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.
[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.
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