Foundry United
Rev.
“Secrets of the Kingdom: The Parables of Matthew 13”
Sunday, February 6,
2011
Rev.
“Secrets of Sowing Extravagantly”
Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23
The kingdom of heaven is here and now as well as then and there. We miss it because we have such strong and fixed assumptions about the way things work in the real world that we miss the realest world of all, which is the kingdom of heaven.
We are sort of brainwashed. It is very hard to help people return to reality after they have been brainwashed. We have been brainwashed to think the world operates a certain way. Jesus' goal was to "un-brainwash" us, to deprogram us so as to get us to see things the way they really are.
The tool he used to do this was the parable. The parables he told and the parable of his own life. Jesus told parables and Jesus was a parable.
A remarkable biblical scholar by the name of C.H. Dodd came up with what I think is still the best definition of a parable.
A parable is "a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought."
Between now and Lent we are looking at the parables of the secrets of the kingdom collected in the 13th chapter of the gospel of Matthew.
These parables are Jesus trying to get us to question our assumptions about the way the world works, and trying to tease us into perceiving and thinking in new ways that reflect the realities of the kingdom of heaven in which we actually live here and now if we could only perceive it.
Jesus teases us with this parable – A sower scatters her seeds everywhere, knowing that many will be lost and never grow into plants, but confident that some will grow to produce a plentiful harvest.
In the kingdom of heaven God is extravagant, almost careless. God is excessive.
Seed was precious. There are many parts of the world where it still is. You rationed your consumption of grain all year long so as to make sure you would have enough grains left to plant as seeds for the next growing season. The expression "Don't eat your seed corn" was not a metaphor, but a concrete worry every winter when food was in short supply.
Yet, in Jesus' parable, seeds are scattered everywhere, the likely places and the unlikely places, knowing that much of it will be wasted, but with confidence that some will take root, and grow, and flourish, and produce a bumper crop.
Matthew explains that the seed in the parable is the word of God, which is God's love.
Wasted Seeds
Start here: God's love is often wasted.
Our self-doubts and insecurities will prevent it from taking root in our hearts. Or it will fall on a hard place in our hearts where we are wounded and scarred.
Or it will be chocked by our worries and ambitions. Or it will wither in the heat of our self-destructive attitudes and behavior.
God's love is often wasted, but God's style is to love extravagantly, Jesus says.
Only a portion of God's love falls on good soil in our hearts, but the love that does take root brings forth a harvest sometimes a hundredfold, or 60, or 30. The impact of God's love is so great that apparently it makes sense to God to throw it around in a way that is almost careless because it only takes a few seeds to take root and grow to maturity to make up for all of the seed that is wasted.
In the kingdom of heaven, the problem isn't an insufficiency of love on God's part. The difficulty is in our inability to receive it. George Buttrick said this parable really ought to be called the parable of the soils rather than the parable of the sower. The issue is not the sower or the seed, but the soil.
The problem is the soil. The problem is those places inside ourselves that are hard and thorny so that God's love can not take root or grow. Or the places in our hearts that are shallow so the heat and stress of the day we live in burn up God's love while it is trying to bud within us.
We are just not very good garden patches. We are not very receptive soil.
God has decided to deal with this by loving extravagantly, to the point of wastefulness. God is so excessive, so profligate, so careless with love that some of God's love will fall on whatever little bit of good ground there is within and bear fruit in our lives.
This rings true to me. When I have experienced the love of God in my life it has not been because I have received it easily or eagerly. I have usually resisted it. I know that when I have experienced God's love it is because God is extravagant, and not because I am particularly receptive.
All of us have been told in one way or another, for one reason or another, that we are not very loveable. It is part of our brainwashing. Almost from the day we are born we are told that there are things about us that make us hard to love. We are brainwashed, too, to think that there are things in other persons that we should not love.
The truest reality of our lives is a belief that something about us is something God and other people do not and will not and can not love. It is the lens through which we see the world. It is written on the inside of the blindfolds we wear. All of our experiences reinforce it. We hide whole realms of our being so that others can not know us and then believe that they don't love us when really they just do not know us.
Jesus is telling us the parable of the sower and seed and soil to try to tease our minds and imagination into active thought so that we might begin to question our brainwashed reality. We are really living, if we could perceive it, in the kingdom of heaven where God's love is extravagant and excessive and even wasteful. God loves the parts of us that we suppose it would be a waste to love.
God just keeps scattering the seed of divine love in every nook and cranny of our lives to find fertile ground where love can take root and multiply.
Trusting the Seed.
Start there and then think about this: God has decided to trust love. God has decided to trust the seed. God has decided that love will work as the means to accomplish what God hopes to accomplish in the world.
According to Jesus' parable, God has decided to establish God's kingdom by loving us extravagantly, and to let love fall where it may, and to trust love to eventually work. God has decided that loving is ultimately the most effective strategy.
God believes love, if you scatter enough of it around, will ultimately lead to justice. Love will eventually achieve right. Love will end discrimination and war and greed and poverty and suffering. All God's eggs are in the love basket. The way God has chosen to work in the world is by planting seeds, and the seed is love.
Frankly, I would prefer God to have a backup plan.
I believe in love, too, but I also want to have a lawyer, a signed contract, a security system, a padlock. Just in case.
According to Jesus' parable, God has decided to accomplish what God intends to accomplish by loving extravagantly. God really, really believes in love.
C.S. Lewis said the reason for this is that love is really the only way that God could accomplish what God intends to accomplish. Love is only thing you cannot coerce, he said. You can coerce obedience. You can coerce fear. You can coerce respect. But you cannot coerce love.
So if your goal is to establish a kingdom of love, the only way you can do it by planting seeds of love and trusting them to grow.
If we were honest, most of us would prefer, really, a God who carries a big stick. We want a God who drives a bulldozer. We want a God with brute strength. We want a God who leads armies.
Instead, we have this God who just carelessly scatters seeds all over the place and trusts enough of them to grow to create a kingdom.
My first church after seminary was an aging congregation of working class people, some of whom had lived hard lives. Some died hard deaths. During my years at that church I averaged a funeral every two weeks. I visited hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices. I prayed deathbed prayers. And I paid very little attention to what was happening inside my own soul. As a result, I spent the last years of that ministry in a low-grade depression without realizing it until later. There was so much death, and I had no one to help me process it or enough awareness to know that it would be costly for me. So I just plowed on.
I think all this death was part of the reason I became so driven to become a campus minister. As a campus minister I had one funeral in nine years.
Then I went back to being a local church pastor. During the early 90s I served a downtown church where HIV-AIDS took our young men, one after another it seemed. I spent lots of time again in hospitals and hospices and doing funerals that parents and family would sometimes not attend. I was still pretty inattentive to my own soul.
I left that church and went to work for annual conferences where I visited no hospitals and did no funerals. Eight years ago I came here.
Within days of arriving, I got a call that someone who attended the church was in the hospital and very ill. He was not an old man, younger than I was at the time. I was told he had had a rough life and he was dying a rough death.
I asked the person who was our lay leader at the time to go with me to the hospital. When we got there, the man was unconscious. Ralph and I sat with him for a time. I read some Psalms, I think. Then we took his hands, one of us on each side of him, and said the Lord's Prayer together. When we had finished the prayer and we stood in silence waiting for his next breath. It did not come. He had died.
That night I woke up at four in the morning and could not sleep the rest of the night. I did not know what was wrong. I woke up at four AM the next night; did not know what was wrong.
The third night in a row when I woke up at four AM I went down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I sat at our kitchen table in the dark drinking tea. I thought about the man who had died. I thought about other people I have known and loved throughout the years who had died. I thought about those who had died hard deaths. I thought about those who had died too young. I remember having a hard time breathing. I couldn't seem to take a breath deep enough to satisfy my need for oxygen.
I started talking to God in my mind. Why have you made things this way? Why do you allow it? Why aren't you doing more? Why aren't you doing a better job? Why aren't you doing your work?"
Just as I was thinking this, an image popped into my mind. It was the image of a plaster crucifix, the kind of cheap plaster crucifix you sometimes see in religious bookstores in which Christ on the cross looks particularly weak and defeated and pathetic.
As the image of this plaster crucifix filled my mind, I thought I heard in my head these words: "This is the way I do my work. This is the way I do my job."
We want a God with a bulldozer. This is what God is like: A sower scatters her seeds everywhere, knowing that many will be lost, but confident that some will find receptive places in our hearts and they will grow into a kingdom.
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