Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 07.13.2014
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 13: 1 - 23
I’m always a little off after a vacation, just a little flaky. Or flakier, to be fair. For the last couple of Sundays, I’ve been bobbing about a couple of hundred miles off the west coast of Ecuador, meaning I’m probably not to be trusted around heavy machinery for a while. It was my wife and my sons and all of my inlaws, all together on an eighty-five foot boat smack dab in the middle of the Pacific, as my family and I explored the Galapagos Islands.
It’s an amazing little archipelago, nineteen volcanic islands dappled across the ocean, islands that are slowly drifting along on the Nasca plate, moving just a tick over two inches a year towards South America. It’s most famous, of course, for providing the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species.
Before he got around to writing Origin of the Species, Darwin wrote a travelogue entitled The Voyage of the Beagle, which chronicled his journey as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle, a 90 foot brig. Darwin was 22 years old when it began, having just gotten his bachelor’s. The career plan for young Charles after graduation: becoming the pastor of some small congregation in England.
“I’m just taking a short break before getting into the working world, Dad,” I can hear him saying. “I’m sure I’ll get right back to my church plans when I get back.” “How long will you be gone,” his Dad would say. “Oh, it’s just a short 40,000 mile trip all over the world. By sail. Oh, and could you spare some cash? It’s kind of, um, an unpaid internship. But it’ll only be, like, you know, for the next five years.”
Having spent time aboard an 85 foot vessel--just a foot and a half shorter than the HMS Beagle--I have to admit that I’m amazed that the twenty-something Darwin could get any thinking done at all without the jar full of dramamine they kept in the common area of our little boat. He did that for five years? Yikes. I guess after the first year or so at sea seasickness wears off, or so I’ve heard.
In the months that the Beagle spent mapping the Galapagos, Darwin noted the wild variety of life there, and how that life subtly differs from island to island. Darwin’s observations of the subtle difference between the living things on those islands led him to intuit the idea of evolutionary change.
Moving from island to island, what was most amazing was not just the variety of life. It was the wildly, impossibly different landscapes that you’d encounter as you moved from island to island. On the northeastern reaches of San Cristobal, the land was arid desert, where a few scrubby plants clung fiercely to the rocky soil. Travel just thirty miles, and on the Southern shores of Santa Cruz, the land was lush and rich and tropical, a riot of green and growth. Travel around to the narrow channel between Santa Cruz and the volcanic Sombrero Chine island, and the land is a lava moonscape after a ten year long eruption back around the year 1900. It is utterly devoid of life, black rock blasted dead by the relentless equatorial sun.
For almost a week, we traveled around an area not considerably larger than my home state of Virginia, and it was like we’d traveled from Virginia to Arizona to somewhere on Mars. And life, wherever it could, adapted and made do, finding some way to scramble out a foothold. Some places were dead. But there was not a single place it wasn’t trying, endlessly casting seed, endlessly trying to find purchase.
Life is like that. It yearns to live, yearns to grow, yearns to make more of itself. But it has limits to where and how it can engage, limits that are remarkably like the limits played out in the challenging little parable Jesus spins out in today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew.
This teaching is called, by Jesus himself, the Parable of the Sower. Jesus has been flashmobbed, as crowds have gathered, pressing in. He’s forced to create an impromptu amphitheater, separating himself from the crowd by putting out a short distance from shore in a small boat. As the throngs lined the shore, Jesus bobs out a little distance, sits in the boat, and starts talking about the Good News.
The story he tells is of a man who goes out planting. He’s spreading his seed, far and wide. He sows it on a path, where it is exposed and helpless, and it’s quickly eaten by flying varmints. He casts it down on rocky ground, hard and impermeable as lava flow, and there the seed is blasted dead in the relentless sun. More gets cast into soil where weeds are growing, sedge and crabgrass and kudzu, no doubt. There, the plants grow, but are strangled out by their fiercely growing competitors.
But some of the seed, cast out with wild and generous abundance, falls in soil that’s good enough to yield. That grows into a harvest, some places more richly than others, but a harvest nonetheless.
This is pretty much the entire story, and Jesus moves on with no further comment, as the crowd mutters in rumbling debate amongst itself. He makes no effort to interpret. He gives them no symbolic key. He just lays the story out there, and lets it sit on their heads for a while.
Afterwards, we hear that the disciples come to Jesus, after the crowds have dispersed. They say, “Um, hey, Jesus...er...these stories aren’t quite working. Have you considered maybe a nice list, you know, something relevant, something the people can relate to, like The Seven Harry Potter Characters You’ll Find In The Kingdom of God.”
But there’s a reason Jesus tells them this strange, intentionally obscure and confusing story. If you want to learn from a story, you need to be focused. You need to engage with the deeper concepts involved. Rabbis in first century Judaism commonly used storytelling as a way of engaging the insightful, and closing out those who didn’t want to put in the effort. It’s not exactly a method that’s designed to make everyone feel good about themselves, nor is it a method that rewards those who want everything neatly spelled out for them. That’s the point. It is meant to challenge. It is meant to be hard.
As he shared with his disciples, that’s the reason for storytelling. Though he was intentionally making us work our imaginations to grasp it, it was still Good News he was sharing. It’s good news about a radically new Way of life, about the Reign of God at hand. That Reign of God meant the shattering of the brokenness that rules us. It means graciousness and forgiveness, a world ruled not by the power of Mammon or the sword, but by the radical love of God.
As hard as this parable was intended to be, one thing that’s worth paying attention to is the “foolishness” of the sower, whose generosity with the seed is wild and wanton and seemingly pointless. Who pitches seeds out among weeds? Why waste seed on rocks, or on your sidewalk?
C’mon, God. Get with the times. Better to be neat and precise, wasting nothing, as your semi-autonomous John Deere tractor pulls a Kinze 4900 robotic planter, precisely placing every seed based on the satellite mapping data uploaded from your Farmworks management suite, while streaming realtime data on crop distribution and soil composition from your circling Trimble UX-5 agricultural drone.
But the Kingdom of God is not like industrial agribusiness. If it were, there’d be no hope for any of us.
God would not waste God’s precious love on bad soil. There’d be none of it for the bitter, or the selfish, or the anxious, or the greedy. God would not waste God’s love on the distractable, or the shallow, or the proud.
But the point Jesus is making here is not that God withholds the possibility of the Kingdom from all but the few. It’s that God pours out that possibility to every soul willing to receive it, and even those souls who are not.
This was the image that played out as this parable danced across my time in the Galapagos, seeing island after island, and the relentless efforts of life to find purchase even in the most blighted, desert corners of God’s creation.
For any who are willing to listen, and to pay attention, Jesus tells a story of the soil of our own selves. Here God is, telling us, over and over, across the thousands of years of human history, what it would mean to live a gracious existence.
And yet we--all of us-- can give ourselves over to ignorance, clouding our hearing through willful laziness of heart and mind. We can realize that faith is hard, that it requires hard choices and can create conflict with the broken things in our lives, and we back away to the comfort of the familiar and the easy. We can be distracted by the endless cornucopia of distractions in the world, the busyness and nattering stress of our every day. We can turn ourselves towards the hunger for wealth and posessions, towards the pursuit of power and privilege.
These ways, Jesus tells us, we can turn the islands of our souls into dead and lifeless places. That’s not what he wants for us, for any of us, as he bore the seeds of a new creation.
Let your eyes be blessed, and see, he says. Let your ears be blessed, and hear, he says. Let the soil of your island receive God’s new life as best it can, and yield as best it can.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN
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