A Sown Heart
The Bible Reading
Imagine being one of those early Christians who had hoped that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen, is the answer to this world's problems.
And imagine that 40 or 50 years after his death and resurrection, life in Israel seems to have gone from bad to worse. Jerusalem has been destroyed. Society is full of hostility, sometimes especially towards Jesus' followers. The future seems even bleaker than in Jesus' time, and it feels as though no one is listening to the Gospel. Civilisation itself is under threat and yet no one seems able to see it, or change how they live. That's the time in which Matthew is writing his gospel.
It sounds like, well... today. It sounds like our distress about our times as we are accelerating into climate disaster, and growing social dysfunction.
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What sometimes frustrated those first Christians was that instead of a clear, obvious list of instructions about how to live in all this, Jesus seemed mostly to have left a group of enigmatic stories called parables.
"Why do you speak to them in parables?" ask the disciples in Matthew 13:10. The clear, although unspoken thought behind that question, is: "Why couldn't you be more clear? Then, perhaps people could understand... and would listen." Because, clearly, many people were not listening.
Jesus' answer to this question seems, on the surface, to be so barbaric, that the Revised Common Lectionary omits it from the readings. But today, we are going to read the whole story. The section the Lectionary leaves out is pure gold: It brings the parable to life so that it offers us hope and good news.
There's a lot to take in today so, as you may have noticed from the order of service, everything we say up here this morning is in print at onemansweb.org/sown and, of course, you can listen to the video of the service as well.
We have with us at the microphones today, Professor Walter Wink, from Auburn Theological Seminary, reading from his book Just Jesus: My Struggle to Become Human.
We have a Narrator—that's me,
and we have the Divine Voice from Genesis 1, and from Matthew 13, through Emilia.
Divine Voice: Reading from Genesis 1:26-31
26Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness...27 So God created the human in God’s image. In the image of God, God created it: male and female God created them. 28God blessed them... 31God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Narrator:
Professor Wink knew that that creation of us as human involves our evolution from creatures conditioned to survive at any cost, regardless of what it did to other creatures. Even now, we are often ruled by fear and violence. This is what he wrote about our creation:
Professor Wink:
This is really what God is: HUMAN—[HUMAN all in capital letters.] It is the great error of humanity to believe that it is human. We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see glimpses of our humanness, we can dream of what a more human existence and political order would be like, but we have not yet arrived at true humanness. Only God is human, and we are made in God’s image and likeness—which is to say, we are capable of becoming human. Furthermore, we are incapable of becoming human by ourselves. We scarcely know what humanness is. We have only the merest intuitions and general guidelines. Jesus has... revealed to us what it means to live a fully human life. But how do I translate that into my own struggles for humanness? ...
Only God is HUMAN. The goal of life, then, is not to become something we are not—divine—but to become what we truly are—human. We are not required to become divine: flawless, perfect, without blemish. We are invited simply to become human, which means growing through our sins and mistakes, learning by trial and error, being redeemed over and over from sin and compulsive behaviour, becoming ourselves, scars and all. Is it not the case that the deepest reaches of our humanity are born of our wounds, even through our sins? [Wink, Walter; Berry, Steven. Just Jesus: My Struggle to Become Human (pp. 102, 105-106). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.]
Narrator: Matthew 13:1-23
That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the lake. 2Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3And he told them many things in parables, saying [this]:
Divine Voice/Jesus: ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. 5Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 6But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. 7Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8Other seeds... fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty! 9Let anyone with ears listen!’
Narrator (Matthew): 10Then the disciples came and asked him, ‘Why do you speak to them in parables?’ 11He answered,
Jesus: ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. 12For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.
Narrator: And next... Jesus quotes what we call Isaiah 6:9-15 in the Old Testament. This text comes at the end of a long statement through Isaiah 5 and 6 of Israel's unfaithfulness to God: its greed, its injustice, its false pieties. It sounds very familiar to the excesses of our own society. Isaiah believed that as punishment, God would stop up the ears of Israel, and close its eyes, so that it could not repent, although, finally... there would come a time when a seed would, as it were, grow a new Israel.
And when Jesus' listeners reflected upon Isaiah, they would have received the same message as we do: not a lot has changed in the way people live and ignore God. But first of all, Jesus speaks to the church: Jesus said
Jesus: ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. 12For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.
13The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” 14With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says:
“You will indeed listen, but never understand,
and you will indeed look, but never perceive.
15 For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and their ears are hard of hearing,
and they have shut their eyes;
so that they might not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and understand with their heart and turn—
and I would heal them.”
16But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. 17Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.
Narrator: If you look up Isaiah 6, you'll see that Jesus does not make an exact quotation. It's a softer, gentler, reinterpretation of Isaiah's words. It is no longer saying that God makes people blind and deaf to the Gospel to punish them. I'm going to suggest that Jesus understood how we work as people. He understood that we are not yet fully human. Our eyes and ears are closed to new ideas. That's just how it is with us not yet fully human people. Mind you, that doesn't seem very good new in itself, does it!
After the explanation about why he told parables, Matthew has Jesus give just one interpretation of the parable. Parables are meant to provoke and prod us. They result in all sorts of responses from us, we hear all sorts of things, so this is just one such interpretation among many possible interpretations.
Jesus: 18‘Hear then the parable of the sower. 19When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. 20As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; 21yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. 22As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. 23But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.’
Hymn:
Sermon
There was a young child who decided a pair of their sibling's old jeans were just the thing for school now that winter had started. After the first day, their parent said: "This is a bit embarrassing, and I'm sure nobody noticed, but... I think you might just be wearing those jeans back to front." You see, there was no zip on these jeans, but there was a stitched-on pocket, which the child had placed at the back... despite certain other evidence... such as the fact that they were now wearing the shirred elastic waist at the front, and that the knee decorations were now at the back of the knees.
"With jeans, the pocket is always on the back," they declared, and they wore those belovѐd jeans back to front for months, until... someone in the household bought some new jeans, with a zip—so no argument about which way they went on, and... just by chance… these new jeans had just one pocket here on the front.
These new jeans were brought to the attention of the child… who spent three or four seconds silently inspecting this incontrovertible evidence. "Well, yes..." and they shoved their hand in their back pocket. "But these... aren't jeans."
I have an acquaintance who consumes conspiracy theories and is full on into climate change denial. Rational argument is pointless. They always have an ad hoc "but these jeans aren't jeans" kind of argument for not changing their mind.
Every time I am tempted to write them off, I have to remember what I have slowly learned about myself. And that is that no evidence has ever changed my mind about anything that was really important to me! What has changed my mind has been a change of heart. If my heart and emotions were changed then I could listen to the evidence.
Our western culture has known we are driven by the heart and not the intellect since at least the 18th century, when the philosopher David Hume said that "reason is a tool of the passions." In other words, we are ruled by our hearts. We keep forgetting this, of course, and we imagine that we are reasonable, rational people.
And Jesus knew... long before we did, that rational arguments rarely change people's mind.
So... if we can't change people's mind by logical argument how can anything, or anyone, ever be changed? How can Jesus possibly talk to people and bring to them the gospel, the notion that
God loves us all…
unconditionally,
without violence,
without favour,
and that God loves all people... just the same… even us!?
How can Jesus bring us good news if it's not possible to convert people by rational argument?
Jesus tells stories—parables. Stories are able to evade, or make an end run around, our mental defences. Stories provoke us, they unsettle us, they upset us, break our hearts. They move us, and sometimes that means the light gets in and a little bit of our heart is healed and changed. And we become a little more… human.
Well… Jesus' understanding of Isaiah's words describes exactly what we have been talking about. The simple fact of human existence is this: if we hear, if we respond to a story, if a little bit of the light gets in, then it snowballs... a bit like compound interest on a bank account. "To those who have more will be given," it says, because they can see, and grasp, and move. And understand... that this not just seeing in some intellectual kind of way. It's about moving, about practising living differently.
"And for those who cannot see, who do not have, even what they have will be taken away," it says. If we close our mind to something, then that closing in of our world gets compounded as well. We become less and less able to see or hear. These jeans are not jeans, we say.
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How will we read this part of the Lectionary which is left out? Is it about a violent monstrous God who judges people and takes away what they have, and terribly unfairly favours others who are already rich, and gives them more riches they don't deserve? Jesus is telling the disciples that this is not what God does to us. It's a consequence of how we live. It's what we do to ourselves... either by our refusal to listen, or in that happy moment when something provokes us just enough to crack us open and let the light in... and we respond.
And Matthew is saying that parables are the only way we can begin to hear, the only way we can be provoked to hear the gospel. The more we hear, the more we will hear and the more we will see. And if we don't hear, if we refuse to hear, then our deafness increases. Jesus is describing human nature. Most of us are unable to hear or see the slow revealing of the kingdom of heaven, the culture of God, … until a parable—some story—finally cracks us open.
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Let's look at the parable.
What would first of all have provoked Jesus' listeners about the Parable of the Sower, and just absolutely puzzled them, is this: the sower is the most pathetic farmer that any of these people have ever heard of!
Farmers today use machines sow their seed in neat straight rows. But we would, I suspect, be surprised to see how well ancient farmers could duplicate our regular machine sowing of seed. Their livelihood, and their very survival depended on learning to spread the seed evenly, and without wasting it.
And we can bet a month's pay that next to no seed would ever get thrown or spilled onto the hard path. If a few grains did land on the path they would immediately be scuffed off into the good soil. And no farmer worth their salt would let seed land on stony ground. Or amongst the thistles. Why would you waste the seed that your life depended upon, that the harvest depended upon, by letting it land among the thistles? You wouldn't!
The people listening to Jesus are puzzled, and perhaps even offended, by this picture of such a wasteful, indiscriminate sower of seed, because... they know Jesus has been talking to them about God, and about the kingdom of heaven. They know the sower is a metaphor or a symbol, for God. Jesus has just told them that God is wasteful—as the hymn says—God is a spendthrift lover. God wastes the precious seed on people who have hard, stony, thistle-filled souls.
Imagine we're one of those people who heard Jesus telling the story of the sower and we walked home discussing it with a partner or friends, wondering what it could be about. Imagine one of the children says, "Maybe... maybe the stony ground is the Whosiwhatsit family." And we think,"The Whosiwhatsits! Those hard-hearted, tight-fisted, mean, nasty, worthless, neighbours of ours who are a disgrace to the village?"
Now when the innocent child—because children often hear this stuff better than we do—they haven't hardened their hearts the way we have yet—when the child says this… we have the possibility of saying, "NO! God would never do that. God wouldn't waste seed on the Whosiwhatsits." And so our heart would contract a little, our hearing would become a little dull, our eyes would see a little less of the love and grace of God. That's how it works when we stoke our prejudice, when we practise our prejudice: we harden our heart. Which is kind of ironic... because we've just been saying, "Hey it's the Whosiwhatsit's who are the hard-hearted soil."
Or maybe... walking home… maybe we think, "The Whosiwhatsits!? Really!? Does God also sow blessings in the heart of the Whosiwhatsits? Wow! —could that be true?" Can you see that even if we're just asking the question, and even if we are... well... a bit unconvinced by that idea, that something has been opened in us? That we might look at the Whosiwhatsits a little differently? And that our eyes and ears and hearts are opened a little, as a consequence?
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There's another thing to say. What if we are sitting here feeling that we are blind of eye and deaf of ear? What if we're sitting here thinking, "Well, I am a person with a stony heart. I am a person whose life is choked out with thistles. How can God possibly love me?
What I would want to say is this: the mere fact that we asked such questions about ourselves means that the light of God has entered into our heart, and that the seed is growing, and that there will be a harvest.
The only time I need to worry about the thistles and the stony ground of my soul is if I think I haven't got any thistles and that there are no stony patches, no hard judgemental places in my soul. Because then my eyes are closed and my ears are completely dull and I see nothing. When we are struggling, when we are worried and distressed by our hardness of heart, and for the lack of clarity of our vision, or by our lack of courage, that's when God is at work in the good soil of our heart. Otherwise... we wouldn't even care.
Even though we can be stubbornly resistant to change, with our ears stopped up, unable to hear... Even though we feel unable to change when we want to, sometimes doing the very things we hate, God ceaselessly sows the good seed in us and our humanity is growing.
Go into the world knowing that God loves you beyond measure, and lavishly. God loves all people, including you… and even me. You are not forgotten. None of us will be left behind. And as blind and deaf and lost as the world seems to be, the seed still grows. God still sows. There will be a harvest, and it's happening in each of us now. We are being made human in the image of God. Amen.
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