Abundance

Propers: The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 15), A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

It astounds me how rapidly agricultural technology has advanced in just the last few decades. Granted, I’m no expert. My dad grew up on an Iowa farm but by the time I came along he wasn’t able to impart much lore of the land. No, my education came later, when we moved out to Minnesota and our son fell in love with John Deere tractors. Honestly, you’d be amazed how much a grown man can learn from John Deere board books intended for ages three to five.

I read about seed drills which use little puffs of air to insure the proper placement of every single planted seed. I learned of sensors placed in the soil to direct irrigation, and of miniature drones that fly amongst crops searching for damage. I saw the insides of combines with 48-row corn heads, so large that each individual tine had a laser sensor allowing it to undulate over the ground, flexing with the land so as not to get stuck in a hill. And everywhere I looked inside there were screens: screens displaying statistics and efficiency yields, painting the landscape in digital color to maximize the harvest and minimize fuel expenditure. It was a video game writ large.

And even this, I’m told, is out of date. A colleague of mine, a pastor from North Dakota who grew up on his father’s and grandfather’s farm, informs me that drones and sensors have been replaced by satellite imagery scanning every square inch of the field from space for the slightest aberration, dryness, or damage. The latest generation of tractors doesn’t even include cabs. Autonomous machines farm far more efficiently than human beings could ever hope to on our own. Why, there are even robots milking cows here in New York Mills, and they are a wonder to see. We’ve come a long way from the yoke of oxen and the moldboard plow.

Yet even so—the fundamentals are still the same as they’ve been for thousands of years, aren’t they? For all our technological wizardry, we remain dependent for our survival upon a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. Not to mention the miracle that is a seed.

In our Gospel this morning we hear the Parable of the Sower, easily one of Jesus’ most famous teachings. A sower goes out to sow and scatters his seed all about—the path, the rocks, the thorns, and yes, even some on good and fertile soil. And not surprisingly, the seed on the path gets eaten by birds. The seeds in rocky soil wither before the sun. Those amongst the weeds are choked off by hardier competition. But the stuff that falls on good soil produces in ridiculous superabundance: thirty, sixty, a hundredfold.

And Jesus must explain to His befuddled disciples that the seed in the parable is the very Word of God showered forth upon the world. Sometimes the Word is stolen away by devils, He says, sometimes choked off by the cares of this world, and sometimes the Word indeed takes hold upon rocky soil, those who hear the Word and immediately receive it with joy. But sure enough, as soon as hardship or persecution arises, these rocky souls fall away. They’re all shoot and no root. Yet where God’s Word finds good soil, it flourishes, yielding a vast and glorious harvest, greater than any would have dared to imagine.

One of the beautiful things about Jesus’ parables is that they flummox us. He speaks of characters and behaviors that seem ridiculous to the cultured and the sensible. Seed is a valuable commodity, is it not? Think of all the pains we take in order to insure that every single seed has opportunity to sprout—all the machines and sensors and algorithms and data. Yet here this Sower casts it about willy-nilly! Upon the path, upon the thorns. Who sows seeds upon a road or a rock? Honestly.

Yet God’s ways are not our ways, His thoughts not our thoughts. We live in a mindset of scarcity—and to a certain extent rightly so. We must maximize every harvest, the yield of each individual seed, in order to feed the hungry mouths of this world. At the same time, however, numbers are only a problem for finite creatures with finite minds: creatures who confuse size with importance and rarity with value. But God is not like us. His Word is superabundant, His mercy infinite.

He scatters the seed of His Word upon the whole world, refusing the hold back, refusing to be sensible, confident in the sure knowledge that His Word will not return empty but shall accomplish all that for which He has purposed. Our God is a consuming fire, and fire indeed is the appropriate understanding of what is sown here upon the earth. For like fire, the Word of God only grows in intensity as it is given away, spread and shared. And like fire, it takes only a spark—a single fertile seed—to set all the world ablaze with light and life.

Superabundance is the name of the game: a Kingdom of God that spreads like a virus, like mustard through a garden, like yeast through the whole batch of dough. The life of a single, perfect, sinless Man can turn the whole world upside-down, emptying Hades of its dead and pulling all of mankind back to Eden, back to God. Christ, my friends, is both Sower and Seed, both God and Word, both Man and divine. And He pours out Himself upon all of humanity, all of the world. And the Word works! Regardless of our violence, our infamy, our sins, regardless of the wicked states of our hearts and our souls, He accomplishes His Father’s purpose, without doubt and without fail.

The seed is sown, the spark is lit, and the Kingdom comes at last!

Which brings me to one final point about this most infamous of parables. And that is how we so readily misread it. We take the Parable of the Sower, and we make it into the Parable of the Soil. What I mean by this is that we hear Jesus speak of God’s Word seeded amongst the path, amongst the thorns, amongst the rocks, and we think, “Uh-oh. He’s talking about us, isn’t He? Am I rocky soil? Am—am I choked by thorns? How, oh how, can I make my heart into good soil, so that Jesus will love me?” Right?

We take a parable of superabundance, of grace overflowing, and we turn it into a parable of judgment, of fear. We cease to make it about Jesus and turn it around to make it about us. But to do so is to miss the punchline. To read the Parable of the Sower as the Parable of the Soil is to overlook the joke that is hidden in plain sight. And this is what I mean.

Jesus describes seed falling on rocky soil, that takes root and sprouts up quickly but has no depth. And so the seed withers in the heat of the day. This, He says, represents those who hear the Word and immediately receive it with joy, but when trouble or persecution arises on account of God’s Word they immediately fall away. A pretty damning indictment, I must say. Yet there is a person in the Gospels who fits this description to a T.

Simon, the brother of Andrew, is Jesus’ most enthusiastic disciple. He is impetuous and reckless, diving out his boat on multiple occasions so as to reach Jesus the faster. And Jesus says to Simon that from now on, “You shall be called Peter”—which means Rock—“and upon this Rock I shall build my Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Peter is the Rock, and in more ways than one. Prince of the Apostles, he immediately receives the Word with joy. Yet when trouble and persecution arise, he immediately falls away. He explicitly and publicly denies Jesus, during His Passion, not once but three times, all before the cock crows. Peter, dear Christians—the same Peter for whom this congregation is named—is the rocky soil of whom Jesus speaks in the Parable of the Sower. And look what Christ has accomplished through him!

See how the Word has produced in superabundance, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold, in spite of the devils, in spite of the cares of this world, in spite of the fallibility and weakness and outright wickedness of Christians ourselves! Rocks, thorns, birds, it doesn’t matter. The seed takes root. The Word works His will. And despite all of our brokenness, brothers and sisters—the harvest comes in full.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.