Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 10A, July 16, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of grace, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

In the Gospel of Matthew, we’ve gone from the weeds to the water. Jesus began his third course of instruction in the Gospel of Matthew, by getting into a boat and speaking to the crowds from the edge of the Sea of Galilee, which is really a small lake, using the hills behind the crowd for natural amplification (surround sound).  I’m sorry that our lectionary doesn’t include reading chapter 12 of Matthew, because it is all about Jesus reminding his colleagues in leadership about God’s strong desire for mercy, God’s character of tenderness, God’s deep concern for all who are oppressed, and God’s hopefulness that people will turn and return to Love and to loving. Quoting material from the prophets Hosea, Isaiah, and Jonah, Jesus was reminding his colleagues about God’s extravagant faith in people, God’s great faithfulness. That is the literary mixer or equalizer for this next course of instruction, the way Matthew has composed his Gospel. (I’ve got sound systems on my mind because we’re trying out an extra speaker in Lindsey Chapel today.)

You might not have noticed that between last week and this week, we skipped chapter twelve, but I hope you noticed that in today’s appointed lesson, we skipped verses 10-17.  (I wanted to print them in the bulletin, but it was too hard to squeeze them in.)  They seem like an interruption between the Parable of the Sower and the explanation of the Parable of the Sower, but they’re the rationale for this whole section of Matthew – eight parables right in a row.  The word parable literally means side-by-side, as in comparison, as in, the kingdom of heaven or the realm of God can be compared: with a sower who scattered seed all over the place; with wheat growing with weeds; with mustard; with yeast; with treasure in a field; with a pearl of great price; with a net that catches fish of every kind; with a master of a household who brings out new and old treasures. The realm of God is not some far off place or time where every conflict is finally worked out.  In the realm of God, according to Jesus, “failure, miracle, and normality” are co-mingling and co-existing. [1]

But back to verse ten: the disciples ask Jesus, why do you speak to the crowds in parables?  Jesus responds, “the reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’” Huh? In Matthew, Jesus is saying that he speaks to the crowds in parables because they don’t comprehend them.  No wonder the lectionary leaves these verses out! You might remember that the verses left out of last week’s Gospel portion were about Jesus’ condemnation of whole cities like Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum because they had seen how powerful love could be and still they were not engaging in acts of kindness and restoring outcasts and misfits to community. Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah, despairing that “people’s hearts have grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes…they stubbornly refuse to understand and to turn toward healing.” At this point in Jesus’ ministry, according to Matthew, it has become clear that most of the people who were witnessing his ministry were not going to respond by changing their lives.

Mainstream Christians generally don’t like to hear from the grumpy Jesus in church. But one of the problems with leaving these verses out is that we are more likely understand ourselves as the ones in the know about the parable because we are given the decoder ring.  We are more likely to imagine that we are the ones to whom the secrets of the realm of God are being revealed.  If the verses are left in, we’re more likely to feel like the ones on the shore scratching their heads, or the ones getting mad about the mirror Jesus is holding up to us.

Although Matthew offers the interpretation of the parable, that doesn’t mean that this is the only interpretation.  In fact, this parable appears in Matthew, Mark and Luke, with three similar but differing interpretations of this parable. Just like a musical composition or a piece of art, even friends of the composer or artist can interpret it and make meaning of it differently. [2] But one thing that all of Jesus’ parables teachings have in common is this:  they are each surprising – even disturbing – every single one.  They’re about disrupting the order or the framework that the hearer takes for granted.  They are designed to subvert the way we think things are (or the way we think they should be).  So there are many possible interpretations, but if they don’t disturb us, the interpretations probably are not robust enough.

One of the surprising or disturbing things about this particular parable to me is that the sower was scattering valuable seeds in places where growth was unlikely or even impossible. How many of you have ever bought seeds to plant to grow food?  Now I know that different kinds of seeds require different kinds of sowing methods, and the method in this story was probably broadcast sowing – throwing seed across the ground — but how many of you would scatter some of the seeds you bought on rocks?  How many of you would scatter some of the seeds in the thorns?  How many of you would scatter some of the seeds on a walkway or a road?  I’ve been tempted to illustrate this parable by buying a bucket-full worth of valuable seeds to toss around inside the church as my opening illustration of this parable.  They’d land on the floor, on your clothes, in your hair, all over the place.  That would be a sermon illustration that you wouldn’t soon forget! But I don’t want to waste all those seeds!

Jesus is telling a story that would make his disciples laugh about a sower who is crazy extravagant with the seeds and about a wildly improbable harvest that is between thirty and one-hundred times the amount of seed scattered – more than enough to make up for the seeds that the birds ate, the plants that the sun scorched, the plants that the thorns choked.  The harvest is shockingly huge! According to Biblical historians, a typical yield would be 7½ bushels of grain for every single bushel of seed.  A great yield would be 10 to 1. [3]  If we understand the parable to tell us something about the realm of God, here we have a picture or a song about extravagant generosity and abundance even when the conditions are far from ideal.  The abundance will more than make up for the seed that fails to grow, even if ¾ of the seed didn’t produce grain. It seems to me that Jesus’ intent here was to encourage his troubled disciples, and maybe even his troubled self, with a hopeful vision – to encourage them to both lighten up and keep leaning into love (come when it may and cost what it will)!

That famous quote from Dinos Christianopoulos, queer Greek poet comes to mind:  they tried to bury us – they didn’t know we were seeds.” Or Ken Untener, reflecting on the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, famously wrote:  “It helps now and then, to step back and take the long view. The [realm of God] is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the [realm of God] always lies beyond us [is bigger than us]. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith… no pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything. This is what we are about: We plant seeds that one day [may] grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capability. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We [all of us] are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.”

In my tenth year as your priest, this parable and Untener’s words often come to my mind.  I wonder, for example, where is the good fertile soil in me?  Where are the well-worn paths – and are they, in fact, ruts?  Where are the rocks?  Where are the thorns?  What seeds have a chance of sustainable growth in me?  I wonder about us as a parish.  Where in this parish are the thorns?  Where are the rocks?  Where are the well-worn paths – and are they ruts?  Where’s the deep fertile soil where new growth can bear fruit?  If we scatter seed, what’s likely to grow – and where?  I think a lot about the best use of resources, given what seem to be the limitations of time, money, people.

I hear Jesus saying, “Listen.  Listen.  Imagine and understand this.  The seeds of the redeeming love of God, the compassion, the mercy, the forgiveness, the justice of the realm of God are everywhere – there’s so much, that God isn’t fretting about what falls on the road or on the rocks or in the thorns, God isn’t fretting about what the birds eat, what the sun scorches or about the weeds.  God knows that there’s enough good soil in each one of us, in all of us together, in the world, to ensure a mind-blowing joy-filled harvest – more than enough for everyone.

So what would it look like if we lived as if it were true that the seeds of love and compassion and mercy and forgiveness and justice didn’t need to get distributed in the good soil only – but that they could get tossed around with reckless abandon?  What if, instead of fretting about the condition of the soil in ourselves, in others, in the community or the world, what if we started imitating the sower?  What are the next things that we could do with the love of God as a parish that would be crazy extravagant?

Instead of fretting about our limited resources and placing all kinds of careful restrictions on them that have to do with the fear of “not enough,” or the fear of running out — what if we shatter the notion of what a resource is and assume that we have way more than enough – we have enough to throw seeds everywhere – on the pathways (even in the ruts), on the rocks, in the thorns.  Let’s continue to dare to be crazy extravagant in our ministry together.  Maybe that sounds brave – but I bet for at least some of you it sounds foolish (and to tell you the truth, it sounds like both to me) – and maybe that’s just what we’re being surprised (or disturbed) into becoming – both brave and foolish and crazy extravagant for the love of God.

Here’s the end of a poem for you from Mary Oliver. It’s written in first person singular, so listen to it imagining that the speaker is the voice of Emmanuel Church.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular,
and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. [4]

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