Trinity 6: The generous sower

 Isaiah 55.10-13, Psalm 65, Romans 8.1-11, Matthew 13.1-23

 

“Hear then the parable of the sower”

 This famous story is one of the best known of Jesus’ parables, partly, I’m sure, because it is one that is easy to tell to children, so many of us heard it first in school or Sunday school. It’s very visual, too. We can imagine the sower casting handfuls of seed around him. We can imagine the birds descending on the seed on the path, the withered plants in the rocky ground, or smothered by thorns, never having a chance to grow. If we are gardeners, we’ve probably know this in real life. We sow seeds hopefully in the spring, but only a fraction will end up as full grown plants. Heat, cold, drought, flood, slugs, pigeons, and in the vicarage garden wild rabbits too. There’s always something waiting to snuff the life out of our seedlings. It’s a wonder anything makes it at all.

This is one of only two parables that Jesus himself gives a title to. “Hear the parable of the sower”  he said. The other is the parable of the weeds in the field, not the wheat and the tares, as we often call it, - it’s next week’s Gospel. The titles we give to parables tend to reflect what we think they’re about, and can skew our interpretation of them.  The parable we call the “prodigal son”, for example – the Gospels don’t give it a title – could equally be called the Loving Father, or the Two Sons, or “Family life and how not to live it” which would change the focus completely. In this week’s parable, though, Jesus is clear. It’s the parable of the Sower.

And that’s a bit odd, because actually, the sower is hardly mentioned at all. He comes along, sows the seed and then disappears. It’s the other “characters” in the tale, if you can call them that – the seed and the various types of ground it falls on - who take up most of the column inches. Despite this, though Jesus’ title puts the enigmatic Sower centre stage. Hold that thought, because we’ll come back to it later.

So what about those other, inanimate, characters. The seed, Jesus explains to his disciples -  though not to the wider crowd to whom he first tells the story - is the “word of the kingdom”. Words are a way of expressing ourselves, making ourselves known, making things happen. Words change things, for the better or for the worse, and once they are uttered we can’t take them back. If human words are powerful, God’s words, the “words of the kingdom” are even more so.  In the book of Genesis, when God spoke the words, “let there be light” there was light. His word brought everything into being. In John’s Gospel we hear that the Word was God. He identifies Jesus as God’s living Word, God’s supreme way of speaking to us, of revealing himself to us.

The seed in this story, then, is the presence of God, God at work, God’s very self, given to us and for us. And where is it? It is everywhere, thrown around with what seems like no thought for where it might land, into unlikely as well as likely ground. It’s not carefully rationed, not planted deliberately in places where it would do best; it just lands where it falls.

The different soils in the story, are the human hearts and lives it lands in.

This parable can be interpreted in a very judgemental, condemnatory way – woe to you if you are stony ground, weed-infested, plagued by birds! There’s no hope for you. That interpretation tells us that we should all make sure we are a good seedbed. But the problem with that is that soil is what it is. Soil has no choice, no agency. It can’t decide to plough itself. It can’t do anything about the bedrock underlying it. It can’t fight off the weeds, or the birds.

If we hear this parable as an instruction to us to be better soil, we are on a hiding to nothing. Of course, there are things we can do intentionally to be more receptive to God’s word, and Jesus speaks elsewhere about that. But here, he very deliberately chooses an image of something that can’t do anything about itself to represent us, and that seems to me to take the story in a very different direction.  

The clue is in the little episode that separates the telling of the story and its explanation. The disciples ask Jesus why he speaks in parables. Wouldn’t it be better just to say what he means in plain words? But Jesus tells them that it doesn’t matter how plain the words are, some people will hear and others won’t, or won’t at that moment. It’s just as true today. We look around us – and in the mirror at ourselves – and see unpromising, stony, thorn infested, downtrodden soil. We see indifference, carelessness, apathy, anger, abuse, manipulation. We see people trying to make the world better, but being knocked back again and again, their efforts coming to nothing. It looks hopeless. Why bother to try to change or influence anything? What’s the point?

But this is where I come back, as promised, to the title Jesus gives to the parable. It’s the parable of the Sower, not the parable of the seed or the soil, because the Sower is the key to it. If this sower knows his land at all, he surely realises that much of it is inhospitable, unlikely to produce a crop, but he doesn’t write it off. He carries on sowing anyway, because between the stones and thorns, in cracks in the pathway, there will be good soil too, maybe just in patches or pockets, maybe with only room for one stray seed to germinate, but if he doesn’t sow anything there, there is no chance for that stray seed to bring forth life the life that is in it. If he does, though, that one seed might bear 100 more.

It would have seemed like a risky, wasteful strategy to those who first heard the story. Seed was precious and limited to them, not something just to be chucked around willy-nilly. But I think Jesus means them to be surprised, to notice that, and to realise that you can only behave like this if you have an unlimited supply of seed, and that, he is saying, is how it is with God. God doesn’t need to ration his word, his love, his presence and activity in the world, and we don’t need to do it for him either. The green shoots of God’s life might take root and spring up anywhere, not just in the neatly ploughed and weed free corners of the world where we might expect them. After all, they somehow took root in us. If we want to join in with God’s work, be part of his kingdom, we do that by loving people wherever we find them, just as we were loved where others found us.

“My word shall not return to me empty” said God in our first reading. God’s love is never wasted, never pointless, never in danger of running out. He’s not anxious about where he sows it, and it’s not up to us to judge who is worthy of it and who isn’t. Freely you have received, freely give, said Jesus, elsewhere; God will do the rest.  Amen

 

 

Patronal Festival: The feast of St Peter and St Paul

 

Patronal Festival 2023

 

Today is our Patronal Festival. Like a lot of the words we hear and say or sing in a church context, Patronal isn’t a word you’d be likely to encounter in casual conversation in the supermarket. It comes from the word Patron, of course, which in turn comes from the Latin Pater, a father. in the ancient Roman world, where this language of patronage developed, patrons weren’t necessarily actual fathers. They could be anyone who took you under their wing - who encouraged and supported you, who took notice of you, looked out for your interests and promoted you. It was a formal relationship, with set obligations on both sides, and a vital part of how their society was organised. Having a powerful patron was vital to success.

 

The patrons we celebrate today in church aren’t wealthy business people or politicians, though; they are saints. Today is the feast of St Peter and St Paul, to whom this church is dedicated. When a church was first built, and its people chose a dedication for it, they were consciously putting it and its people under the protection – the patronage - of those saints, declaring a particular relationship to them, looking to them for inspiration and guidance. They hoped, too, that they might be “friends in high places”, speaking for them before the throne of God. I’m not sure that courtly imagery works so well for us these day: perhaps thinking of Peter and Paul as companions on the journey is more helpful.  We don’t pray to the saints, still less worship them, we pray to God, but I like to think of the saints as people who pray with and for us, just as a living friend might do, offering us company and encouragement.

 

The Creed talks about the “communion of saints” reminding us that being a Christian isn’t meant to be a solitary endeavour. It’s something we do together – with our church community, with our brothers and sisters across the world, and with those who have gone before us, who have shone with the light of Christ. Sometimes when I pray, it’s just me and God, and that’s fine, but sometimes its good to picture myself surrounded by that great team of well-wishers. It’s like turning up to a party and finding that there are friends there you didn’t know were coming, or having a buddy go along with you for moral support when you are doing something difficult. The saints remind us that being a Christian isn’t a solitary thing. We are called to discover and explore it together, helping each other along the way.  

 

Our readings today, which feature Peter and Paul, illustrate that. They aren’t portrayed as heroes, rugged individualists, but people who needed others, and to whom community was important.

 

St Paul is one of the giants of Christian history. He left a legacy that that changed its course, through the letters he wrote to the churches he founded around the Mediterranean. But at the beginning of the reading we heard today, no one would have predicted that. When we first meet him he is going by his Hebrew name, Saul; it was common for people to use more than one name, in different situations, so that they fitted into whatever the local culture was, just as immigrants today sometimes Anglicise their names if they feel it will make it easier for others to pronounce them. He was Saul to his Hebrew friends, but Paul to the Gentile Romans and Greeks. When we first meet him, he is hell-bent on rooting out anyone who followed the way of Jesus, who he saw as a troublemaker, who’d got his just deserts when he’d been crucified for his radical interpretation of the Jewish faith, an interpretation Paul thought was completely wrong. But on the way to Damascus, Paul heard the voice of that same Jesus speaking from the right hand of God, evidently favoured, not condemned, and suddenly his world was turned upside down. Blinded by the light, he could no longer see the way ahead – spiritually and emotionally as well as literally, and had to be led into the city. Left to his own devices he might simply despaired, but God didn’t leave him to his own devices; he sent Ananias, a local Christian, to him. Ananias knew of Paul’s reputation. He knew he’d had Christians imprisoned elsewhere. He has to have wondered whether he was simply walking into a trap.  But he went anyway, and thank God he did, because if he hadn’t perhaps we wouldn’t be here today; it was Paul’s ministry which enabled the Christian message to spread westwards into Europe, and eventually to these damp islands at the edge of what was then the known world.

 

Paul’s ministry, from the very earliest moment was one which was rooted in community, recognising that we needed one another, just as he had needed Ananias,  and that shines through in his letters. He describes the church as a body, with every part essential to the whole. He speaks of the primary importance of our love for one another, which reflects the love of God for each of us.  

 

St Peter, too, doesn’t get where he needs to be on his own in the story we heard today. Jesus has been raised from the dead, but now what? It’s all too much for Peter – the roller-coaster of his denial of Jesus, Jesus’ death, and then, just when Peter thought it was all over, his resurrection - so he goes back to what he knows, or thinks he knows: fishing. Except that even that goes wrong. He and his friends fish all night but catch nothing. Fortunately, a stranger calls out from the beach that he should cast his nets on the other side of the boat, and he does, and catches a catch like he’s never caught before. But it takes one of his friends, “the disciple Jesus loved” as he’s described here, probably the apostle John, to point out what Peter has missed.  “It is the Lord!”, he says. Peter jumps into the water and swims towards him, into a new life and a new commitment as a leader in the church.

 

Peter and Paul; our Patron saints – two giants in the Christian story, but could only become so because of the communities they were part of, because of the other saints around them, the people who might seem like bit part players, but whose contribution made all the difference.

 

That’s what distinguishes saints from superheroes. Saints don’t have superpowers; they’ree just people who are open to the call of God, whether it is to something apparently great or something that seems insignificant at the time. Today as we celebrate our Patronal Festival, we remember Peter and Paul, but we also remember those who were so vital in their story, Ananias, who bravely welcomed Paul, and the unnamed disciple who saw Jesus and pointed him out to Peter, and all the others who made up the communities they were part of, encouraging and helping them along the way. Their stories hold up a mirror to our own, inviting us to play our own part in that great communion of saints through whom the light of Christ shines in the world, yesterday, today and forever.

Amen