Meditation for Week III in Lent 2016 Of Scattered Seeds, A Sower and the Soils of the Garden Most of you know that our family spends time each summer in the village of Cooperstown, in the leather-stocking district of upstate New York. The scenery is spectacular Lake Otsego is 10 miles long and the drive along its shoreline with the mountains all around you can miraculously bring down anyone s elevated blood pressure. One of the things that charms me most especially if I can get up there in late June or early July are the wild flowers that line the roads wherever you go. The colors and variety are so pleasant to see, I ve often wondered how they came to be growing there. The miles of roadside gardens never fails to prompt me to think about Jesus parable of the sower but also a favorite children s book of mine by Barbara Clooney, Miss Rumphius. (A great read for grown ups as well as children!) For those of you who may not be familiar with this little gem of children s story, Miss Alice Rumphius, inspired by her grandfather s stories of traveling to faraway places and living by the sea, is inspired to tell him that she when she grows up she will also go to faraway places and then when she has grown old she will live by the sea. Her grandfather tells her, That is all very well, little Alice, but there is a third thing you must do. What is that? asked Alice. You must do something to make the world more beautiful, her grandfather told her. (In other words the first two will bring joy to you, but you must also bring joy to others.) Alice promises to do that even though she has no idea what that could be. 1
It takes Miss Rumphius a long time to fulfill this third promise. It is only when she has grown old, having traveled to very far off places and settled now near the sea, that Miss Rumphius figures out how she can honor her childhood promise of doing something to make the world more beautiful; to bring joy to others. While sick and lying in her bed in the early spring, she has time to reflect on this promise and she notices that the flowers she planted the summer before had come up and bloomed in spite of the stony ground. When she recovers she goes out for a walk and is surprised to discover patches of flowers on the other side of the hill from where she had planted her garden. It was the wind! she exclaims in delight. It was the wind that brought the seeds from my garden here! And even the birds must have helped! That is when Miss Rumphius had a wonderful idea. She orders packets and packets of seeds and throughout the summer, with her pockets full of seeds, she walks along highways and country lanes, fields and hillsides and flings handfuls of seeds everywhere. The next Spring there were flowers everywhere blooming in fields and hillsides, highways and lanes. Miss Rumphius, the sower of seeds on every kind of soil, kept her promise and made the world more beautiful, bringing joy to others. Luke tells us that great crowds of people were gathering around Jesus. They are following him from the cities and villages where he has been proclaiming and bringing good news of the kingdom of God. 2
On this particular day, they hear Jesus tell a story about a sower of seeds. Very like Miss Rumphius, the sower in Jesus parable scatters seeds everywhere on the pathways, on rocky ground, among weeds and thorns and on good soil. Now before we consider all the different types of soil, let s ask a few questions about this sower of seeds. If this sower of seeds is a farmer, what is he doing wasting seeds like that? As the crowd listened to Jesus tell this story, they would have been thinking, What a fool! In Jesus day seed was a precious commodity. You gathered seed by hand. No sower, no farmer in their right mind would be so wasteful as to just throw seed on the path, or among rocks and thorns and weeds where there would be so little chance of taking root and growing. Who does that?! Yet, actually, that s the point Jesus is trying to make. Because his parables turn everything upside down from what we expect, the sower isn t like a practical farmer because the sower is God who is crazy in love with all people. This sower is our God who has foolishly and generously sent Jesus into a world full of hard and rocky hearts that would reject him. Nevertheless God casts Jesus into the world anyway. So, is God a fool? Well perhaps by all human standards God is foolish foolishly in love with you and me and all people, the whole world. 3
Like his Father, the Sower, Jesus also scatters the seeds of the kingdom everywhere proclaiming the good news from town to town, on mountainsides and lakeshores, in synagogues, the homes of Pharisees and tax collectors, to women and children, old and young, to Samaritans, Romans and Jews alike. His words and deeds falling like a rain of seeds seeking for some good soil where it can take root and grow and make the world beautiful as the kingdom of God. But this parable is not only about God and Jesus as sowers of the seeds of the kingdom. It also speaks to us, the church. We are being called to be lavish sowers, too; sowers who freely and extravagantly spread the seed of God s love into the lives of others. We forgive those who don t deserve it. We love those who don t return our love. We serve those who may never know what we have done or thank us for it. We talk about our faith with those who are likely to reject it. And we do it like Miss Rumphius trusting that the wind of the Holy Spirit will help us. We don t need to worry about the many kinds of soil rocky, packed down, thorny or good; we can freely and with abandon scatter the seeds of God s love in lives of people all around us and let God worry about what grows. That s good news, too. Because Jesus is speaking about the mystery of how the kingdom of God is planted and grows even in some very unexpected, even inhospitable places. 4
Regardless of the conditions, we scatter the seeds, God is at work to make the seeds take root and grow. Those with ears to hear are those who are willing to scatter the seeds of faith, hope and the love of God into the lives of people wherever they are, no matter the condition or situation they are in. We can do all this with abandon only if we have faith in Christ. Now even though this parable seems simple and understandable on its face, there is always a twist because parables are not really easy to chew; there is always some kind of strangeness in the story that reveals the paradox of the kingdom of God. This parable of the sower, the seeds and the soil tells us that the kingdom of God is universal its everywhere. This parable tells us that the kingdom of God is already present in our midst. And please notice, we did nothing to make it appear and neither do we consent to its appearance. The kingdom of God demands a response and yet the kingdom of God is a mystery whose power is not based on strong-armed intervention but on the weakness of what the worlds considers small, foolish, rejected and cast away. Think of how all this echoes through Jesus ministry. Jesus the Christ, as the Word, comes to his own and his own do not receive him. He is despised. He is the stone the builders rejected. He is ministered to, not in his own recognizable form but in the sick, the imprisoned, and those are generally down-and-out and trampled upon. And to cap his whole mission as the Word sown in the field of the world, he dies, rises, and vanishes. 5
His entire work proceeds as does the work of a seed: it takes place in a mystery, in secret in a way that, as Martin Luther said, can neither be known nor felt, but only believed and trusted oh, by the way that would be the good soil. Now we consider the seed that falls into the other situations. In all of them, despite the condition of the soil rocky, thorny, trampled or well-prepared the seed actually does its proper, reproductive work: it brings new life, it springs up. True, there are differences in the outcome of that work, but what we need to remember is the operative power of the seed, the life-giving power of the Word. True, there is antagonism and resistance to their power. But the kingdom of God does not bludgeon antagonism and resistance into submission or out of existence. It s rather ironic, but the seed and the Word kind of trick the un-responsive into doing God s work when all the while it thought it was doing its own thing. Like the birds that nibble on the seeds and then pass them out of their bodies unimpaired, the forces of evil have no power against the Word. Which means there is nothing neither height, nor depth, nor things present or things past, life or death nothing can separate us from the Love that will not let us go. Because, in the end, it is the Word alone, and not the many interferences with it, that finally counts. And one way or another, God s gracious love will bear fruit in us who are planted in the good soil of Christ. So, as St. Paul said, let us live and be guided by the Spirit, and scatter the seeds of God s Word with abandon 6
in the field of the world and in the lanes of our hearts. Christ is faithful and will keep his promise of the gift of the Spirit. In this way the world will be made anew in the beauty of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentles and self-control. Where these are, the kingdom is. Where these are, Christ is there. Is there anywhere that doesn t need such beautification? So, go! Scatter the seeds of the kingdom with abandon! 7