Pentecost 4, Proper 10 Sermon, July 10, 2011

Most of us when we hear this Gospel begin to think of the different gradations of soil in a qualified way, in a way that places us in one particular location, while at the same time placing others in a less pleasant location or more pleasant location.  We can identify people in our lives who are caught up on the path and do not respond to the Word of God. We can identify people in our lives who fall on the rocky ground and respond to the Word but have no sustainability and fall away fast.  We can also identify people in our lives who we think are saintly, phenomenal people who do so much good it is clear to us that they have fallen on fertile soil and are responding in their vocation fully to the Word of God in their midst.  It is kind of a natural process, to try to compartmentalize people in certain ways, to look at folks and attempt to determine their worth based on our understandings of the moral implications of the Gospel as told by Jesus, contrasted with their behavior and lifestyle.

            If we are lucky, or if we are a little wiser, maybe, we take this Gospel and internalize it.  We can see that we have times in our lives when we fall on the path and have little chance to respond to the Word of God because it is taken away before we can take hold of it.  More often than not, we can frame our lives in the vision of the third image from this Gospel, seeds that fell among thorns, when the Word of God falls to us but is choked out due to our penchant for things, both valuable and not valuable.  When our idols get in the way and keep us from holding the Word of God present in our hearts.  And we also can identify times in our lives when the Word of God lands on rich soil in our souls and our response has produced on a great and amazing level. 

            This Gospel is rich with metaphor for our personal lives, it is also helpful to bring order to our relationships, at least, perceived order on our part.  It is a wonderful parable that allows us to engage the Word of God in many different ways.  My thoughts have taken me down a new path, a path that I wish I had weeks and weeks to explore, because when I imagined this parable in a way I hadn’t before, I found myself liberated, I found myself excited, I found myself yearning for more.  I read a sermon by The Rev. Ramona Soto Rank, an ELCA pastor from Portland Oregon, she wrote one thing that sparked my imagination. She wrote, “Think of the seed as God’s word.  The seed will fall where it may, but will never fall in vain.”   It will never fall in vain.  Which of course is not how we understand this Gospel, right?  There were some seeds that fell in vain, there were some seeds that did not take root, and of course those were in vain, they were failures, right?

            The parable of the Sower inevitably is interpreted as a picture of this God of ours who is outrageous and wasteful and reckless.  It is a parable that helps us to see that God is constantly and abundantly covering the earth with God’s word in every language that has ever been told and in those languages that have no words.  There is nothing wasteful about the actions of our God, there is nothing in vain about the actions of our God, there is no failure in the actions of our God.  Is this a liberating thought?  That nothing God does is in vain?  That noting God does is wasteful, it may look wasteful, careless or reckless, but in the end, it is not.  In the end, God’s Word, sown as seed in the world and in our lives, always has transformative implications and always turns our own expectations and order and our world’s expectations and order on its head.

            Tied together with the Old Testament reading from Genesis we see and understand more clearly God’s saving action in the world, and God’s saving action in the world is not an action that brings comfort and joy to our lives.  The story of Jacob and Esau is a puzzling story, God clearly has a plan for these two, and it is a plan that does not sit well with me.  God speaks to Rebecca and clearly states to her that Jacob is the favored Son, that the promises God gave to Abraham will be given to Jacob, not to Esau.  Then, when the two are born, Esau comes first, and in that society, as well as in our own, the firstborn is privileged, is worthy of special rights simply for being the first born.  I should know, I am a first born and, like all the rest of you firstborns, raise your hands please, we know we are particularly special people, right.  The law of primogeniture, Walter Brueggemann states, claims two particular things, first, that the oldest is first and favored and second that some have natural rights that cannot be questioned.  Jacob comes out of the womb grasping at Esau’s heel, Jacob is born second, the birthright belongs to Esau.  Yet later in the story we discover that Esau gives over his birthright for food, Brueggeman again states that this is not a qualified action, this does not make Jacob better than Esau, the contrast that is made in this giving over of the birthright contrasts two particular things, first it is a contrast between deferred and immediate blessing and second the contrast is between material blessings that can be taken managed and controlled and well being that must be received only as gift.  Jacob took the birthright for his own, and Esau received something for his well being as a gift from Jacob and God, we come to understand, is tampering with the fundamental convictions of society.

            The birthright becomes Jacobs, the second born and the work and goals of this God of ours becomes clearer.  God’s purpose in our world is to turn everything on its head.  God’s work in this world is to make our human expectations lose their power, their control over our lives and those of others.  God’s mission in the world is to take those who are second, those who are last, those who are least and hand over to them the rights and privileges of power, love and joy.  As Desmond Tutu says, “God has a bias and that bias is for the poor, the orphan the widow, and the least of these.”  While we gather together here on a Sunday morning to worship and be fed by the Body and Blood of Christ, God is out there with the people who have nothing, shivering in the rain.  God is out there with the people who are suffering from the heat and who do not have enough water to give them life or food to give them energy.  While we are in here, God is out there caring and loving and moving and breathing, giving God’s self completely and wholly to those who are in need.  God is out there working to turn the world on its head.

            Nothing God does is in vain, and there is nothing wasteful about God’s great abundance.  There is a future for us that God has imagined, but it is a future that we cannot comprehend, but also a future that allows us to choose to participate in the mission of God in the world.  God has a promised and preferred future for all of us, a future that takes our expectations and removes them from the world, that takes our expectations and replaces them not with ordered reality, but abundant and fanciful and reckless possibility that will become a new reality for us all.  The seeds sown in today’s Gospel are not for us, and while we are not called to be the Sower, or the judge of how the seeds fall, Jesus makes this clear when he alone, the Son of God, takes the opportunity to explain the parable, explain its implications for judgment, that its determination is not in the hands of the disciples but only in the heart of God.  The disciples are called to recklessly and abundantly sow the seed, likewise, we are called to sow, we are called to share, we are called to take the risk of being abundantly reckless like the Sower of today’s Gospel, we are called to be intentionally careless about how we share God’s word.  Some will say we have to share the Gospel with those we don’t know, I would say yes, that is true, but we also have to share the Gospel with those we love.  We have to share the Gospel with those we know, we have to share the stories of God in our lives, the stories of the spirit moving and shaping and blowing us to and fro, the stories of how we are trying to follow Jesus and be and do good in the world.  If we can claim and see and share those stories from our lives, if we can understand how the Word of God has been planted in us, we can begin to work with God to turn the world on its head. 

            Risk is never fun or easy, and the risk that God is calling us to today is a risk that takes us beyond anything we have accomplished in our lives to date.  We are now called to participate in the turning of the world on its head.  We are called to turn our own selves over to God, to open our hearts and let the Word of God break out of the prison we have contained it in all these years.  Our hearts and souls are filled with the Word of God, the Word of God as seed that we have been afraid to let go of, because we weren’t sure how it would be received.  Now, we have permission to let it all go, to release it all, for the Word of God, the seed of God within us is not for us, it is for everyone else in the world, those we love, those we do not love, those we know those we do not know.  Sow your seed, sow the Word of God that sits in your soul, share it with everyone who has ears to hear or eyes to listen.  And know, that there is nothing wasteful about spreading God’s word, the Word of God is never sown in vain.