Seventh Sunday after Pentecost A; 07.12.26; Dr Matthew (Matteo) Carter, Seminary Intern
We all have a friend or relative who loves plants, loves gardening, can’t stay away from the soil. For me that person was my paternal grandmother, Fern Abbott, of blessed memory, from whom I got my middle name, and because of whom I gave my son the same middle name. She had a honey-sweet voice, handwriting so beautiful it looked like effortless calligraphy, and she taught me how to do crossword puzzles, which I do every day and so I think of her every day. My point here is that there are people in our lives who plant good words in our heart and those words flourish even after the sower has passed away.
For my grandmother, gardening was pretty close to church. She even had a ceramic plate staked up next to her phlox, on which you could read these pretty verses:
The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth:
One’s nearer God’s heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.
There’s a part of me that thinks that quatrain is a pretty great meditation on the parable of the sower. Not the whole of the parable–because the poem is so cheerful, and the parable contains some dark musings on what evil and greed can do to pour Round-Up on the human heart. But the poem gets it exactly right: if you want to get close to God, get close to the soil.
In what follows, I have to declare a large debt to the priest and theologian Ragan Sutterfield, who writes so beautifully about the way in which observing the rhythms of the seasons can help us hear God’s own heartbeat.
Sutterfield observes of this parable that it “invites us, as an act of discipleship, to cultivate the soil of the heart so that we might receive the gift of the gospel and grow.” Perhaps, he suggests, we might consider renaming it the parable of the soil, because soil is only good and rich when it is teeming with microbes, fungi, bacteria, the organic matter in silt and clay ; likewise our lives, for God to work in them, need to be teeming with friendships, other relationships, interdependencies and hidden networks of mutual aid. When Jesus speaks in the parable about the “good soil”, the soil that produces the bumper crop, he seems to understand that the listener who hears the word and understands it has help to understand it because the ideal listener is a part of a receptive community. Jesus conducted his ministry in front of large crowds because, I dare say, he knew–God knows–that we would need each other to figure it all out.
All too often we see discipleship as a private affair—me and my personal walk with the Lord. Hear Ragan Sutterfield on this!
[A]s anyone who has seriously tried to live into the way of Jesus knows, community is necessary. In fact, community is essential for any transforming practice. One can’t become a chess player or rock climber on one’s own; no one can sail properly without another to show them the ropes. Each of us requires others to teach us and companion us through the life of any good practice. Why would we expect it to be different for the practice of following Jesus? To be a disciple, to move toward the good soil of the heart, means we need to cultivate our discipleship in the midst of a diverse living community.
The first time I read that paragraph, I was at school and I was so carried away, I said “Amen” so loudly that the seminary librarian on duty gave me a dirty look! No regrets.
I want to draw just two specific connections between today’s Gospel and our life together. The first is a connection to the end of the Litany of God’s Mission for the Church, which we prayed together last Sunday when I had the honor of lectoring. There we read:
Sustain and encourage all who minister in your name in lonely, dangerous, and unresponsive places
To follow Jesus one’s whole life is to accept that the soil, as it were, will not always be hospitable to the seed. It may not even be arable at all. And–you know I have a big heart for interfaith and ecumenical ministry–though I may oppose some of the theology of the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I sure do admire their tenacity and perseverance. I encourage you to be less exasperated by their solicitation and more inspired by their commitment to doing exactly–and I do meet exactly what the Gospel instructs us all to do, which is to try, and try again, and make a whole mission out of the trying.
And the second connection I want to make is this: “a sower went out to sow”: The beginning of this parable, as St Thomas Aquinas saw, contains a seed of ecclesial theology. God sent God’s self out into our mortal world, a sower sending the most precious seed, and that seed grew into a life like no other, an exemplary life that was full of gentleness and the ardent wish that everyone, no matter how woebegone, should have a fair chance at flourishing. No wonder that, after the Resurrection, Jesus was mistaken for a gardener. He tends our lives until they come to verdancy. God’s green thumb can bring anything, and anyone, back to life. And for that, my wilted soul says: AMEN.
