Seed on Stone

Scripture: The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 15), A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

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

Ah, the Parable of the Sower!  You know, when I was a kid, I used to hate this parable.

It wasn’t exactly what you would call a comforting word for me.  Usually, I’m afraid, this parable is presented as a sort of cautionary tale; a veiled threat, if you will, about choices and consequences.  The Sower—that is, Jesus, Who is God in the flesh—spreads the Word of God far and wide, scattering it indiscriminately throughout the world.  And various fates befall these germs of life.

Some fall on the hard, unplowed ground of a path or road, and are immediately gobbled up by the ravens of Satan, who snatch the Word of God away.  Others take root, but only in the shallow, rocky soil so common throughout Palestine.  When the harsh Near Eastern Sun strikes, they whither like the enthusiastic but cowardly disciples they represent.  These would be Jesus’ “fair-weather friends,” I suppose.

Still other seeds take root and flourish, but sprout up amongst thorns, which represent the cares and worries of this temporal world, and the little sprouts are choked off—strangled by the briars which engulf them.  Only some seeds fall upon good soil.  Only some seeds prove fruitful.

Usually the lesson tagged on to the end of this story when we tell it to children, is:  “So I guess you’d better be good soil!  You better watch out!  You’d better stick to the straight and narrow, or birds will eat you, thorns will throttle you, sunlight will burn you out!  You’d better make yourself into good soil, boys and girls, because only the few, only the tough, only the pure will make it in the end! … Oh, and uh, by the way, Jesus loves you, go in peace.”

How very comforting.  All the compassion and serenity of a junior high dodge ball match.

Brothers and sisters, our Gospel reading today is about nothing less than the very Word of God.  And as such, it is not a thing to be taken lightly.  Yet that is a phrase we bandy rather cavalierly, isn’t it?  Word of God this, Word of God that, when we rarely pause to think what exactly we mean when we say, “This is the Word of God.”

As Christians, we believe that there are things beyond what we can understand, beyond our rational comprehension.  This is not to abandon rational comprehension, mind you.  Heavens no.  God gave to us the good gifts of reason and sense so that we might use them in living as reasonable, sensible beings.  To deny the importance of human reason is to reject a gift of God.  No, reason is a part of us, a part of the natural order, through which we understand science, nature, and the world around us.

But we also believe that reality, that Creation, extends above and beyond simply what we can see and touch—above and beyond what our squishy little monkey brains can wrestle and subjugate.  There are things in existence that are above Nature, literally supernatural: things which reason can neither prove nor disprove.  Chief amongst these is the disposition of God.

God is above and beyond us, above and beyond everything.  Why, Aristotle, one of our greatest thinkers, believed that God was so high, so perfect, so transcendent, that God couldn’t even notice little dust specks like you and I.  No—the only thing perfect enough for Aristotle’s God to comprehend was Himself.  So that’s what He did.  Aristotle’s God sat around and thought about Himself.  Nothing else was high enough or worthy enough of such a perfect Intellect.

I suppose that’s a sensible enough understanding of God.  Certainly reasonable enough.  It makes sense in its own way.  But the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ is fundamentally different.

It’s not that the Christ-God is any less perfect or less high than Aristotle’s.  Rather, what makes the Christ-God perfect is perfect love.  Perfect compassion.

We are not capable of reaching up to God.  Human beings simply aren’t that competent.  The angels themselves cannot reach up to God on their own, and compared to them you and I are just… shaved orangutans, really.  Yet out of love and compassion, God reaches down to us, God comes down to us, God reveals to us all the wonderful things about God which we could never have discovered on our own.  This is what we call divine revelation—the Word of God.  The Word of God is God telling us, teaching us, showing us, all about God’s self.

And He certainly does this through myriad means, doesn’t He?  We speak, of course, of the Bible as the written Word of God.  Baptism and Communion are the sacramental Word of God, which feed and sustain us.  But the True Word of God, the ultimate revelation of exactly Who and what God is, is nothing other than Christ Jesus.

In the life, teachings, death, Resurrection, and promises of Jesus, we are shown the very mirror of the Father’s heart, the very face and bones of God.  Immanuel, “God-With-Us,” God always with us—no matter the cost.

This promise is not just words!  It is not just a set of propositions to be accepted or affirmed!  This promise is the Word of God, and as such it is a living thing.  It is the fire of the Holy Spirit, forever burning yet never consuming.  It is the seed of new life cast upon all people and all types of soil.  It comes to us in physical means, through Bread and Wine, water and flame; Comes to us through the meaty messy life of this community; Comes to us through waves of sound beating against our eardrums,  And when it hits you, it does something to you.  Takes root and sprouts.  It chases after you, grabs a hold of you—kills you and makes you alive again!  The Word of God does the Gospel to you.

Now I’m not saying that the Word of God affects all people in the same way, automatically converting all of those upon whom it falls like a blanket.  Jesus’ parable today is all about how the Word does different things in different people.  In some it works slowly.  In others it goes off like some massive “God bomb.”  And in still others it seems not to take root at all, and we wonder why.

But let us not be too quick to judge!  The prophet Isaiah makes clear this morning that whether we understand it or not, the Word of God is working in mysterious and hidden ways.  “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, so shall My Word be,” sayeth the Lord.  “It shall not return empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose.”

The Word of God never returns empty.  It may seem impotent, it may seem to fall upon deaf ears, upon dead soil, but even the slightest change—even a single seed—will yield thirty, sixty, a hundredfold!  God does great things through tiny seeds!

And no matter how much opposition, no matter how it may seem that the Word of God has been squelched—even when the Word has been crucified, spitted on a spear, and thrown in a tomb for three long days—we know that new life lies ready to sprout forth with the Easter dawn.

That is the comfort given to us by the Parable of the Sower.  That no matter what occurs, no matter how we sin or go astray, no matter how we are scorched or throttled, God will ultimately accomplish His purpose.  And His purpose is to save us, redeem us, and give us new life.  Thanks be to Christ!  Let him who has ears to hear listen!

Now, before I sit back down, I want to tell you a little secret about this parable—the reason that I used to hate it, but now I love it.  You see, there’s a joke in it.  A wry joke, perhaps, a bit of gallows humor.  But it’s there.

Maybe you think I’ve gone a little soft.  Maybe you think I’m trying to de-fang this parable.  Maybe you think this really is about how we’d better be good soil, or else!  Well, my friends, let us look to the example of the rocky ground.  You know, where one hears the Word of God and immediately receives it with joy—yet this person has no root, and immediately falls away when trouble or persecution arises.

There is a man in the Gospels just like this; an enthusiastic disciple of Jesus who swears to be by the Lord’s side even unto death.  Yet when the soldiers come, he scatters into the shadows, and explicitly denies Christ not once, but three separate times.  When Jesus first saw this man, he gave him the darkly humorous nickname, “Rocky.”

In Latin, the word for “rocky” is petrus—rendered in English as Peter.  Saint Peter, after whom this very church is christened.  St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, was the rockiest soil of all—and look what Jesus did through him!

Now, just try to imagine… what the Word of God will accomplish through you!

Thanks be to Christ.  AMEN.