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 led me to imagine growth was something I could arrange all on my own; made me think I could control it, too, as if it was all up to me to secure the hope of flourishing in the life of my lima bean and by extension in my own life, too.

And here is where our gospel reading has the deeper wisdom, the sort worth planting in our hearts.

2

In St. Matthew’s telling, one day Jesus left the house and eventually landed in a boat. It’s where he wants to meet us: outside our usual defenses and comforts. So, right off, we’re to know this is an outside the classroom kind of story: a “leaving what you think you know” kind of story, in order to open your heart to wider wilder possibilities.

But before he calls us there — to the hope of the good soil — Jesus rubs our noses in the soils that fail to foster the seeds. And understand here: our hearts are the soils he intends to receive the Word of God that is the seed. So, when Jesus explains why some seeds fail to take hold in our hearts, he means us to feel uncomfortable.

The unmet seeds fall on the path. Or among the thorns. Or on the hard ground. And somehow what seems random — a consequence of the Sower’s wild throw — becomes instead our problem, a consequence of how we live. Apparently, our hearts can be too busy, too hard, too shallow to receive what God longs to give us. And Jesus marks this awareness for a reason.

You see, the broken heart — as in, the busted-up broken-open heart — is better prepared to receive God’s word than the heart that wants for nothing. And to my mind, by naming those resistant soils, Jesus calls out our misguided belief in our own self-sufficiency, as if any of us could ever surpass God’s providence.

His words also take aim at our failures to understand or forgive, our certainties about people who offend us, all of it fed not by hope but by fear: the fear of being hurt, the fear of failure and loss, the fear of not having enough or not being enough or of losing what we have, in short, the fear of risking our hearts to love as Christ commands us to.

Jesus is the Sower of all good things. And we? We are merely the soil, made of earth and made to receive what falls from the Sower’s hand. And how wondrous be the seeds of God! And how wasteful the loss of them.

3

As the cross itself reminds us, Jesus is no paper-cup savior carefully sowing his grace one seed at a time into hearts already open to receive his love. No, Jesus is a broadcast Sower, aiming for the world, more chancy than careful. Which is to say, the Sower in this parable throws seed into the wind freely and randomly. All over the place! on the hard ground, into the thorns, over the busy path, and into the good earth.

And in case you missed it, no actual farmer would ever actually sow that way. It is far too costly.

By invoking the customary grain bag an ancient sower carries, our Lord wants us to know he bore and bears the weight the worldwide longing for mercy. So, I ask us, who are we to ever harden our hearts against whole crowds of people? And why have we, so many of us, fallen into despair about the gift of life today?

Granted, there’s a lot to worry about. Always is. But worry, in and of itself, is wasteful. Consructive work, on the other hand, can prosper the ways of God.

So again, I ask us, how can we recover a more lively sense of God’s manifest grace thrown daily into the air we breathe? How can we see past our differences with other people to see instead our shared dependence on the One who made us all?

The Sower’s aim brings mixed results, yes. And yet every seed he throws bears the everlasting hope of human flourishing. It’s up to us to receive that gift and to long for it: the mercies our Lord has won for us.

In one sense, we’re called to share his reckless gesture of blessing broadly, most especially in the hard work of forgiveness. And here I’m not talking about the laboratory kind of forgiveness where it all makes sense to us, where we choose our words carefully and keep an ear open for anything that offends us.

To my mind, forgiveness isn’t about agreeing with each other about what happened or who said what when and to whom. No, forgiveness begins not with control but with longing for the grace of God to fall on us all like rain. And when it does, it’s like watching rain become seed become love.

There’s no way to know the sincerity of anyone’s remorse. I figure we leave that to God. And it’s alright to mistrust someone who hurt you. But to deny the hope of forgiveness seems another thing entirely. Seems a waste of potential. Not our own. Not even that of the penitent.

No, it seems a waste of God’s potential to heal our divisions. A waste of seed fallen on hard ground.

So, no, in the name of Jesus, I’m not commending the safety of the laboratory where we all keep a safe distance in our chosen separate cups, growing in isolation from all that troubles us. No, I’m talking about the costly kind of labor that makes no sense at all by anyone’s measure, but that nonetheless makes us cry to receive the free and unearned gift of forgiveness thrown out like seed from the Sower’s all-merciful hand.

That kind of love can happen with us or without us.

We are the heirs of his reconciling love. Whether it be a person or a nation or parish, who are we to ever lose hope in anything or anyone?

In my reading of this parable, it falls to us to keep an eye out for those long-ago seeds of hope Jesus one day threw into the wind. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.