Sowers of the Kingdom

Sermon

St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, Chandler, AZ

Year A

Proper 10

(Readings)

My father is a police officer in Mobile, Alabama.  He’s been doing that job for over 30 years.  Apparently he’s been pretty good at it.  Over the past 20 years of my life, I’ve gotten snippets of advice from him and either explicitly or implicitly I’ve learned a bit of the police trade from him.  I credit him with my early fascination with Sherlock Holmes—I started reading the short stories and novels when he gave me his copy of them when I was 10 years old.  When I went to work for the police department as a civilian employee, I was nervous.  My father had a reputation as a practical joker.  The Mardi Gras season was a time in which police officers would play jokes on each other, and my father was apparently very good at this.  So when I went to work for the police department, I expected that the sins of the father would land upon son.  This didn’t happen.  Nearly everyone who looked at my nametag would ask, “Are you Chris Berra’s son” and launch into some story about something my dad did, either in humor or appreciation.  For all of this, my dad is not a very outgoing guy—kind of middle of the road, balanced between extroversion and introversion.   Conditions have to be right for him to talk about himself. 

One day, he was bringing me home from school—I was either in the eighth grade or ninth grade—and somehow we ended up talking about his time in college.  I don’t remember much of the conversation at all, but I do remember one off-the-cuff statement he made.  He told me that he wished that he had all the money he had spent on alcohol during his time in college.  If he had the money, it might have made a big difference for my parents, who started out their marriage in some financial stress. 

Now, I was a teenager then, and I could recognize moralizing.  You know moralizing, right?  The story that you were told that leads to an obvious conclusion in order to influence your behavior.  Y’all know that, right?  Y’all have used that on someone before, right?  Parents?  Teachers? Preachers?

There was something different about the way my dad said it, though.  He didn’t follow up with anything like, “let this be a lesson to you.”  He even seemed a little embarrassed to say it.  No, what I heard from my father that day sounded like regret; a true case of “if I could do it over…”  For years I have heard the stories about shenanigans my dad had pulled in high school and in college, but this was the only time I recalled hearing regret.

That admission from my father made a difference in my life.  I’ve always remembered that he said that to me.  While I was not a teetotaler, I did not spend very much money on alcohol while I was in college.  (Grad school—a tad of a different story.)

The funny thing is, my dad does not remember saying this incredibly influential thing to me.  Sometime in the past 5 years, I mentioned the story to him and told him how meaningful it was to me, and he just looked at me like, “what?”

I experienced something like this when I was a teacher.  After my first semester teaching, I took a page from my first English professor, and I wrote a letter to my class.  In it I outlined my philosophy of teaching, why I required more of them than others in comparable classes, and something about the nature of life and the students’ worth as individuals.  About three years later, at 3a.m., I received a Facebook message from a former student.  She said she had no idea what I was talking about when I had written the letter, but she had just come to understand it, and was thankful that I took the time to write the letter.  I can say that nearly all of the teachers I know take great happiness in those moments when a former student reports back that something the teacher said or did made a difference.

Today’s passage from the gospel reminded me of instances like these from teaching or the lessons from my father—instances where something that happens to us, or something that we do, has a lasting impact that seems to be much grander than the little idea that gave it life. 

Today we heard the parable of the sower, which will start a few weeks of parables in the cycle of readings from the Bible that we follow. 

Parables are stories that may make little sense on the surface.  I imagine a farmer hearing the parable today would possibly laugh and walk away by the end.  You don’t normally throw seeds on the pathways.  Furthermore, the harvest Jesus is talking about is physically impossible.  Sevenfold would indicate sufficiency, tenfold would be true abundance.  But thirty, sixty, one hundred?  Impossible. 

Biblical scholar C.H. Dodd once observed that the point of a parable is to “tease the mind into active thought.”  This brings to mind another element to parables.  You can almost see yourself in every element of a parable. 

Today’s parable is a prime example of seeing yourself everywhere within it.  Perhaps you are the seed; being sent by God into the world hoping to land on good soil.  Perhaps you are the soil, hoping that the seeds given to you by God find good growth within you.  Perhaps you are sower, which is where I’m going with the text today.  Now, the text has Jesus giving a fairly detailed explanation of the parable, but that does not close to us the possible meanings within the text.

Jesus says the sower is the one who brings the word of the Kingdom of God.  That is not very specific.  In the text, the sower could be Jesus, or even God who sent the Word incarnate to live among us.  Sowers would also be his disciples.  By extension, as Jesus’ disciples, we can also read ourselves as sowers.  Anyone who points to the kingdom is a sower.  This seems to me to be a rather natural read of this passage.  Everything we do is in some way making impressions and memories and connections for other people—little seeds that flourish and flower, or die, or are uprooted in our common life.  Things we say or do, for better or for worse, can root themselves in the lives of others.  Sometimes we plant these seeds without even knowing it.  Sometimes we do know what we are trying to do, and we wait to see if our seeds land on hard packed ground, among thorns, or on good soil.

So it seems important to notice something about the sower.   There’s no reason a sower would put seeds on pathways, or on hard ground, or among thorns.  You would not expect much if you were to dump a seed packet in the median of the 202.  But, this sower does.  The sower throws seeds where there would normally be no chance of the seed growing, meaning the sower wastes time and seeds.  And yet, we are being told something about the nature of someone who works for the Kingdom of God—even more important if you think the head sower is God or Jesus, and we are to emulate the divine life.  We serve a God who sends rain upon the righteous and the wicked, and sent Jesus to testify to a love that encompasses the whole of the world.  This Jesus also discovered that the people one would think most receptive to the signs of the kingdom, the religious professionals of the day, spurned these seeds— which took root instead in the very people who were despised. 

[And this brings us to one of the most shocking things about the gospel of Matthew.  For all of Matthew’s talking about what is righteous and what is not; what is good, and what is not; and who would be saved, and who would not; Matthew gives us no final formula for determining who that would be.  There is never anything so clear cut as to let us know who is in and who is out; nor tell which situations are hopeless and which are not.  To do otherwise, Matthew would open the way for us to think we can pass judgment on others, and Matthew will not give us that satisfaction.[1]]

As sowers, we are to throw seeds—signs of the kingdom—wherever we go.  Whether by our speech, by our actions, by our concern and care for others, we are not to hold back these signs of God’s grace and vision for our world.  We are shown by example that no soil is to be spared from the sowing of seeds.   The grace of God is much grander than we may give credit.  And here’s the thing, God may see good soil where we do not. 

We are finite.  We are limited by time and space in ways that God is not.  This enables God to do something we do not.  God never loses hope; we sometimes find our faith flagging.  God never gets discouraged; we find our efforts coming to little use. 

Jesus’ advice to this is the life lived within God— glimpsed by us as life in the Spirit empowers us —a life characterized by hope, joy, faith, perseverance, and love.

We may plant seeds and never see results, and that is a hard thing.  We enter into tiring work; and it may often appear thankless.   But all around us we also see the fruition of signs of the kingdom.  A vibrant parish, care expressed for others, friendships flourishing, effective prayer, and good work done within the community.  And in our individual lives, we may see goodness springing forth from the goodness God has shown us, and lessons we have learned.  And occasionally, we may see the results of our planting in the lives of others.

So, friends, keep planting those seeds, and even more so.  Unclench your fists just a bit more and let the signs of the kingdom fall all about you.  Sow life and love and other signs of the goodness of God’s reign wherever you find yourself, regardless of the ground you find beneath you.  And may you find yourself often amazed when God’s wildest dreams come true through you.

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[1] For the purposes of this sermon, Matthew’s description of Jesus’ church discipline (18:15-20) is a different conversation than judgment in an eschatological and/or final sense.

Sin and Grace in History

Proper 9 Year A RCL
Track 1
Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Psalm 45: 11-18  or Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Sermon at Nativity Episcopal Church, Scottsdale, AZ

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.”  Romans 7:15, 21

Good morning! 

It is a pleasure to be here with you today, and I am grateful to Susan and Wayne for giving me the opportunity to join you in prayer. 

My name is Robert Berra, and I am the Episcopal Campus Chaplain for ASU Polytechnic, a campus at the southeastern edge of the Valley, next to Gateway Airport in Mesa.   I think you have a short bio of me in your bulletin, but I’d like to tell you one more thing about me that might help this sermon make sense.  I love history.  My undergrad was a double major in History and Education and before graduate school, I taught high school.  I am fascinated by ideas—by how thought can change the world. So, I’d like to start with something of a history of an idea, and put it in conversation with our reading from Paul’s letter.

The time before World War One for many European and American people was a time of unparalleled optimism.  Society seemed to be on an upward swing—at least it was for those on top of the social order.  From the Enlightenment to the beginning of the Great War in 1914, human progress seemed unstoppable.  The physical sciences made possible the industrialization of society, with leaps and bounds in the development of transportation, medicine, exploration, and easily obtained consumer goods.  

The social sciences—economics, psychology, and sociology— were also coming into their own; and at least in the case of the social sciences, many saw the possibility of the human society reaching a Utopian goal of peace and perfect understanding.  From the dawn of modernity, the claim that the social goods of religion would be replaced by the discoveries of the social sciences gained ground.  Some of these social goods were a sense of caring about others, social cohesion, changes in the understanding of meaning to events, and a shift from clergy to scientists as the new keepers of knowledge.  Most famous of these predictions was Karl Marx’s observation that religion could serve as the “opiate of the masses,” masking the pain of an oppressive social order. This not quite incorrect observation was often coupled to the hope that all religion would be thrown off, people would finally see their oppression, and act to bring about a just and equitable social order on the rubble of faiths that would rather keep people longing for a heavenly reward instead of addressing the real and pressing issues of human flourishing. 

These were the challenges to Christianity; and to put it in simplistic terms, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the challenge of modernity meant that Christian thought in the United States split and ran a gamut between fundamentalists—who refused to deal with new knowledge about the natural world and new discoveries about the way the Bible was composed—and Christian liberals—who almost jettisoned ‘sin’ as a meaningful concept and substituted the hope of Christ’s coming again for a human-made Kingdom of Heaven achieved by adherence to the Social Gospel.  This split is roughly the reason why—in the U.S.— the mainline churches seem so different from the churches who cluster around fundamentalist or evangelical identities. 

In many ways, World War One caused a crisis for those Utopian dreams of uninterrupted progress, for both secular and Christian folks expecting an ideal society. War on an industrial scale.  The scale and the efficiency of the killing and mayhem were unlike anything the world had ever seen.  At the battle of Somme—a battle in 1916 that lasted five months—on the first day of that battle—the British army lost 19,240 men.  1,000,000 would eventually die just in that campaign.  This week marked the 98^th anniversary of that battle’s beginning; and actually, this month is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War One, in case you want to mark your calendar. 

After the end of the war, after the monuments, many in Europe were left wondering what had happened and traumatized.  The literature that came from men in the war witnessed death and futility become major themes.  Disillusionment with the possibilities of human achievement became a stronger intellectual stream.  Some recognized that even the optimism that attempted to label WW1 “the war to end all wars” was misplaced.  At the end of the war Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the commander of all the allied forces, thought the allies had not been tough enough in the extremely punitive Versailles Treaty and realized the world would go to war again.   He said of the treaty “This is not peace; it is an armistice for twenty years.”  He got it wrong by just 65 days.

In Christian thought, the war and subsequent world events—such as witnessing the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the excessive brutality of communist regimes— shook the optimism of some of the liberal theologians of the early 20^th century.  One theologian who exemplifies a shift away from the myth of uninterrupted progress to what would be termed “Christian realism” was Reinhold Niebuhr.  Niebuhr started his career as an idealistic young man, but the brutality of war and the behavior of nations throughout the 20^th century made him re-think liberal Christianity’s near-jettisoning of sin as a concept central to the understanding of Christ’s work in the world.  Niebuhr’s contribution is best summarized by this quote from one of his contemporaries: 

“[Of Niebuhr it is said that] he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into … the semi-fundamentalism of other…theologians. Moreover, Niebuhr has extraordinary insight into human nature, especially the behavior of nations and social groups. He is keenly aware of the complexity of human motives and of the relation between morality and power. His theology is a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man’s existence. These elements in Niebuhr’s thinking helped me to recognize the illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism. While I still believed in man’s potential for good, Niebuhr made me realize his potential for evil as well. Moreover, Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man’s social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil.”[1]

This quote, by the way, is from another great theological mind of the 20^th century:  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his intellectual autobiography.  The admiration was mutual between the two.

What does this mean for our reading from Romans?  What does an intellectual history have to do with our reality, both physical and spiritual?

I suggest it means mainline Christianity would be well served to recover a radical understanding of both the power of sin and the grace of God through Jesus Christ that gives us a fuller picture of where we find ourselves as a redeemed people in a fallen world. 

Our passage from Paul is one of the most incisive and difficult descriptions of the human condition according to Christianity.  Not only are there some people who actively choose evil, even those who would call themselves good—or those who we would think are good—are not perfect. There is something about us that makes even our good actions suspect.  According to Paul, sin is not simply an act of commission or omission.  It is not simply a missing of the mark.  It is not simply falling short of a series of ideals that are given to us either by the faith we follow or the cultural values instilled in us.  For Paul, sin is “an active, aggressive power that seizes hold of God’s good gifts and bends them toward death.”[2]  For Paul, this is what it meant to live under the law.   The law was good and holy, but the power of sin was able to turn even something good and holy to destructive ends, and Paul is speaking from experience.  For Paul, the greatest demonstration of the power of sin working through him was the persecution of the Church; and he did not do this in spite of the law.  He did this because he kept a law that sin had hijacked for its own purposes.  Sin is so powerful that it can wrench God’s gifts into serving its own ends.[3]

Furthermore, the way sin goes about this death-dealing work is not simply by our breaking of rules, but by the distortion of relationships.  Our proper relationship with God, centered on God, is turned inwards—into a self-centeredness—and we try to secure our own goals over against our neighbors and God.  We turn away from a loving God whose Son showed us a life of self-giving as the perfect expression of God’s will, and instead seek our own advantage.  We strive by our own will instead of by trust in God.  We see our fellow persons as competitors, not children of God; as expendable, not loved; as obstacles, not fellow workers in the Kingdom; as lesser than us, not as fellow heirs to the Kingdom. 

Historically, Christianity at its best has maintained this expansive view of the power of sin.  It sees sin not as simply the cosmic chalking up of an individual’s wrongdoing, but a state of humanity and an active force inherent in humanity that tears us apart and keeps us from recognizing the belovedness of others in God’s eyes. 

And so, at every level of society, within ourselves as individuals, as a city, as a state, as a nation, as a globe—sin interferes.  Think of all the awareness campaigns of problems and troubles in the world that we are inundated with.  There are so many, and we being finite beings can only choose a few to address.  Furthermore, I recognize sin within myself; like Paul I find within myself a mixture of motives to even the good that I want to do—wondering how ego plays into my decisions, how my status within the church helps or hinders humility, if I could do more for others if I but choose to do so. 

We recognize sin even in our history—for example, the Declaration of Independence, which enshrined the ideals and the rationale for the founding of our nation and the hope of freedom and equality for all was not free from the hold of sin.  The declaration was a world-shattering statement of belief that nevertheless was an ideal that would not be achieved at the time of its writing.  Before the Declaration could pass the Continental Congress, Jefferson was forced by southern delegates to remove a condemnation of the slave trade.  Our nation was created and built on the principle of the equality of all people, and yet from the very beginning people were shut out of that goal.  Niebuhr called this—and other examples from our national life—the irony of American History, in which, as a people, our great virtues can make us ignorant or accepting of our vices.

That is Paul’s message to us today:  virtue and vice are closely linked.  We sometimes find that we do the evil we would prefer not to do.  We find that in the good we do, something not quite right lurks nearby, perhaps as our motive or our method for bringing about the good. 

If this account of the nature of sin seems all-encompassing and pervasive, the radical nature of God’s grace and the unlimited reach of God’s reconciling work in the world is even more so.  For no other reason could Paul write, “ For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self,  but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.  Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

The results of sin are entirely within the scope of God’s saving work.  God’s presence through we who make up the Body of Christ, and the slivers and glimpses we see of the Kingdom of God in the world still make it possible to recognize the Good and call out the evil.  These glimpses of God’s reconciling power expose evil for what it is, even when evil is expressed in law and culture.  One example of these glimpses of the Kingdom’s reconciling power were the marches and the demonstrations of the Civil Rights era, which exposed the brutality and evil of the social order that was commonly called good in the Southern states as activists both black and white were beaten and attacked.  In those attacks on demonstrators, the sin of the system showed its logical outworking, finally was recognized for what it was, and repulsed many. I mentioned the slavery clause removed from the Declaration of Independence, but this week—July 2— was also the 50^th anniversary of the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which attempted to address inequality that has continued in our society.  The work of God in our midst. 

We, through God’s power, can effect good and be agents of the reconciling work of God.  But we have to be careful not to continue the mistakes of earlier generations.  Discounting the power of sin is one way in which the power of sin can grow.  Thinking ourselves capable of countermanding sin on our own ensnares us even further in its power.   As theologian Ted Smith has written:  “If the problem were weakness of the human will, then reconciliation would require nothing more than a little extra willpower.  Jesus would be something like a really good life coach, someone who could help us keep our resolutions.  If the problem, however, is the power of sin to twist the good gifts of God…to evil ends, then deliverance requires a defeat of that power.”[4]  And this is the Gospel we proclaim:  God does not just give individual humans the willpower to live our best lives now, or does God say that it does not matter if we do not have that best life.  In Jesus Christ, God sets the cosmos free from bondage, redeeming our lives and equipping us for the work God has given us to do.[5]  And the ultimate victory will be God’s.

May we remember that self-deception is always a possibility through the working of sin, and may we not forget that the discernment of God’s will is everyone’s vocation.   May we remember that we are not in this alone—that God working through us is the antidote to any notion that we go our own way with no help.  May we not abdicate our own responsibilities in this earthly pilgrimage to affect God’s love and justice in this world.  May we remember these lessons, and take to heart that a world in which freedom, justice, and love reign, a world in which we live up to the ideals of our Declaration of Independence—and more importantly the character of the Kingdom to come—is possible through God’s power, and only through God’s power.   

Amen.

           

[1] Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence." The Christian Century 4, Sept. 1958: 479. 

[2] Ted A. Smith, Romans 7:15-25a, Theological Perspective, Feasting on the Word, Yr A Vol 3, 208

[3] Smith, ibid.

[4] Smith, ibid.

[5] Based on Smith, ibid.