Listen for God's Voice

July 16, 2017

The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost

During the first semester of my first year of teaching, there was a knock at the door of my first apartment . . . .

Two Jehovah’s Witnesses or some door-to-door evangelist group asked to talk to me about God and the Bible. Not well-versed in either but with opinions about both, I agreed. One of the first questions they asked was whether or not I believed that if I sinned in one way, I had sinned in all ways. Without a pause, I said “no”.  To which they responded, “you are wrong”. And immediately my 22-year-old brain went to the reasoning that if sinning in one way was the same as sinning in all ways….why hold back?

And I wondered if the sower in the parable felt the same. He scatters all his seeds and they fall in four different situations:

                                     some on the road

                                     some on rocky ground

                                     some among thorns,

                                     and some on good ground.

And three out of four…75%…do not yield.  Why try!

Today’s Gospel reading is the first of a series of three parabolic teachings (you will hear the others in the next two weeks) which have something to do with seeds and (unbeknownst to those who heard it first) these parables have everything to preparing for the Kingdom of God.… In this parable Jesus uses a concrete situation—a sower, a farmer maybe, or someone hired for the sole purpose of scattering seeds—to help those gathered on the shore (and specifically his disciples) understand the kingdom of God. (Amy-Jill Levine, 9)

One problem:  this parable as Jesus gives it is not at all obvious to the people hearing it for the first time. So because the crowd thinks they heard a farming story and they do not grasp what this story is about. Jesus explains the parabolic metaphor as a representation of four different types of people…and what happens to each, based on their varying abilities, to hear (or not hear) the word of the kingdom. So what we end up with is a neat little package of explanation.

—Jesus is the sower of the seeds

—The seeds are the word of the kingdom.

—The recipients of the word of the kingdom have a 25% chance of being:

            the person who is the “good soil”,

            “who hears the word and understands it,

            and “who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”

—And with that yield, those in the 25% bracket become sowers of the seeds.

Except that . . . . there is a 75% chance of being the one who receives the word of the kingdom but does not understand, or can’t stand up to troubles and persecution, or succumbs to deceit and worries. Not good odds. And besides, parables do not come in neat little packages. So what if we look at this parable another way?

Mark was the first Gospel writer and Matthew and Luke borrowed from him. And Matthew often took creative license with what he borrowed. In the Gospel According to Mark (remember Mark was the first Gospel writer) and in the Gospel According to Luke, and not in the Gospel According to Matthew, Jesus says that the sower sows the Word of God. The sower sows the Word of God. Now, because of Matthew’s creative license, we identify the sower of the seeds as Jesus…..and we have in our minds an image of him and we have in our minds an image of those of us who make the 25% cut—going around sowing the word of the kingdom on places that haven’t yet received it.

Remember Mark (the first Gospel writer) and Luke (who borrowed often exactly as is from Mark) wrote that the sower sows the Word of God. And in Christian theology consistent with the Johannine teaching the Word of God is the one who was in the beginning with God, and the Word of God is the one who became flesh and dwelt among us…therefore the Word of God is the Son of God, Jesus….

Do you see where this is going? Jesus is the Word of God—so in the parable: Jesus is the seed sown. And the Sower of the seed is God.  The sower of the seed is not Jesus! It is God who scatters the seed.  It is God, the Sower, who sent Jesus, the seed sown, to everyone everywhere. And that means that Jesus is sown within everyone in the world—and sown, so to speak, without a single bit of earthly cooperation or consent. Therefore, it is not our job to prepare in order to receive the sown seed. The seed has been there since God first imagined us.  The seed has been been there since God first imagined you. The sown seed, the Word of God, Jesus…abides within us…

                   always has been

                   always will be.

So the parabolic meaning is no longer about preparing a place for God to grow into our lives.  It is about living into and with the Word of God. We do live in a world of temptations which threaten our ability to abide in the Word of God. We do live in a world of potholes and sinkholes and rocky roads and stumbling journeys that challenge our stability in abiding in the Word of God. We live in a world of thorny opportunities and prickly decisions that jeopardize the life source of the Word of God. The parabolic meaning becomes one of growing into God’s presence already within us….one of abiding with God’s love within us…and within each other. It is about acknowledging and accepting, nurturing and sustaining, knowing and loving that which is at the very core of all God has created.

The Word of God abides within us……within all of us……within all of God’s creation…

                   always has

                   always will.

The Word of God abides within us which allows us to look at the Parable of the Sower less as a 75% chance of failure and more as a 100% opportunity for success. God has sown divinity into our humanity and asks us to live into the divinity of our humanity. Explore what it means to abide in the love of God, that love woven into our very being……to hear it, to see it within yourself and others. Explore what it means to do the same when you leave this place and as you live into the rest of your day and into the rest of your tomorrows. Hear the Word of God in a plea for help. Watch the Word of God walk toward you. Hear the love of God as you speak. See the love of God as you help another. And when you share the peace today, listen for the love of God within each other’s voice….and….see the love of God within each other’s eyes.

The loveliness of parables is that they continue (millennia after millennia) to be open to new understandings. Today I offer to you what I found this week.  The next time something quite different may ring truer. Read the parable in next Sunday’s Gospel and find what rings true for you. And as I think of this parable in terms of God sowing divinity within and among our humanity, I ask that you…..hear God's voice…and see God’s love…beyond the clamor and busy-ness of our man-made world...and into that space in your heart and soul where divinity and humanity touch and merge ever so slightly and gently...as if to barely see or hear but to always know that God’s love abides within you inviting you to abide in God’s love……now and forever.

AMEN.