Matthew 13:1-9,18-23
Listen!" It's a word from this Sunday's gospel that stood out to me the moment first time I scanned the passage. It's a word meant to prick up your ears, a word meant to jolt us out of whatever else we're doing, whatever else we're thinking about or worrying about, and get us to pay attention.
Listen! In this parable, Jesus has a word for us today that feels particularly important, particularly urgent to get across. I’m glad that the text contains a parable, because Jesus' parables illustrate three things that I think are true about the Bible in general:
First, it's that the bible isn't always easy to interpret. Often, it's pretty hard. We're talking about texts written thousands of years ago by people who didn't speak our language and are from a completely different culture. Sometimes people say that Jesus' parables are simple truths put in simple language that anyone can easily understand, to which I say, have you read Jesus' parables lately, and closely? They say things like "therefore, make friends for yourselves by means of the wealth of unrighteousness, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal tents" (Luke 16:9). I don't think that anyone's doing me a favor in telling me that this is easy to understand. If you believe those people who tell you that the Bible is easy to understand, and then you pick it up – you will no doubt avoid the Bible thinking you are some kind of dummy. Just like I want to avoid the gym, because I feel like I'm the only person there who hasn't stepped right out of a fitness video.
So if you sometimes find the bible to interpret, take comfort: it IS hard to interpret sometimes. Often, actually. Here’s a rule of thumb that I use for reading Jesus’ parables: if I interpret it in such a way that there is nothing surprising or even shocking about it, it’s time to go back and read it again. Jesus’ parables serve a purpose a little like that of a Zen koan – those ‘riddles.’ "A famous koan is, "Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand clapping?"
The point of a koan isn't that there's a correct answer that springs instantly into mind. A koan isn't supposed to inform you; it isn't supposed to give you information that will increase your feeling of mastery. If anything, it's the opposite of that. It pulls our minds in to confound them, and that kind of dislocation from our usual ways of thinking helps us to open up and let go of our usual ways of thinking. A koan doesn't inform; it transforms you as you wrestle with it.
Jesus’ parables work kind of like that; each one ends in a shocking reversal of his listeners’ expectations. With that reversal, the story pulls us out of entrenched patterns of relationship and ways of being in the world; it dislocates us from what’s comfortable - to free us to establish new kinds of relationship, new ways of being. If the first thing I want you to remember about the bible is that it's often not easy to interpret, then the second thing I want you to take away about it is that the hard work of wrestling with scripture is more than worthwhile. It's not a product of our culture, so I find there's nothing like it to challenge our cultural assumptions about who God is, what God wants, and what things like love and success and freedom really are. Anne Lamott likes to say that if what you get out of the bible is that God hates all the same people you do, you're in trouble. I'd agree. If I come away from the bible feeling that the problem with the world is that there aren't enough people like me in it, this is a good cue to keep reading, and to keep asking how God is calling me to new life. The bible is Good News for God's people -- news of justice, peace, of true freedom and abundant, joyful life. The Bible teaches that we are transformed by God’s grace into a new life, which is to say there is room in your life and in my life for God to work more deeply. There is room in your heart and in mine for more compassion, more peace, more freedom than we'd thought. Is it a question of doing more, not really, it is more a question of how we can let go of our natural tendency to want to control our lives. It begins with God as -- the source of our identity and our only permanent loyalty. Some people call that choice being "born again," and I want to take the liberty here in this sermon to go on record as saying I'm entirely in favor of being born again.
You and I need to be born again -- not once, but for every time that someone tries to tell us with words or actions that we're not God's child, for every time that we're tempted to substitute our culture's vision of respectability for God's dream of the "mighty being brought low and the lowly raised up," for every time we forget that God's blessings, love, and justice are for ALL of God's children, for every time that we are so afraid of being rejected we try to control the situation, no matter what it is. As long as we remember that being born again is done by God and not by us. We can reveal our true selves, we know we will not just survive but learn to love again. IN other words, we need to be born again, and again, and again. In my case, several times a day. This Sunday's parable is the story of a farmer who goes out to sow seed. What's so surprising about that? Farmers sow seed all the time. And anyone who knows anything at all about what a plant needs to grow won’t be surprised to hear that seed cast in the middle of a road, or on the rocks, or among thorns doesn’t grow. But this parable contains not one, but two surprises to jolt us into openness to the work of God’s Spirit among us and in our relationships and our world.
Listen! It’s not at all surprising that most of the seed didn’t grow. What’s surprising is that the farmer chose to sow it there. This isn’t a rich man we’re talking about here: this is a poor farmer, a tenant farmer who can only eke out a living for himself and his family if he not only makes wise choices about where to sow, but also is blessed with good weather and a great deal of luck. Good seed is hard to come by; the wise farmer makes sure to entrust the precious grain he has to the best of soil. But this one tosses seed about while standing in the closest thing he can find to the parking lot at K-Mart, where the pigeons will eat it if thousands of feet and truck tires don’t grind it into the pavement first. In short, this farmer behaves as though that which were most precious was available in unlimited supply. What on earth is he thinking?
But here’s the real corker: God blesses a farmer like this beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Normally, the farmer who reaps a twofold harvest would be considered fortunate. A fivefold harvest would be a cause for celebration throughout the village, a bounty attributable only to God’s particular and rich blessing. But this foolish farmer who, in a world of scarcity, casts his seed on soil everyone knows is worthless is blessed by God in shocking abundance: a harvest of thirty, sixty, and a hundred times what he sowed.
Many of us have been hurt in relationships, so we guard closely what's precious because it seems to be rare. Things like love, openness and giving up control. I hear this from folks quite often, I will never let anyone do that to me again, hurt me like that again. There is sometimes a sense that the good things God has for us are in such limited supply that the only kind of good and responsible thing to do is to guard it very carefully, give it only to those we're sure are worthy, protect it like the last egg of the rarest endangered bird. Predictions of peril and doom in our world provoke a great deal of anxiety, and living on a knife edge like that not only causes constant unrest; but also tends to shut down the kind of creative and life-giving vision that energizes us to live more deeply into God's dreams for us as individuals, partners, and for the world. Thank goodness our God is not like this, waiting for us to become perfect and then bestowing the blessings, our God casts the seed like a foolish farmer, knowing that even the most hardened spirits can bring forth new flower.
Perhaps you remember the movie Ordinary People? It came out many years ago now, but it won several Oscars, so many of you may have seen it on video or DVD. I liked it so much I read the book by Judith Guest. There is a marvelous description of the father of the family. His two sons are out boating one day on the lake and there is an accident. One of the sons drowns. The other lives the rest of his life with survivor’s guilt. The mother retreats into busyness; the father into despair. This is the description of the father:
He had left off being a perfectionist then when he discovered that not promptly kept appointments, not a house circumspectly clean, not membership in Onwentsia the Lake Forest Golf and Country Club, or the Lawyers' Club. Not Power, not knowledge, not goodness, not anything, cleared you - through the terrifying Office of chance- And that it is chance, and not perfection, that rules the world.
People who are perfectionists, find some degree of success in this life. But what do we do when things do not go according to plan. Most of us expect the world, especially our interactions with other people to be orderly, fair, just, and rational – we do not like to leave things to chance. Whether it is a bomb in London, or simply the completely different way one person sees a problem as compared to the way another sees it. Life is messy. Our flaw is that we expect all of experience to respond to rational ordering and understanding. And when it doesn't, we resent it.
We can order existence rationally to a degree, the way we can push back the sea a little with a dike, or stop a river for a while with a dam. But beyond our rational boundaries in our deepest longing and need, there is disorder and mystery, and even chaos.
The parable tries to get us to see the world from another viewpoint and ask a different question; to ask, "Why do things go right?" And it says that; there is only, one reason for that: because God gives it as a gift. Life comes to you not from your efforts to organize things efficiently. You can't do that. It's just too big for you to organize. Life comes to you through trusting that if you do your best, some things will fail, some seed lands on bad soil - you cannot, control that. Other things, will succeed. Seeds will take root and they will grow. The message is, leave the results to the Foolish Farmer – this is the one we trust, the one who is our God. Amen.