[Sermon delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church at Solemn Morning Prayer, the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 16, 2023]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
Yet again, we have heard today the Parable of the Sower. Yet again, we have the reality that Jesus’ listeners were much more receptive to agricultural metaphors than we are today. While I grew up in a rural community, on a farm even, the irony is that familiarity does not guarantee understanding, especially when dealing with the advanced metaphor of the parable.
Throughout the history of the People of God, we have been struggling to make sense of it all, and not just this parable. We struggle with difficult concepts such as the Trinity, Atonement, and Redemption, but often lose the most important thing of all, our first love,[1] so to speak, the living relationship with the Word of God. The Gospel is primarily relational: our relationship with God and in corollary our relationship with each other. Everything else we talk about explains these relationships, tells us how God has worked on restoring these relationships, and instructs us how God wants us to repair and sustain these relationships, starting with our relationship with God.
I will offer that our Gospel passage today can be considered a parable of relationship with God, unlike a very popular interpretation giving a highly predeterministic view of humanity, showing a range of responses to the Word of God, with only one subset fully actualizing and the rest being damned forever (along with an exclusionary glee that is very unbecoming). The latter view is used by many to write off whole segments of humanity and to bolster their own sense of their imagined value in God’s eyes, giving up on people for whom Christ died.
If we put aside that sinful view, for sinful it is indeed, we can look at the Parable of the Sower as a description of our periodic, even daily, disposition, towards the Word of God as given to us in Scripture and Holy Tradition.
First, there is the path. Our Lord tells us that what is sown on the path reflects a lack of understanding. We read, we hear, we see, and it just does not sink in. We make no effort to understand or comprehend, and because our attention flits around with no anchor the message is set aside and forgotten, never to be taken up again. Some days are just like that. We are tired, or we are just sick and tired and we dig in our heels, say, “Yeah, whatever,” and move on. The Scripture and Tradition call that “hardness of heart.” The oppportunity to actually learn something about ourselves, about God, and our relationship together gets washed away or eaten up.
Second, there is the rocky ground. Rocky ground is unprepared ground, a field that has been cleared but nothing else has been done, so there are still a lot of things that prevent any lesson we try to learn from taking root and growing and thriving. In this situation, we actually make the effort to understand the message, to hear what God is saying to us, but we do not really think through the implications and prepare ourselves for them. This might describe most of our days, where we study and learn, but never contemplate and apply. We never consider how what we learn might actually be unpleasant, or difficult, or get us in trouble, and because we do not prepare ourselves for those difficulties we unlearn that lesson we spent so much time and effort to learn.
Third, there are the thorns. We just may be too busy. Some days we are so nose to the grindstone either to make ends meet or to further pad that retirement nest egg or because we are addicted to the busyness. We learn, we study, we understand, then say, “I’ll get around to it,” and a classic procrastination cycle establishes itself. Our culture is especially predisposed to it, combining short attention spans with the worst outgrowths of the Protestant Work Ethic. The carefully learned lesson is filed away in a remote cubby-hole in the back of a secret compartment in the roll-top desk of our lives, and good luck finding it again without having to redo the work.
Fourth, there is the good soil. This state is the most difficult to achieve. Every other example I gave above will have resonated with us (and if not, either we are either fully actualized saints or just not very self-aware). These are the days when we hear the Word of God, we understand the message, and it clicks. Not only that, it also imprints. We reflect and see where we fall short, and not only do we see where we fall short, we see why: we see the situations we put ourselves into, the priorities we set askew, the toxicity we let take root, the traumas that harden us. The Word of God actually begins to change us for the better. We grow further into the Image of God in which we were created.
If we take the metaphor in this light, then we can infer that good soil, as Our Lord uses in the metaphor, has to be prepared. Any patch of untilled earth has a host of problems. There are game paths or human paths or even roads that were built on it, and these need to be broken up; sometimes the land is nothing more than a broad expanse of compacted earth the consistency of concrete. That has to be addressed by amending the soil, ploughing it, harrowing it, breaking up the clods and turning it over. Then the rocks have to be picked out of it; it is a fact that soil will always have rock working up from the bedrock whence it broke off. Unaddressed, the crop will have no deep roots and the tending and harvesting equipment will sustain terrific damage as they are used. The weed problem must also be addressed; the thorns must be burned away before anything is planted, the other weeds pulled, and most importantly they continue to be pulled during the entire life cycle of the crop. Then, and only then can the crop succeed.
Let me translate that for you. We have to combat our sloth and inattention, which is no easy task. We are acculturated to take the easy path and not address anything difficult. Study and the time it takes to understand is not encouraged, especially now, but it is critical for us to break free of the inertia if we are to make anything of the Word of God in front of us; that is the hard path we have to break up. We also need to make the time to reflect on what we learn or hear and to reflect on our selves and our own lives. What are our pain points? Where does it feel not quite right? Why do I want to dismiss what I just heard as too difficult, too disconnected, or just too much? What toxicity am I hanging onto? We need to make the time to address the rocks that keep us from applying the insights to our lives. We also need to address the weeds and thorns. We have many responsibilities, some real, some imagined, but we need to eliminate the harmful ones we imagine, the ones to make us look busy or look good in others’ eyes, and we must reprioritize the real ones. The kicker is that this is a constant day-by-day and hour-by-hour process, this is the weeding and thorn-removal. Only then can we say we have fertile ground for the Word of God.
When we tend the field, and tend it daily, then the Word of God can grow in us. When we tend the field daily, the Enemy can come by in whatever form, whether it be authorities, employers, relatives, neighbours, or even natural occurrences, and the crop can survive. When we tend the field daily, our past programming and traumas, while still real, will not overwhelm the crop and it can survive. When we tend the field daily, our competing priorities and responsibilities can no longer get in the way and choke out the crop. When we tend the field daily, the crop will thrive.
And what is that crop? It is most emphaitically NOT, as many would have us believe, a tally of new believers brought to the faith on our curriculum vitae. St. Paul puts it best to the Galatian Church, the crop is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.[2] Note that St. Paul puts love first in the list.[3] Everything else flows out of it. St. John the Divine tells us that God is love. [4] Our Lord tells us that the two commandments from which everything else depends is to love the LORD our God with all our hearts and minds and souls and strength and to love our neighbours as ourselves.[5] It is from this fruit that the Spirit grows in us that the Gospel is proclaimed:
“To bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion—to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.”[6]
If we have no love, then how can we proclaim this good news? If we have no love, how do we become willing instruments of God to effect this good news? If we have no love, then where is the evidence of the Lord’s favour? It is only by turning to the Word, to Christ our Lord, and by hearing and wrestling with not only His words but with ourselves daily to tend the field of our hearts that the Spirit brings forth the fruit of God’s love in us and all that flows from it.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.