The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost - Matthew 13:1-9,18-23 - The Rev. Lauren Byrd
Seedy time And he told them many things in parables, saying, ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow.’ 1 Today we enter what some call the seedtime readings. It will be a seedy time next Sunday, too. The first thing I ever set out to grow from seed with my own two hands was a lima bean my first-grade teacher gave me to plant in a small paper cup full of wet loamy soil. She had a seed for every child in the room. And I remember pushing my seed into that dirt with a kind of holy care. I remember, too, how quickly it grew from one week to the next alongside all the other seeds pushed into other cups by my classmates. For a moment, our classroom had the look of a laboratory. Daily, it fell to each of us to water and watch and wait. And in what seemed no time at all, we began competing to see whose bean would grow the fastest while calling out the slower beans stalled in their cups. Though it was an early lesson in waiting on growth to come, it crosses my mind it also misled me. You see, it l...