a sermon on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 10A/Lectionary 13]

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

I can’t remember when the first one arrived, but I believe it was sometime last fall. I opened the mailbox one day and it was lying there on top of all the bills and coupons. At the time we had a sophomore in high school, and that was apparently all that was needed to trip some trigger in a database somewhere for us to receive college brochures. They came sporadically after that first one, but now they are consistently arriving every week—from small colleges, large universities…places I’ve never heard of before. Each one of their slick mailings is addressed by a computer, stamped by a computer, sent out by a robot, all with the hopes that our daughter will not just toss it in the trash can but will open it up and actually look inside and dream and imagine her future studying at that school.

Universities and colleges must send out gobs of these interest brochures, so I called my alma mater, NC State University, to find out just how many. The undergraduate admissions counselor I got on the phone was not able to make a guess at how many, but she did laugh when I asked her to try. All she said is that she easily hands out 2000-3000 brochures a week during one of her recruiting trips, and that there are upward of six other admissions counselors doing the same on a weekly basis. The math starts to add up, and that doesn’t even count the ones mailed each week.

In this day of digital communication and social media and texting, you would think that distributing hard copies of information in a scattershot manner would have gone the way of the Dodo, but you would be wrong. Recently I was speaking with one of our young adults here at church who graduated from Roanoke College about five years ago. Knowing that she did not grow up Lutheran and that she was from a small town in North Carolina, I asked her what made her end up at Roanoke College. “Oh,” she said, “I had never heard of it until I got a piece of mail from them one day.”

It may seem like a waste, but scattershot is a strategy that works, and one which we hear that even God is fond of in this morning’s lessons. Jesus stands on a boat out in the lake while the crowd stands on shore, and he just starts teaching, scattershot. He is not specifically targeting anyone or any group. In fact, he has not really not targeted his message at all so far. Wherever he has gone, Jesus has simply shared the that God’s kingdom has come near, and that everyone who repents is welcome. Like a university admissions counselor sent out to expand her institution’s name, passing out brochures by the thousand, Jesus comes to share God’s Word with anyone and everyone indiscriminately. On this particular day the interest is so high and the desire to be near him so great that the only way he is going to be able to be heard is to stand on the boat and preach from there.

And hearing the word that he teaches is the key to receiving that kingdom. The word is the beginning of faith, just as a seed is the beginning to a plant, and a plant is the beginning to a harvest, and the harvest is the beginning to a meal. At the very beginning of creation it is a word from God that brings everything into existence. “Let there be light,” God says, and then creation flows forth from there. Throughout the years that Israel sought to be God’s people, both in the wilderness and in the Promised Land, it was words from God that sustained them—words of promise, words of hope, words that held them to a high standard. They didn’t have glory and military power and abundance commerce like other kingdoms. But what they did have was God’s word among them. John, the gospel writer, helps us understand that Jesus is God’s word made flesh and living among us.

Each week we are gathered for worship here in this place or online around nothing more than God’s Words because they do something good to us. They cause growth in us, they bring about forgiveness and a deeper understanding of who we are and our place in the world. The things God says are the key to understanding who God is and how we build a relationship with him. And given all of this we might think that something so powerful and so vital to life and so borne of heaven itself would be worthy of great protection and should be parceled out very sparingly. (“One for me, one for you…”) But here comes Jesus, just slinging it out like its Brunswick stew at a Boy scout fundraiser.

The parable of the sower is how Jesus begins his next series of teachings, and this story highlights just how gracious and over-the-top extravagant God is with his word. The farmer doesn’t seem to worry that the seed will ever run out. Instead of carefully planting each seed in the good soil, he scatters them everywhere. It’s not a complicated story. You don’t need to be a wheat farmer or even an amateur gardener to understand its point. God’s Word is shared with the world simply so that goodness and faith may abound. Some people will receive it and others won’t, just like some of the people listening to him from the shoreline will get what he’s saying, and some won’t.

But the parable’s meaning is even deeper than that. The world isn’t divided permanently between those who are good soil and those who aren’t. The seed keeps being sown, and even Jesus’ own disciples will be rocky ground and thorny thickets on different days. For that matter, if we look at the statistics of the parable on a strict level, on average each of us turns out to be hostile to God’s Word most of the time. If the seed in the parable is going out equally scattershot, only one quarter of the seed actually falls on good soil. Only one fourth of what we could receive today in the hymns, in the prayers, in the readings, in the sermons, actually finds its way to fruitfulness in our hearts. That is a terrible return on investment, but God doesn’t seem to concerned. God knows that some will return, and that’s what matters.

 God has faith all the time that somewhere there is some good soil buried in us. God has hope that at any given time, somewhere in our hearts there is the possibility that we are ready to hear and receive how much God loves us, and therefore, ready to work for the building up of his kingdom. God has this faith in that good soil somewhere, and so God keeps giving his Word. God keeps scattering his goodness and mercy in and through Jesus, his Son, who is so bent on reaching and everyone in any situation that he sows himself onto the cross. This is scattershot to the extreme. This is God saying I’m so determined that my word never be withheld. Even in that solitude and separation there will be good soil somewhere, and new life will begin.

Along the coast of Lake Superior on the upper peninsula of Michigan is a very rare and fascinating geological feature called Chapel Rock. It is a sandstone rock that rises from the water several years from the shore. It’s like a little rock island, and on that island grows a lone pine tree. Scientists estimate that it is about 250 years old. There is no soil at all on Chapel Rock, and yet the tree thrives. Upon closer look you can see that there is a root that connects the tree on Chapel Rock back to the mainland, stretching out the distance back to the good soil, from where it can get its nutrients and water. Like that root, the death and resurrection of Jesus is God’s promise that he will always be a lifeline to any type of rocky ground we find our hearts to be.

The other lesson Jesus intends with this parable of the sower is for those of us tasked with spreading God’s word here and now. Just like the sower, we are to share God’s love indiscriminately and without agenda. The faith, the love, the promise we experience when we receive God’s Word will never run out, so we don’t need to be stingy with it. God also plans that we will disperse it freely to all of God’s people, not reserving it for certain ones or for people who we think might be receptive. You never know when the seed of faith is actually going to land.

With that in mind, hearing Jesus’ parable also makes us realize that God intends for us to go about ministry without too much concern about the forces that may work against us, the thorns out there that will choke out the faith and the birds that will eat it up. I think we would find this immensely promising in a day and age when congregations are shrinking and shutting at an all time high and more and more people are disaffiliating from church and organized religion altogether. There was an interview in the New York Times this week between Eboo Patel and Tish Harrison Warren about the importance of organized religion in America even now. Eboo Patel is a Muslim and Warren is an Episcopal priest. I got to meet Patel and have lunch with him when the Chaplaincy at the University of Richmond hosted him several years ago. Patel works in interfaith settings seeking to promote harmony and cooperation between different religious groups, but he’s lately become more focused on pointing out the immeasurable good that these groups do in society.

In the interview he mentions that even as the wider church deals with a negative image due to sex abuse scandals and religious violence and the politicization of faith, congregations and faith groups are still out there continuing with their good work, often unnoticed. When it comes to the heavy lifting of refugee resettlement, addiction counseling hunger and homelessness work, society relies on the work that churches and other faith groups are doing. As just one example he cites that recently the city of Chicago welcomed 10,000 migrants into the city, but they hadn’t adequately prepared where they would all sleep. Who’s taking care of them? Catholic Charities and groups like Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. And we know this kind of thing goes on everywhere, all of the time, at congregations large and small across the world.

At the end of the interview Patel says something really interesting. He says that even as communities of faith face headwinds it is important that they just keep telling the stories of beauty and service that they have. It’s easy to get down and circle the wagons, but it’s more important that the word get out. It’s key not just to do the works of God’s word, but to find ways to thoughtfully talk about them too. If you tell an inspiring story, he says, people will eventually move in that direction.

That is the task of the church—to share the stories where God has moved us and used people to bring forth fruit in the world. To go out and plant with abandon! To me, it sounded like advice that this sower might give, the sower in the parable, who goes against the grain of careful, precision farming techniques and instead just wants to share what he has. He wants to share what he has, no matter where it falls, because he knows it’s good…and he knows at some point one little seed on good soil will produce 100 more in return.

Thanks be to God!

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.