Recently I was without a car for a couple of days. I walked to work which I should do anyway. It’s good exercise and an education. I’m happy to report the Department of Public Works did an excellent job removing litter left by the huge Fourth of July crowd. There are impressive banks of day lilies, which one simply can’t appreciate at 30 mph. However, I do have a word of caution. If you walk along Crescent Road, stay on the sidewalk. The woods are thick with poison ivy.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. At home something has stunted or killed half my hostas. Fertilizer, water, and, yes, chemical sprays have not saved the roses. On the bright side, I can go two weeks without mowing because most of the lawn is moss. But weeds? Weeds I can grow. This spring I was up to my elbows in a thick patch, yanking them up by the roots before I realized I had in my grasp two fat bunches of – poison ivy. I can’t keep alive the plants I want and can’t get rid of the poison ivy I don’t want. In my blue periods that seems to sum up the world we live in.
Thursday was a blue period. When I should have been working on this sermon I had the radio on in the office listening to the horrible news from London. A two-decker bus was blown to smithereens. Three bombs shred the Underground. The calm courage of ordinary British citizens made the attacks seem even more hideous. The attacks were clearly intended to create the greatest possible carnage among people who were just trying to make their way to work in the morning.
Most depressing, I can see no end to such barbarism. This is no criticism of the military or civil authorities. It’s simply impossible to maintain a reasonably free and open society and monitor every person who might possibly be up to no good. Modern technologies – high powered explosives and cell phones – make it possible for small groups or even lone individuals to do exponentially more damage than they could just a few decades ago. I can’t see any way to completely eliminate terror attacks. This is the poison ivy world we live in. This is the world I will leave to my children and grandchildren. Thursday was a dark blue period for me.
Jesus told the parable of the sower to a large crowd. Then, privately, he gave an explanation of the story to his disciples. At least that’s what I thought, but the more I studied today’s reading from Matthew the more I was convinced Jesus told the story two different ways to make two different points. In this gospel the parables Jesus tells openly all concern the Kingdom of God; how it can be glimpsed in the present and what it will be like when it’s ultimately fulfilled. The parables Jesus tells privately to his committed followers focus on what they can expect as the Kingdom of God comes into being.
In the second telling of the story, the one he told only to the disciples, Jesus pays close attention to the fate of various seeds. If the sower represents Christ, the “seeds” are the creative, mysterious, transforming word of God. Not “Words” of God. Not specific quotes. The seeds represent the power by which God brings restoration, renewal, compassion, justice, peace, and love. Where are we in this story? The dirt! That may be a bit insulting. Nobody wants to be the target of mud slinging or have one’s reputation dragged through the dirt. But hang on. “Humor”, “humus,” and “human” all have the same root. Kurt Vonnegut called human beings “sitting up mud.” In the second chapter of Genesis the Lord made the first human out of – dirt. Soil is important in the story of the sower. There’d be nothing for God’s creative power to take root in if it weren’t for soil. Being dirt in this story is an important thing to be.
We could think of people as one or another of the various patches of soil in the field. Some people are hard while others are shallow. Still others are a tangled mess of loyalties, motives, and desires. Then there’s us; receptive, compliant, deep; nourishing God’s grace and nothing else. Yeah, right.
It would be more accurate to think of ourselves as each being a whole field. Experience has hardened our hearts in places like packed earth. Painful encounters with authority figures, poverty or wealth, failure or success, abuse or prejudice; a painful encounter with religion – any of the experiences can leave us with hard, unyielding patches in our souls. There are trampled down places in all of us that could use some gentle tilling, some loosening up.
There are places in each of us where the soil is thin. We may harbor bedrock assumptions that people aren’t to be trusted, that if something good happens something awful is bound to follow, that if others really got to know us they wouldn’t like us. Stones of suspicion, fear, and doubt are below the surface in most all of us. They make it hard to be persistent with compassion, justice, and love. We don’t need to dig those rocks out so much as let them crack open. Given a tiny space the roots of trust, joy, and friendship can break up the biggest boulders.
No field is without weeds. In various ways all of us nourish something other than the grace and love of God. Concern for reputation and image, desire for wealth and power, longing for appreciation and respect need not be bad in themselves. But when our chief loyalty is to ourselves it is not to God. In attempting to satisfy ourselves we become less generous, less understanding, less open, and less caring. All of us could stand to root out a few weeds.
But some of each of us is really, really good soil. Some have a depth of compassion for the weak and vulnerable where God’s justice is rooted. Some are rich in talents for music, art, drama, or design. God’s beauty flowers there. Some are gifted with powers of reason and intellect and God’s knowledge grows there. Some can organize, plan, and teach and God’s community flourishes there. None of us is perfect and all of us can bear good fruit.
In the second telling of the story Jesus challenges we who would follow him to attend to our spiritual soil. The first telling of the parable to the crowds has a different point. As usual, the story is lifted out of ordinary life. A farmer casts seeds in a field. Every farmer knew not all the seeds would fall on fertile ground, not all the seeds that sprout will grow to maturity. Every farmer knew losses were to be expected so they sowed abundantly.
Like most of Jesus’ parables this story has a shocking conclusion. In ancient Palestine farmers could expect to harvest 10 bushels of grain for every one bushel of seeds planted. Here the yield is enormous – 30, 60, 100-fold increases. Only divine power could bring about such incredible yields. This telling of the story is not about what we need to do. It is about what God is doing. In the short term, the results don’t look good. At the end of the season the Kingdom will come.
Last Thursday, listening to the reports from London, I had my doubts. This is a poison ivy world. This is the world, with all its festering animosities and violence, I’ll leave to my children and grandchildren. But would I rather leave them the world into which I was born? In that world Jim Crow ruled the American South. Anti-miscegenation laws were in force in more than 30 states. Polio could strike any child down anywhere. Gender discrimination was scarcely questioned. All out nuclear war, then a real possibility, would have irradicated all life on earth. This is a poison ivy world, but I sure wouldn’t turn back the clock. Sometimes the news is exceedingly grim, but the Lord of the harvest, even now, brings forth an abundance of mercy, justice, and love.
Jesus told the story of seeds and soil twice to challenge us when we’re complacent and comfort us when we’re blue. Wherever we are at the moment, Jesus meets us there.
Amen.