A Proper 10 15 Ord BFC 2017
Matthew 13:1-9
July 16, 2017
Growing
up, I had an incredible pastor--who taught me to see God, the world, Christian
faith, and myself with eyes and heart more broad and more loving than I
believed possible. For I grew up in a
small town with requisite championship football team and All-State quarterback
and head cheerleader thanking Jesus for our success, the most meaningful moment
in a young person’s life being when they turned from their wicked ways to give
their heart over to Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. Even with my local pastor gently expanding my
faith, the cultural Christianity around me still gave me this sense that Jesus
and God were stalking me with their morality as I sought to authentically have
a conversion experience to a God who seemed more about morality and rules and
five spiritual laws. Oh yeah, they would
say as an aside, that God, He’s also loving.
That God, as male morality maker, is
still so deep and thick in our culture, I find myself sometimes absent of faith
because I’m caught up in the cultural narrative.
How do we see, understand, or
experience God? In turn, how do we then
see, understand, or experience God in relation to who we are? I think those are some basic questions we ask
over and over in progressive faith communities like ours. What we say most often is that the answers to
those questions are ongoing, never set in stone.
Jesus would tell a story. He did this, I believe, because he knew there
was a popular, unhealthy understanding of God in the wider culture that did not
square with the part of his deep, Jewish tradition he believed to be
authoritative. He would share parables
to engage the wider cultural narrative and set it on its ear. The wider cultural narrative suggested that
God was a moral gatekeeper and that we as a people must have done something
wrong because, well, look: poverty,
malnutrition, disease, disability, deformity, and death. We must have done something wrong,
right?
Jesus would also relate wisdom
teachings to raise the consciousness of those around him to say, “Hey, this is
just how the world works. It is not how
God designed it or wants it. So take
note, grow up, and these are the struggles before us. We live in an unjust world.”
Or he
would share one of those wisdom stories to help people recognize that God, the
world, their Jewish faith, and their communities were far more broad and loving
than they could imagine possible. In
these stories, God is a spendthrift, sharing love wastefully and
extravagantly. While the wider culture
may teach the poor and war-torn that they are somehow morally corrupt or
corruptible, unworthy of God’s love and therefore the material bases of life,
God and God in Christ see them as pregnant with possibility.
I believe we have one of those
wisdom teachings before us this day, the Scripture that Sarah read, what has
become known as the parable of the sower.
Now the writer of Matthew goes on to have Jesus interpret the parable
for the disciples so that we all can know exactly what it means for the urban
setting in which Matthew’s community lives.
But in one of the other ancient
texts this parable is found, the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus shares the parable
without explanation or interpretation.
Some scholars believe that parts of the Gospel of Thomas, a collection
of Jesus sayings without interpreted meanings or the stories found in Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John, date to a time even earlier than our Biblical gospels,
around the year 50. Matthew was probably
written thirty to forty years later, in the year 80 or 90. Scholars in the
Jesus Seminar believe that the teaching as told in the Gospel of Thomas is
probably closest to the original. The
Gospel of Thomas version is the simplest, contains no commentary or
interpretation, and does not have added elements like the sun included in the
parable as told by the Biblical gospel writers.[1]
Because the Gospel of Matthew is
part of the Bible and the Gospel of Thomas is not, the parable has long been
interpreted with the meaning Matthew’s author gives to it. If we begin with an understanding of God as
Judge, this all makes sense. For Matthew understands the parable as one where
humankind is interpreted as the seeds—some falling on the shore, some on the
path, some on rocky ground, some among thorns, some on the soil. If we think about that interpretation, this
make’s God’s love and goodness indiscriminate and maybe a little cruel. The world appears to be a frightening place. Our fate seems to be divinely ordained. If you end up on the path, tough for you. If I end up on the good soil, well, good for
me.
With this interpretation, many
scholars have said that this parable does not go back to the historical Jesus,
because this was not Jesus’ world view in many other passages. The parable does not correspond to how Jesus
understands God and humankind in other parables and sayings. For Jesus taught people to be aware of God’s
goodness present, alive, and working in the here and now. That seems to be a fairly straightforward
message for someone later called by communities “Savior” and “Son of God.”
But remember the audience to which
Jesus is teaching. If Jesus is teaching
the poor and destitute that God is present, alive, and working in their midst, and
that they are pregnant with the possibility of life and growth, this teaching
becomes radically counter-cultural. For
the imperial order was teaching the poor and destitute that God was present,
alive, and working for Caesar or Herod, but certainly not for the poor and
destitute. Bread, Rome preached, would
be distributed at the whim of Caesar, and only in those places and for those people
considered Friends of Caesar. Never,
ever would Rome want their subjects to believe that divine life and growth were
happening from the ground up.
So if the Jesus community, or if we,
are not the seeds in the parable, who are we?
Certainly the understanding that we exist as individuals, individual
seeds, trying to find our fertile soil goes against all those understandings of
a community that was all in it together, an understanding preached and lived out
by Jesus.
I know this must run counter to
everything you have been taught as a Christian.
The preacher is preaching counter to the Bible? Yes, and I’ll continue to do that with
Matthew believing that as a city boy, the author of Matthew did not get some
aspects of rural life. It is to remember
that Jesus was firmly rooted in place-making.
And the particular place Jesus was rooted in was rural Galilee where
farmers, and day laborers, and fisherfolk lived in deteriorating and fractured
communities and families, the land often stripped from them by crippling debt.
Secondly, I believe that the author of Matthew
was far too caught up in seeing Jesus as a punishing “moralizer”, a law-giver
who made it the responsibility of every good Jew to not question why God might
be arbitrary or capricious or cruel but, irrespective of God’s goodness or
justice or fairness, we are to be responsible, work hard, and be grateful for
any little seed God might cast our way.
Though part of the Jewish tradition, I don’t think that is the part of
the Jewish tradition Jesus midwifed in his teaching and ministry.
I would ask you to consider the
possibility that Jesus taught the communities around him that they were
pregnant with possibility. Much as the
first creation story in Genesis told us that humankind was created out of
fertile soil and divine breath, Jesus was calling his listeners to live out
that holy vocation. Be the fertile soil
you were created to be. For we are the
soil. We are the soil. In this interpretation, God is once again the
Divine Scatterer. But the seeds are now
not us but God’s will for life, and health, and growth among a poor and
destitute people. Even in places where
you think life and health and growth could never happen, God is scattering
seeds. And instead of seeds which are
foreordained for life and death based on position, these seeds are scattered
almost haphazardly and wastefully all over the world.
God is a spendthrift, extravagant in
casting seeds of love and justice throughout the world. God risks love thrown on the shore, life
thrown on the path, health thrown on the rocky ground, growth thrown among
thorns, and also risks it all by casting seeds on rich soil. We are all these soils, not individually, but
as a collective community.
If we are the seeds then we can
bloom individually, and perhaps make it on our own, if we luck out on rich
soil. But if we are the soil, if we are
the soil, then it is up to us as a community to provide the fertility necessary
for God’s life, health, and growth. That
seed is scattered among us everywhere, and the church is the affirmation that
we cannot be the soil alone. Soil is a
community metaphor.
I know what you are thinking. You’re thinking that Mike likes this soil
metaphor so much because it rhymes with his vocation as a manure spreader. Ok, maybe true. But beyond that, I want us to ask ourselves
what values, what things would have to be going on in our communities to be considered
rich and fertile soil?
How are we to be the fertile soil
for the seed which God has scattered?
Because I believe this wisdom story teaches that the seed is scattered. God intends life and health and goodness for
each place. In this interpretation, God
is assumed to be incredibly loving and compassionate—for the seed is scattered
everywhere. And the seed will grow if we
provide the right environment that leads to sprouting, developing roots, stems,
flowers, and reproducing in healthy ways.
We are the soil.
One of the things I try to do during
my vacation time is catch up on reading I’ve not been able to get to in the
everyday push and pull as a pastor. I
found a gem of a book written by someone who grew up in eastern Montana and
then became the mayor of Missoula, Montana.
Daniel Kemmis penned Community and
the Politics of Place. In that book,
Kemmis offered two very different visions for the functioning of democracy, one
by Jefferson and one by Madison. The
Jeffersonian vision believed in educating the populace, educating them into
citizenship, believing that “people could rise above their particular interests
to pursue a common good.”[2] Kemmis coupled this with a strong belief that
Montanans had been sold a bill of goods.
We are told over and over that this grand State was founded, furthered,
and kept through rugged individualism, only the most hardy of immigrants moving
to inhabit the rough terrain, harsh climate, and wild environs. Montanans then see themselves as individuals
able to make free and arbitrary choices.
Or, or our freedom is limited and constricted by a regulatory
bureaucracy. In these two choices,
government is always the enemy, denying our individual freedoms and private
enterprise. In this narrative, values
are only about private matters and bear little reference or regard to a
particular place.[3]
Assumed by Native culture but too
often forgotten in our state and national dialog is a deeper narrative that
remembers the importance of place, tradition, and commitment through
cooperation and community. As a diverse
people, we seek common ground. He
references a story from his own family where diverse neighbors, who might
consider each other distasteful in all other spheres of life, necessarily came
together to cooperate in barn raisings.[4] We learn to inhabit a particular place
recognizing, as almost all Native teaching does, that we must “dwell there in a
practiced way, in a way which relies upon certain regular, trusted habits of
behavior.”[5] We live in this place as if our grandchildren
might live in this place, to the seventh generation, with deepening delight and
gratitude as people of fertile soil.[6]
Some 27 years ago, Kemmis wrote of a
need to return to and remember the deeper narrative of a diverse people who
relied on each other as neighbors in cooperation and community. God risks.
God is a spendthrift. And seeds
are scattered and fall on the ground in the Heights, in Lame Deer, the west
side, out in Lockwood, in Crow Agency, the South Side and right here in
downtown Billings. And we? You know who we are. In cooperation and community, we are the
soil. Pregnant with possibility, we are
the soil. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Robert W. Funk and Roy W.
Hoover and The Jesus Seminar, The Five
Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (San
Francisco: HarperOne, 1996), p.
478. Gerd Ludemann, Jesus after 2000 years: What He
Really Said and Did (Amherst ,
NY
[2] Daniel Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place
(Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), p. 11.
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