the story but I get to stand here and expound on it, theologically of course. But frankly, I don’t feel much better, even with those letters and periods following my name and that young Gerry Brague’s reaction is not far off from this supposedly scripturally-astute one. Because if in fact the master is sitting in for God in the parable, I look at the rest of the story and at myself and find way too many similarities between me and that third slave than I do with the other two slaves and there goes that warm feeling.

I am much too quick to take whatever God has given me and hide it all away, thinking it’s mine to do with as I please and not an investment on which God expects, no, on which God demands a return. I am digging holes all over the place secreting away riches galore. Sure, I’ll return them, pretty much untouched and unused, some may even still be in their protective wrapping, but then it will be too late. Then I’ll find out that there was supposed to be more that I brought back; more than the original amount; more than what God gave me to begin with.

And if you think now that that warm feeling has dropped a goodly number of degrees, Fahrenheit or Celsius, just think what will happen to it in the cold, outer darkness. Brrrrr. It sounds worse than North Dakota in February and we all know how I feel about northern winters.

And so, like Ebenezer Scrooge, who awakes Christmas morning crying out something along the lines of “did I miss it, did I miss it?” I look around me and realize that I’m still here on this earth and I can dig up whatever has been given to me and that I’ve hidden and I can begin to use them and make them multiply, right here, right now.

If you’ve been hiding, squirreling away, veiling, burying, covering, or concealing the gifts, talents, and resources that God has given to you and continues to imbue in you, then I urge you to think about these final lessons from Jesus’ time on earth. And bring them out so that you’ll see a vast increase in your, no, in God’s investment.