Sunday after All Saints Day – November 2, 2014

Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34:1-10; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12

Homily preached by the Rev. Canon Linda S. Taylor

 It’s so good to see all of you! I’m recognizing faces. This is fun!   This is a special day. This is the day that we remember all of those saints who have gone before us. All those saints who have given us a pattern for Christian living—those we’ve known, those we’ve held in our hearts, those we see no longer. We know their stories. They have been so important to us. We also know the stories of those other saints, the saints we’ve never met—from centuries ago or just decades ago. People whose stories are also known to us. People whose stories have come to us through other people who have had direct experience with them. As we think of those saints, we each have our own ideas about what sainthood is all about. About holiness—what makes people holy. We all have our own sense of that. And the people in Jesus’ time were really clear—clear about holiness. They had the law. The law described exactly what made people holy. And they had the interpretation of the law that made it even clearer. They knew what holy people looked like. Everybody knew. They looked like God’s favorite kids. They were respected. Most of them were rich, and they say in the front pew in the synagogue, so everybody could see them. Everybody knew what holy people looked like in Jesus’ time.

So when Jesus takes the disciples up the mountain and sits down and starts telling them God’s idea of holiness, you got to believe they were surprised. Listen again to those words that Jesus gave them:

Blessed are the poor.

 Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.

Blessed are the merciful.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake.

Then he went on to teach. Only after he told the people how blessed they were–in all their situations—did he go on to teach. Today’s gospel portion, which we call the Beatitudes–the Blessings—is way back in the fifth chapter of Matthew. We’ve been way up in 25 and 26—up in that range—but now we’re way back in the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. This is his first public teaching. It goes on for about three chapters, and it’s full of “You have heard it said, but now I tell you….” And he begins this teaching by turning upside down the expectation of what holiness looks like. Before he begins to tell us how we are to live, he reminds us that we are blessed. No matter what’s happening. No matter what kind of situation we find ourselves in, we are blessed. When we’re in all kinds of situations, we are blessed.

(Long silence)

That just kind of hit me. This is twice now I’ve said this today, but it just kind of hit me. The depth and strength of this blessing. We sometimes tend to think that we have to work for this blessing—that we have to be like Mother Teresa doing marvelous things—that we have to be like the martyrs who died in the arenas—that we have to be like Dr. Martin Luther King who began a movement that’s still shaking our world. But that’s not what it’s about. We’re not blessed because we do something spectacular. We’re not blessed because we’re in trouble, either. We’re not blessed because we’re poverty-stricken, in spirit or in goods. We’re not blessed because we mourn or we’re meek or we’re merciful. All of those things are built in the blessing we’re already in. We can’t earn that blessing. We don’t have to earn that blessing—that’s the Good News. That blessing is there. It flows out of God’s unbelievably, overwhelmingly, exuberant and extravagant love—that just flows out like water. I gave the example this morning about what happens when you forget to turn off the water in the bathroom sink, and the plug is in, and a couple of hours later you notice that the water is going down the hall. It’s overflowing, it’s filled the room, it’s going down th[...]

RCL Year A, Proper 24

Well, it’s hard to believe that this is it. My last sermon to you at ECA. My last chance to say everything I want to say. Where do I begin? Do I lay out all my theology to make sure that you get it, do I tell you all the stories I never got to before, do I try out one last joke? Well, as Maria says in the Sound of Music, let’s start at the very beginning. Not the beginning of our time together in January of 2011. I mean the very beginning: the basic truth, what it all boils down to: you are God’s beloved, and God is doing good things here. That’s the essence of what I want to say to you today.

But it takes more than that to sum up our last few years together. To do that is more complicated. For my side of it, I have learned much about myself and my ministry, who I am and who I’m not, what I can do well and what I really can’t. You’ve watched me grow and been patient with me (mostly). Because even though I’d been ordained for several years and served in three congregations before I came here, I’d never been rector. I’d never had quite this much authority in a group of people – what I said hadn’t carried quite as much weight as an associate priest. So I didn’t know that some questions were not as simple as they first appeared – ‘where do you want the altar flowers to go?’ seemed like such an easy one on the surface. Or ‘Hey, what if we tried taking out the kneelers?’ While other questions went much more easily than I’d expected, like asking you all to participate in the reconciliation process several years ago, to get through the feelings from the embezzlement. Or inviting George Romer and then Mary McPherson to be senior wardens with me. (Excellent senior wardens, I must say.) Or hiring a new Christian Ed director – what a blessing Susie Ferguson turned out to be for this congregation and our children. But it took me a while to realize that when I offered an opinion, it was actually listened to. Not always accepted, of course, but listened to.

At the same time, I learned a lot about you. I learned what you liked to do, which weren’t just the things that had shown up in your parish profile during the search. You enjoy your fellowship dinners – serving barbecued meat, smoked meat, roasted meat, meat cooked in pits, meat in sausages, marinated meat… You excel at visiting each other in the hospital – no matter how quickly I got there to see someone, you had nearly always beaten me to the room. You like music that you can sing along with in worship, though I’m still not entirely certain what music that is. And I learned about what you deeply wanted, which is to see your beloved church continue and thrive. And to work more on your own lives of prayer and relationship with God. And I also saw that you are willing to risk new things to do that, even the unknown and suspect territory of community organizing, or tackling a public commitment to saying the Daily Office every day. Of course, sometimes what you like and what you deeply want for this congregation don’t always line up perfectly, and so we had some things we had to talk through along the way. And my own limitations and contradictions sometimes thwarted what I wanted to see happen here. That’s the complicated part. So saying goodbye now is partly about celebrating all that we did together – and forgiving and letting go of what we didn’t get to do.

The thing is, we’re all kind of contradictory creatures. In the words of one of my mentors which I often repeat, human motives are always mixed. So of course a congregation of humans doing life together is going to be even more mixed. Today’s gospel passage, I think, is about that – our contradictions, our mixed motives. The trick question that the Pharisees ask of Jesus, should we pay taxes or not, has one motive in mind, to catch him up. But Jesus’ response is serious, naming the competing claims we all have on our lives. Pay taxes? Yes. Give to the emperor what belongs to him, he says – you live in this wo[...]

RCL Year A, Proper 23

There’s nothing worse than being invited to a party that you don’t want to go to. Or even worse, a wedding. Someone invites you because they count you as a friend or as an important connection, and they want you to be part of their special day – and you just don’t want to go. You have other things to do; there’s a game on that you are really bummed about missing; you know it’s going to be boiling hot at that wedding venue; and in the end, you don’t really like them that much anyway. So either you drag yourself there and grumble, or more likely, you come up with an excuse for why you can’t come. Ever felt that way?

Jesus’ parable is about those kinds of excuses. But not just the excuses we make to friends and colleagues – it’s about the excuses we make to God.

First we have to acknowledge how over-the-top and violent this parable is. A king invites people to a wedding, and not only do they make excuses for why they can’t come, but they beat and kill the postman delivering the invitation. Then in retaliation the king attacks and burns the city of those who RSVPed their regrets. He tries again to have his party, inviting people he doesn’t know off the streets to come instead. But when he finds one of those random guests wearing the wrong clothes, he throws him out into outer darkness.

Weddings are high-stress situations for many. But I would imagine that most of us have never been to one that felt quite like this.

There’s a whole history of hurt and rage behind Matthew’s version of this parable, the story of a community that was torn and turned against itself over who Jesus was and how they were to understand him after his death and resurrection. A lot of accusations about who’s really part of the wedding feast and who wasn’t ever part of it after all. And that hurt and anger has carried on through the centuries, with this parable and other texts used to justify horrible brutality and revenge on the part of Christians toward their Jewish brothers and sisters. We have to recognize the bloody legacy of this story, and what it was originally intended to convey – it doesn’t do to gloss over it.

But scripture has power in part because its meaning continues to evolve and change over time. This parable is not just an allegory of Jewish-Christian relations in the first century. It is a story about us, and about God. Because we are invited to a wedding. And all too often, we don’t really want to come – and then sometimes even when we do, we’re not really ready to be there.

The IAF core team leading the work of community organizing at ECA this last year has learned some things about our congregation along the way. We began this endeavor thinking about how we could engage more effectively with our neighbors, really become a larger part of the Almaden and San Jose community and serve others with our gifts. That idea galvanized some of us: we’ll get more involved and make a difference, we’ll attract people to join us! And it made others of us just tired: what, do more than we’re already doing? I’m already worn out. But very soon into the process we realized that even though many people at ECA named the quality of the community here as one of the main things they loved about the place, a lot of people in this community really didn’t know one another all that well. Some people didn’t even know the names of their fellow parishioners, let alone basic facts about their lives. And even those who did know others felt uncertain about how deep that relationship could go – they weren’t so sure they could talk about things like money, say, or which way they planned to vote in the next election, let alone matters of faith and doubt. And the core team realized that without that level of trust and relationship, we would have a hard time discerning and involving ourselves with new ministries outside of ECA.

That realization has been a long time coming, because the core team is itself made up of, well, people from the church too. P[...]

RCL Year A, Proper 20

Every evening when I make dinner, one of the last steps is to get out two plastic cups and the gallon of milk, pour the milk into both cups, and then crouch down so my eye is at the level of the cups, to check and be sure the level of milk is exactly the same in each cup. Usually I do this without thinking. Sometimes, though, I stop and catch myself, and think, this is so ridiculous. But I know that if I don’t check, somebody else will. Two somebody elses, to be accurate. It has to be even.

Anyone who has kids or remembers being a kid knows exactly what this is about. It has to be fair. If one kid gets something, the other has to get it. If they don’t, it’s not fair!

We are deeply imprinted with this. It’s what we mean by justice. Justice – think of the statue of Justice with her scales, weighing things out – justice measures and calculates to be sure everyone receives their due. It’s how we make sure there is equal opportunity, equal compensation, equal rights. When justice is lacking, someone is bound to notice. Sometimes that noticing can lead to rebellion, revolution, and war, when the injustice is too great. Justice matters.

But we’re confronted today with two stories where justice as we define it is thrown out the window. Or, to be more accurate, where justice is trumped by something even better: generosity and grace, radical, reckless free gift. It’s so wonderful, it’s hard to take in. But for most of us, our first reaction to these stories is not to exclaim over the generosity; it’s to think, it’s not fair.

Jonah’s the first of the stories, the prophet whose task it is to go and preach repentance to those dreadful Assyrians. No way, he thinks. I don’t want those enemies of Israel to be given the chance of forgiveness – are you kidding? So off he runs to Tarshish – but then there’s the storm, and the belly of the great fish, and Jonah finds himself on his way to Nineveh after all. But his sense of justice is still so strong that he can’t stand what God is doing – can’t even believe that God might be up to something more. So he goes to the city, does his job, and leaves to sit and enjoy the spectacle of Nineveh’s punishment. But to his horror, the people of Nineveh take him at his word and repent, and God forgives them – them, those horrible no-good Assyrians. And God teaches Jonah a little lesson, sitting out there under his bush. My grace and generosity is greater than your sense of justice, Jonah. That story we get; we know we’re supposed to laugh at Jonah and be on God’s side. Repentance is an act that should receive the compensation of forgiveness, after all – at least in one kind of equation.

But centuries later, Jesus tells his followers a story that bothers us a bit more. It has a similar moral, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. There’s a lot of work to be done in the vineyard, and over and over throughout the course of the day, the manager of the vineyard goes out and hires more workers. The last ones are hired so late that they work only one hour of the whole day. But in the end, all the workers, the one hour shift and the ten hour shift, receive the same wage. It’s not fair. Which is Jesus’ point. God’s generosity is greater than our sense of justice.

Justice is essential in human dealings. We need to balance and measure and calculate to prevent injustice, to prevent people from being taken advantage of and exploited. But not everything can be measured and accounted for. How much repentance does it take to equal full forgiveness, after all? What is the measure of our lives? How do we calculate our relative goodness? We can’t. God’s generosity doesn’t stop to add it up; it’s a reckless generosity. And really, so is ours, as one commentator points out, at least to some extent. Very few of us track each day with a tally sheet, scoring each other for merits and demerits. We love and forgive our family members, friends, coworkers, all the time. Generosity is the basis for relat[...]

On Sunday, September 14th, Will Bond and Nick Martin shared their experiences from a summer trip to Philadelphia for the Episcopal Youth Event.  The EYE draws over 800 high school aged kids from all over the country and even world wide.  Will and Nick also went on a mission trip to Chester, PA.  Listen as they share their experience.

RCL Year A, Proper 18

At retreats and other events, I’ve had the chance to spend time with monastics over the years, and I always find myself delighted by their humor and bracing honesty. They are people who know themselves and others very well. One monk I saw as spiritual director would always warn me against my own pretensions, saying, ‘Human motives are always mixed.’ Nobody is pure. And in other conversations, when monks were asked, what’s the hardest thing about being a monk?, the answer has always been clear: ‘Other monks.’ Whatever drew them into the monastic life in the first place, they have had to deal with the other people who are there as well. And monasteries, like churches, are often full of people who are more difficult than most. We’re the island of misfit toys, as some say about the church. But the thing is, dealing with one another is how we really grow in knowledge of and love towards God.

There’s a theory of group development by Bruce Tuckman, a psychologist who was at Princeton in the 1960s. He listed five stages of development for any group gathered around a common task, which he called forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. (Why the ridiculous rhyming words? because it comes from the Dilbert management speak world. But there’s still some useful truth in it nevertheless.) In the forming stage, the group is polite, conversations stay on the surface, and everyone stays comfortable. They rely on the group’s leader to feel safe, and that strong desire for safety means that not much really gets done. In the storming stage, conflict develops. Different agendas emerge, the leader is questioned, personalities clash, and everything starts feeling less safe for everyone. Cliques develop of likeminded people, and sometimes turn into factions. But if the group is able to move through those conflicts successfully, then they move into the third stage, where they listen to one another well, are willing to change their minds and learn from one another, and trust each other. They share the leadership, and the group is able to move ahead with its mission. If the group is really good, it will move to the performing stage, a high level of maturity and productivity, both as a group and in the work of each individual. And some groups come to an end eventually, the adjourning stage.

No theory of development ever claims to be linear, however. And not every group goes through all the stages. As a group continues its life, further conflicts may develop. New members will come and old members will leave, adding to the uncertainty and moving the group backward along the stages of development. So the group will need to reform around its mission again and again. Many groups never make it out of stage one at all, because they fear conflict too much – they dip a toe into an area of difficulty and quickly retreat. Everyone stays where they feel safe, but the purpose of the group, the task it is meant to accomplish, is lost.

It’s a theory that works pretty well for churches. A congregation is a group gathered around a shared task or mission, and it grows over time in the depth of community it can sustain. But there’s no guarantee that a church, or any other group, will develop real community – because to do so, they have to go into the hard stuff together. People get to know each other, and before too long, they stop being quite as nice to each other and start battling for who gets to be in charge. And somebody steps on somebody else’s toes. No wonder that within the first century of the church’s life, they were already talking about how to deal with conflict and forgive one another – what our gospel passage talks about today.

So what do you do when conflict erupts in your community? says Jesus. Well, you deal with it directly. Go and talk to the person who stepped on your toes, privately. If that doesn’t address the problem, then talk to them again, with the help of a few trusted friends. If the problem continues fur[...]

RCL Year A, Proper 15

You remember that children’s song with the hand motions?

The church is not a building

The church is not a steeple

The church is not a resting place

The church is the people…..

 

I am the church

You are the church

We are the church together

All who follow Jesus

All around the world

Yes, we’re the church together!

We are all digesting the news of my leaving ECA – me no less than you. There are a whole lot of feelings amongst us. Some of you are angry; some of you are sad; some of you, perhaps, are relieved. Deep down I believe that Jim and I are following God’s call by this move to New York, but it is nonetheless sad to be saying goodbye to all of you and to this beautiful place. This change is coming sooner than we all anticipated, and it has not been easy sharing the news with you.

There are a whole lot of feelings that you are feeling, and all of them are normal and understandable. But there is one feeling that I want you to resist, and that is despair and hopelessness. Whether you believe it or not, I am convinced that you will be fine. I am not ECA. To paraphrase the song, the church is not the clergy – the church is the people. You are ECA. You, the people, are the church together.

We know this not just because of the song. We know it because you’ve been a congregation for nearly 47 years and I’ve only been here for the last 3 ½ of them. Some of you have been here for most of that 47 years. Some of you have been here much less. But you’re all the church together, every one of you as important as the others.

We know you’re the church because when one of you is sick or grieving, lots of others of you go out of your way to take care of that person. Whether you’re able to ‘pay it back’ or not, many of you have had to learn to accept the gift of care and attention when crisis hit. And many of you have been glad to give the help when it’s been needed.

We know that you’re the church because you’ve met together in groups and committees and vestries and talked long and hard about your mission and how you serve God in this neighborhood. You did that in your last rector search, you’ve done it as we’ve stepped into community organizing, you’ve done it in dinner parties and lunch groups and offsite meetings – many of those meetings, I might add, without the benefit of clergy.

We know you’re the church because you gather here Sunday after Sunday, regardless of who is or isn’t up front leading the service. You have opinions about what happens in worship, but you come whether it’s exactly to your taste or not because you know it’s an important foundation to your life together. You show up.

You are the church, and you will go on long after you’ve called your next rector to join you along the path.

I think you know all of this. And I think over the last few years you’ve been realizing more and more why you are church. That understanding has been expanding and evolving over time, for you and for the wider church. As the culture around us has been changing, we as a whole church together, God’s people in the world, are learning just who we’re here for.

The gospel story we heard today is all about that question. Jesus has an exchange with a woman that still sounds shocking even to our ears. He leaves Jewish territory and roams through Gentile lands, escaping at least for a while the wrath and hostility of the Jewish elders. But even here he is known, and a woman shouts out to him, demanding that he cure her daughter. First Jesus ignores her, then he shrugs her off, and finally when she will not let him go, he insults her to her face. It’s hard to read and hear. Is this Jesus meek and mild, Jesus the loving and inclusive? Doesn’t seem much like it. But the woman persists still further, arguing that even she, a Gentile woman, is part of his mission field. And suddenly he looks at her with new eyes. You’re right, he realizes. Great is your faith!

There are commentators who go out of their way to explain that all of this [...]

RCL Year A, Proper 14

We took the kids backpacking overnight last week, a fun adventure that quickly turned very exciting when a huge thunderstorm with hail and pouring rain hit us right as we were eating our dinner. We dove into our tents, Jim with Benji and me with Frances, and hunkered down. In our tent we discovered all the leaks in the rain fly, sang songs, told stories, ate M&Ms – but finally, Frances dissolved into tears as the lightning flashed and hail banged down and thunder roared on and on. In the end, the rain lasted nearly three hours – way more than we’d bargained for. But we made it through, and she fell asleep, and later I did too – and the morning was clear and beautiful and everybody was damp, but happy.

Storms are powerful things, times when we realize just how little we are in control. They happen when they’re predicted and they happen unexpectedly; they happen in our lives all the time, real storms and life-event kinds of storms. So maybe it’s not surprising that there are actually two different stories of Jesus and his disciples and a boat and a storm. Matthew includes them both in his gospel. The earlier one is the one where all of them are together in the boat, a storm arises, Jesus is asleep, and the disciples shake him awake, shrieking, don’t you care that we’re perishing?? In that story, Jesus rebukes the storm, stills it, and then turns and rebukes the disciples for their lack of faith. And they are amazed and wonder, what sort of man is this who can control the sea??

Several chapters later, there is this story we just heard. Jesus puts the disciples into the boat without him, a storm arises, he walks across the water and terrifies them still further, and then calls Peter out of the boat. Peter steps toward Jesus, panics and begins to sink, and Jesus rebukes him for his doubt, grabs him and climbs into the boat – and then the storm is stilled. And the disciples are not only amazed, but this time they realize what sort of man this is – that Jesus is the Son of God.

There have been two storms in my family in recent weeks, one literal, one more of a life storm. The first, the real storm, happened to my brother and his family, when an enormous windstorm tore through their town a few weeks ago. 70 mph winds took down a huge fir tree, narrowly missing their house. My brother and his son Phillip, a teenage state champion golfer, were out playing golf when it happened – yes, playing golf in a windstorm. When my brother got the call from neighbors about what was going on back at his house, he shrugged and figured, nothing to help it now, so they finished the round. He works in insurance; he understands catastrophe and the worst that can happen, and he could see this was not it. It didn’t require his immediate crisis response, so he didn’t give it. He is not a person of faith, but it is reminds me of the first story of the disciples in the boat with Jesus: realizing that although you are in a big storm in a little boat, you have the resources to deal with it. You might wonder, Who is this? just how are we staying so calm? But basically you manage to keep going.

In a different kind of storm, my mother just learned that she has to have a hip replacement. For the past 40 years of their marriage, she has been the hale and healthy one while my father has had various health scares, surgeries, ER visits, and so on. About 6 months ago that suddenly changed, when she developed some terrible pain in her back and hip. She began to have to use a walker even to move around the house. Here was a call she couldn’t ignore. But her first thought on this news from the doctor was, I can’t have this surgery, who will take care of Dad while I’m in the hospital? I can’t step out in this storm. Everything will fall apart. Only when we, her kids, said repeatedly that we were there to help, that she was not in this alone, did she begin to face into it – and then said later how ‘providential’ it was that we had been there wh[...]

RCL Year A, Proper 11

Have you ever felt absolutely certain about something, only to discover that you were totally wrong? A few years ago my son was moving up to a new class in his preschool. There were two different classrooms and sets of teachers that he could be assigned to, and I was absolutely certain which class I didn’t want him in. I had noticed this particular teacher on the playground and I didn’t want her. To my eye she looked coarse, unkind to the children, even trashy – too much makeup, too many tattoos, the trace of too many cigarettes in her voice. Anyone but her, I thought. The night the assignments were posted, I called the school to find out who B. had. And it was that teacher. Oh no, I thought. Oh NO. But the very first day I took him into that classroom, that teacher was there to greet me. ‘You moved here from New York?’ she said. ‘I grew up in New York! You like camping? I love camping!’ B. immediately connected to her, and as the weeks went by I often received photos emailed in the middle of my day of the two of them having a merry old time together. And very quickly I realized how totally wrong I was, how incorrect a judgment I had made about her purely based on my assumptions. I could hear God gently reprimanding me in my head.

Sometimes we’re completely wrong about people. We make judgments based on an impression or hearsay or something they said on an off day, and it can take us a long time to realize that we were wrong. Sometimes we’re wrong about whole groups of people. The church as a whole has had problems with this – from supporting slavery to racial segregation to fights over the ordination of women and gay marriage, we have found ourselves as an institution more than once on the side of what is wrong, adamantly arguing in judgment on other people. Only later have we looked back and seen where we been wrong. And all of those wrong judgments can lead to real damage, in our own selves, in the lives of others, and in the institutions we’re a part of. It is no light thing what we think about others and about the world, because it leads us to act in ways that have real consequences.

Jesus’ parable today highlights these kinds of flaws in our judgment. Good and evil are mixed up in this world, he’s saying, just the way wheat is mixed with weeds in a field. They might look alike; tearing up one might result in damage to the other. The only way to tell will be at the end of time, when the larger picture is revealed, and what you don’t know and understand now will be made clear. Stop clinging to your sense of certainty, and let God be the judge – you cause harm with your misjudgments. Or as Isaiah points out, there is no other god but God – stop trying to be God yourself.

It’s hard to resist, though, isn’t it? As the saying has it, “When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed they are not it.” We may not actually think we’re God or the center of the universe. But we’re pretty sure God agrees with us, that we’re standing pretty close to the center ourselves. Whether it’s in our political views or our family relationships, it’s the other people who are the problem. Carried to the extreme, this is what leads us to shoot down a plane we believe to be the enemy’s military aircraft – only to find out that we’ve killed hundreds of innocent people on a jet. Most of the time the effects of our mistakes are smaller than this, of course. And yet they can still be devastating to people around us.

Tim Keller, a pastor in New York, did a lot of preaching and writing a few years ago on idolatry, the worship of other gods besides God. He made the point that idolatry really is the main sin for all of us – not the worship of carved idols and statues, but of other things we have set up as our gods, things that we obey and that compel our behavior. Everything from career success to religion to individual self-sufficiency can become our god, Keller says. And when they are there i[...]

RCL Year A, Proper 10

One of the things I love about Jesus’ parables is how much there is to take from them. They’re not like Aesop’s fables or Just-So Stories – there’s no clear single meaning or point he’s trying to make. Jesus tells the story, people hear it and ponder, and he walks away. That’s how I think God communicates with us – that’s how I experience God communicating in my life, at least. The communication is clear, and yet not logical-rational clear. The point is there, but it lies beyond our ability to absolutely articulate it in words. So I distrust anyone who tries to boil God and God’s message down to sound bytes. I think the truth is always greater than our ability to explain it.

And yet this parable today is followed by just that: an explanation. A private explanation, directly from Jesus to the disciples. Like he turns to them and whispers, ‘What that beautiful story I just shared with the masses means is really this…’ And so the explanation absolutely shapes how we hear the story. This parable is about how people receive God’s word, and we know that because Jesus told us so. So when we hear this parable we’re supposed to think about what kind of soil we are. Are we good fertile soil, bearing fruit? Are we hard and rocky or thorny or shallow? Let’s all be working harder to make our soil better at receiving and living out God’s truth.

But the problem is that the explanation doesn’t entirely capture the whole story. The story begins with the sower sowing seed. It doesn’t just focus on the soil, but on the sowing and the seeds. Whatever Matthew’s intentions in including this explanation from Jesus, it seems pretty reductionist. Which is a reminder that these stories of Jesus were oral tradition, things Jesus said that got repeated and passed along until someone decided to write them down – and along the way, decided what order to write them down in, what explanations to add in, and other pieces of context that shape the way we understand them. Generally it’s pretty impossible to get back to what Jesus said, pure of everything else that got added to it along the way, despite what some biblical scholars try to do; and we believe that the Holy Spirit had a hand in all the human muddling that produced scripture, so that the result is still more or less inspired. But that doesn’t stop us from noting when there’s such a clear disjunction in the text, and wondering why.

So what if we back up before the explanation and focus our attention on the sower in this story, rather than the soil – the sower who goes out to sow. It’s an image that is easy to understand. We don’t even have to be gardeners to get this one. Maybe because of this very parable, the metaphor of planting seeds makes intuitive sense. Seeds take time to sprout and grow – not everything we do bears fruit right away. We know that in our lives, just like we know that in our gardens. Parenting, growing a business, developing a relationship, all take time. Immediate success is unlikely with things that really matter.

So too with being followers of Jesus. If we understand the seed to be the good news of the kingdom, the word, the message of God’s love and saving grace, then we’re supposed to be spreading it just as a sower does – as well as receiving it as the soil. We’re not the seed; we’re not the creator of the seed; but we, like the disciples who were listening to Jesus, are the ones meant to get the seed out there. And from this story at least, it seems we’re supposed to be spreading it pretty freely, letting the soil receive it as it will. We may or may not succeed. But whether it succeeds or not isn’t our business, strangely enough. Which is hard for us to take in.

Here’s the hard part about sowing seeds: you really can’t control what happens next. Birds might come and eat them; a drought might come and no water will feed the sprouts; the soil might be the wrong kind for the plants to grow. So when we get to spreading the seed of the good news, or [...]