Readings (Track 1)

How did the world come into being? Israel’s neighbors gave wildly diverse answers to that question. The first chapter of Genesis, echoing one of the Egyptian answers, tells us that God brought the world into being through the word. “Let there be light…” (v.3) “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place…” (v.9) “Let the earth bring forth living creatures…” (v.24). Whatever else we learn from that chapter, we learn that God’s word is powerful and effective.

The psalms return repeatedly to the theme of the word’s power. Psalm 29, which we use every year at Jesus’ Baptism (1^st Sunday after the Epiphany), is one of the better known: “The voice of the Lord is a powerful voice; / the voice of the Lord is a voice of splendor. / The voice of the Lord breaks the cedar trees; / the Lord  breaks the cedars of Lebanon” (vv.4-5).

So when the Word of the Lord—by now clearly with a capital ‘W’—assumes human flesh, we expect it to be powerful, irresistibly powerful. Anything less, and we ask the question John the Baptist asked: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Matt 11:3). We heard some of Jesus’ responses to this puzzle last week; in today’s reading we encounter another of his responses.

Jesus tells a story about a sower who sows on different sorts of soil. The seed fares rather badly in the first three soils, but produces yields of 30, 60, and 100fold in the fourth.  The meaning of the story is not self-evident. Fortunately for the disciples—and us—Jesus explains: the sower is sowing the word of the kingdom. The story invites us to wonder about the ways in which the word of the kingdom and a seed are similar. A seed is at once powerful and vulnerable. It can multiply at astounding rates. (Those of us who are not farmers mostly experience this with the plants we do not want.) It is vulnerable—to birds, to thin soil, to inhospitable surroundings. The word of the kingdom—the announcement that the kingdom is near, the description of the life of the kingdom in the Sermon on the Mount—is powerful. In the right soil: St Peter, Catherine of Sienna, Martin Luther King Jr. But it is surprisingly vulnerable: even John the Baptist struggles to accept it, and too many of Jesus’ hearers don’t even try.

The story, that is, is a story to help Jesus’ followers understand the decidedly mixed reception Jesus is receiving. It is a hopeful story: there will be a spectacular harvest. It is a sober story: much of the seed sown will not bear fruit.

Nevertheless—why does God play it this way? It causes us constant confusion. We’re used to power being used to compel. God has that power, but chooses not to use it that way. Something about valuing our freedom. So the seed is vulnerable as well as being powerful.

But Matthew, Mark, and Luke include this story not simply because of its importance in understanding what was happening in Jesus’ ministry then, but also because the Word comes to us repeatedly, and the challenge comes to us as it did to the original audience: “Let anyone with ears listen!”

Frederick Bruner writes “Everything is focused on the essential: that the seed enter the soil—that the Word be heard for what it is, the Word of God. Nothing else matters as much.… The soil that regularly lets seed in, regularly gets fruit out; it is that simple. ‘Seed in, fruit out.’ The soil’s whole task can be summarized in one mandate: give the seed room!” (The Churchbook p.7).

“Seed in, fruit out.” That’s a different vision of a life well-lived than our culture offers us. It’s a more hopeful vision of a life well-lived, for rather than splitting life into pre-productive, productive, and post-productive, it tells us that at any age we can receive the seed, give it room, bear fruit.

“Let anyone with ears listen!” This imperative is behind one of Archbishop Cranmer’s greatest contributions as he re-formed the English church in the 16^th Century. He simplified the eight daily services of the monastic Divine Office down to two, simplified the schedule of readings to achieve continuous readings of the Old and New Testament through the calendar year, and made these two offices, Morning and Evening Prayer, the backbone parish life. So, open the Book of Common Prayer, and, voila, these come first. And today a variety of smartphone apps make the Daily Office even more available.

Our life as Christians is improv. We’re baptized into a long story: Abraham and Sarah, King David, Queen Esther, Mary and Joseph… Jesus’ harvest metaphor and books like The Revelation give glimpses of the story’s ending. Our challenge is to improvise, to live in ways that fit in and maybe enhance the story. And for that most of us need ideas, so Nehemiah in the Persian bureaucracy, Tobit exiled in Nineveh, Dorcas of Joppa and her sewing machine: good friends. So, the Daily Office.

“Let anyone with ears listen!” It turns out to be remarkably difficult to listen. William Stringfellow, a lawyer/lay theologian/activist who will probably enter Lesser Feasts and Fasts once the normal 50-year waiting period has past:

Listening is a rare happening among human beings. You cannot listen to the word another is speaking if you are preoccupied with your appearance or impressing the other, or if you are trying to decide what you are going to say when the other stops talking, or if you are debating about whether the word being spoken is true or relevant or agreeable. Such matters may have their place, but only after listening to the word as the word is being uttered. Listening, in other words, is a primitive act of love, in which a person gives self to another’s word, making self accessible and vulnerable to that word. It is very much like that when a person comes to the Bible…

“Let anyone with ears listen!” And so we’re reminded, once again, that the challenges of relating to God and relating to each other are intimately related. Habits of careful listening (or not) in one sphere will bleed over into the other, for better or worse.

Listening to Jesus’ parable in today’s hyper-polarized context, two additional observations. First, we’d probably misread the parable if we assumed that any of us are only one sort of soil. Perhaps the dynamics associated with each of the soils are playing out in each of us. Second, and related, it’s probably important to keep listening. Even the best of our responses can go off the rails remarkably quickly. It took the French revolution less than three years to get from the Declaration of the Rights of Man (8/26/1789) to the guillotine (4/25/1792).

But it would be a mistake to orient a sermon on this text toward exhortation. The bottom line: the Sower has come and is with us. There will be a rich harvest. Left to ourselves discouragement and despair might make sense—but we have not been left to ourselves. “I am with you always—he promised—to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:20). So, today, this week, “Let anyone with ears listen!”