When we announced to the congregation that this would be my last Sunday, I hadn’t yet checked the lessons for today. If I were sticking around, we might be in the midst of a series on the matriarchs and patriarchs from Genesis. But today I will just have to hope I didn’t sell my greatest treasure for a cup of soup. Because when I saw the Gospel, the parable of the sower, I smiled.
Jesus tells of a farmer, a sower, who went out scattering seed. Immediately the metaphor, I thought, was clear. In eight years together, we’ve sowed a number of seeds. We’ve seen the green shoots of grace gatherings and children’s ministries. We’ve harvested some of the first fruits from new initiatives like theology on tap and laundry love. We’ve tended heritage vines like our mid-week Bible study and our partnership with Trinity food ministries. We’ve seen a lot of growth together.
And, truth be told, ministry can be a frustrating calling. In the church you can spend a great deal of time wondering when and if your seeds will sprout. I have had to trust St. Paul’s understanding of seed-planting: “I sowed. Someone else will water. In God’s good time, God will give the growth.” (That’s my paraphrase of Paul.) I thought I would preach a whole sermon about the seeds I sowed, that we sowed together. We’d talk about the growth, and we’d talk about the good soil we’re still watching. We’d talk about the great potential still ahead for Holy Communion (and it is great). This really was going to be a great sermon.
Let Everyone Who Has Ears…
But then, I got turned around by Jesus. Right at the heart of our reading today Jesus says, “Everyone who has ears should pay attention.” This is one place where the NRSV translation may have it better, it reads: “let everyone with ears listen.” Listen. My earlier sermon was too shallow.
One of my favorite theologians, Willie Jennings, likes to point out that much of the failure of Christianity is a failure of imagination. Jesus taught in parables because he wanted folks to lean into their God-given capacity to imagine new worlds and to enact them. Christianity has failed especially when we have failed to imagine a different outcome than the present. We have, in the church, according to Jennings, allowed our imaginations to be corrupted by all the old games of power and hierarchy. We use our intellects to systematize, to limit and to control. But Willie Jennings laughs and says, Jesus still has something else to offer. Jesus wants to help us imagine another world.
It is easy to get caught by those verses just before Jesus invites those with ears to listen. Jesus talks about the seeds that landed in the good and fertile soil. Some of those seeds yielded a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. It is easy to think, “wait, Jesus, you didn’t explain the difference here!” How come some of the seeds yielded so much more? How do we get those seeds? How do we get the high yielding ones? What do we have to do, do we need to pray more? To trust more? To give more? Do we need write to Bayer North America? How do we increase our yield?
Jennings would tell us, that’s our normal use of our imagination. We try to use our minds to get us to the top. We want those high-yielding seeds. But friends, that isn’t Jesus’ point at all in this story.
Scripture scholars tell us that the idea that any first century seed would yield even thirty fold would have astonished Jesus’ hearers. If you had seeds that yielded thirty fold, your harvest would be enough to let you retire early. Sixtyfold and a hundredfold, and you’d go from a subsistence farmer to a wealthy wealthy human being.
The Miracle in the Parable of the Sower
There is a miracle in this story, and I wonder how many of us, like me, failed to hear it on the first go-around. These seeds aren’t just usual seeds.
One of my favorite moments as rector of Holy Communion actually came in a conference room at the great laboratories of Bayer North America. This was a few years ago, so the company might have been called Monsanto at the time.
The meeting was during the visit from our partners Cristosal who are based in El Salvador. My friend Noah, the director, and his colleague David Morales, an internationally respected human rights lawyer were here in St. Louis. Noah preached that Sunday. Together they presented a human rights forum at Wash U, and one of our vestry members set us up for a tour at Monsanto, and to talk to some of the leaders there. Noah kept accidentally calling the place “Mont Santo” which translates “Holy Mountain” Every time I had to stifle a laugh.
In those days the company was spending huge amounts of time and money defending genetically modified seeds. The scientists came ready to talk to us, visitors from a justice organization, about GMOs. I think they imagined that these leaders from Central America wanted to fight their usual fight.
We listened for awhile about these highly scientific seeds, and finally David Morales said something like: “friends, we don’t need you to defend this science. From my perspective, any technology that helps feed more people is a good thing. I didn’t come to argue about genetic modification.” You could have heard a pin drop.
Noah spoke up: “After the Salvadoran war, Monsanto came to El Salvador. They bought the family business of the ex-president who had ordered the deaths of thousands. Monsanto paid millions to a war criminal.” Noah then asked, essentially, did Bayer now have a policy about buying the companies of war criminals? What were the ethics reviews the company had in place to make sure they weren’t empowering bad actors in a local country? Well, the group wasn’t prepared to answer that question.
But there was also a real sense in the room that something important had been asked. The question wasn’t offered with the hostility the company so often faced in public. The encounter between Central American human rights workers and seed scientists wasn’t a usual encounter, not one you’d usually expect and it left us imagining what kind of different world might be possible. By asking questions outside the usual fights, could important work for justice be done? Being a fly on that particular wall will always be one of the moments I remember from my time here as rector.
Unlikely people in unlikely rooms together
This parish, at its best, puts all sorts of people together in unlikely rooms together. People who are struggling to make rent every month sit across the breakfast table from professors with endowed chairs at major universities. Brilliant scientists find themselves stripping wallpaper alongside musicians and high schoolers, working to make a house into a home for housing insecure neighbors. Moms and grandmas laugh together as they pray over laundry machines.
In this, my last sermon, I want to invite you, not to miss the miracle. Don’t miss the miraculous harvest. Over these eight years we have laughed, and danced. We have cried and mourned. I have messed up my lines while reading, and we have stumbled through new music together. There are times when it is easy to get caught up in details, but together let’s take a moment to take stock of the miracle.
The miracle of Holy Communion is love. Simple, but it is a miracle a hundredfold. This is a parish that chooses to lead with love. You do it when you welcome kids who act their age disruptively, like mine, and tell parents “you’re doing great.” You lead with love when you make room for the folks who over-talk in Bible study, and when you ask someone who has been especially quiet, “is everything okay?” You lead with love when you catch newcomers hanging around the edges and walk them right to the center of the room, show them where to find restrooms, or like Mary Allen once did for so many folks in this parish when you say, “here, sit with me, I’ll walk you through the confusing array of bulletins and books.” The miracle of this place is love, lavished on strangers and awkward newcomers, and awkward longtime parishioners alike.
Don’t miss the miracle: The Miracle is Love
Jesus’s sowers don’t sow with ordinary seed. Teaching this story as a measure of the faithfulness required, it would be a failure of imagination. Teaching our faith like a measurement for holiness, you miss the miracle. The farmer, the sower in this story seems a little careless doesn’t he? He wastes the seeds among the weeds. He spills the seeds on rocky ground. Why would he let such a precious resource go to waste?
Why? Because he trusts, God’s love always yields far more than what was sown. If you put in a little love, you receive far more than you gave. Jesus wants us to know: you can be liberal with love. You can throw it around. You can dance and let the love fly and land where it will. Love that doesn’t grow is the anomaly. Don’t waste your time worrying about why some of the love didn’t sprout. The miracle is that so much love blossoms that you never had to worry in the first place.
What world could we imagine, if we trusted like this sower? What world could we build together with God, if we knew, deep down, that it would all be alright? That the yield of love will always come? What love-spreading difference will Holy Communion make together next? I look forward to watching from afar the new ministries you next imagine together with your next priest, for the sake of your neighbors.
My friends, thank you. Thank you for all the ways you have showed me and my family God’s world-changing love over these eight years. Thank you to the vestry members who have lead us, and the ones who will lead you forward. Thank you to my clergy and lay colleagues who preach, and celebrate, and lead, and work, and dismiss us with so much joy and patience. Thank you for welcoming me into this diverse community, for planting some seeds with me, for watering and tending. And know, to God the seeds that matter most are not projects or programs. Projects and programs, like priests, come and go. So most of all thank you for loving us, like you love one another, recklessly, abundantly. Across all the spectrum of human diversity, past all the difficulties of our day, keep loving. Keeping sowing that seed. Be ready for God to grow miraculous results for love.
Amen.
Mike Angell 