Matthew 13:1-9,
18-23
You can see quite
a construction in our church today: rockets, robots, lights, tools, and
ladders. We left them up so that you could see we just finished a week of
Summer Celebration. And it was a great week. But while I could tell you about
it, I’m not sure you’d fully understand it. I could shout “Wow God!” to you and
tell you about Ian Victor and his crazy invention. I could even ask our music
leaders Tom Dixon and Emma Stoddart to show you some dance steps. You might be
interested; you might be glad it happened; you might be glad you weren’t there.
But you wouldn’t really get it because you didn’t live it; if you weren’t part
of it, you are not in on the secret.
For reasons that
are unclear to me, the lectionary leaves out a crucial portion of this Gospel.
After telling them this parable, the disciples, feeling baffled, ask Jesus: Why do you teach in parables? And
tells them that he speaks in parables precisely so that people will not get it.
And what in the world is that about? Doesn’t that just contradict everything
Jesus stands for, like proclaiming Good
News to all people and welcoming everyone into God’s kingdom? How can we square
that Jesus with this one today, who says: Seeing
they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen. Well, I think Jesus
offers us the answer to that conundrum with this whole idea of being in on the
secret. He tells his disciples: To you it
has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven. The Greek word
used there for secrets is musteria, “mysteries.”
The disciples have entered into the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, so they
can get what Jesus is saying. Other people outside the kingdom will never get
it, and Jesus doesn’t want them to get it because he doesn’t want them to be
outsiders: he wants them to come into the kingdom. Please follow me carefully
here because this is really important: there is deliberately no way to fully
grasp the parables of Jesus unless you are in the kingdom. They are impossible
to understand from the outside. So every time he utters a parable, people face
a choice: they can shrug it off, they scratch their heads — “Huh?” Or they can
enter into the mystery, into the secrets of the kingdom and, as we heard this
week in Summer Celebration, have their minds blown! Because that’s what Jesus
is trying to do: he’s trying to get us to hear these stories from the inside so
that he can, in fact, blow our minds.
Let’s use this
parable of the sower as an example. If we listen to it as outsiders, then we
can easily dismiss it as weird or quaint. Or we could settle for some
superficial understanding of it: Yes, there’s this farmer, and he throws lots
of seeds around and squanders lots of seeds: many of them don’t ever produce
anything because they fall on bad soil. But some fall on good soil and bear
fruit. And then we could discuss the inefficiency of this farmer or enter into
a facile and fruitless (pun intended) exercise of trying to determine what kind
of soil other people are or maybe what kind of soil we are. Is that what this
parable is about? NO! But if we hear it as outsiders, as people not living in
the mystery of the kingdom, we might reach just that conclusion.
But now hear the
story from within the kingdom, from within the very heart of the mystery. If we
are hearing this as insiders, that means kingdom seeds are already bearing
fruit in us and we can see that reality is not what we thought it was. Outside
the mystery, we could say that lots of seeds get wasted and many people don’t
have faith. From within the mystery, we can experience instead the extravagant
abundance of God, who is sowing seeds of the kingdom every minute, every
second. They’re within us and they’re all around us. God is relentless in her
love: every opportunity is seized, every inch of soil is covered. And God is
infinite and eternal: this sower never gets tired. Ever. It doesn’t matter, for
example, how many hundreds of times we may have heard this story and not really
understood it or even cared to: right now God is sowing seeds in our hearts and
hoping they sprout. And if we don’t get it this time, there is always next
time: God never gives up. And that is true about all of life within the
kingdom. It doesn’t matter how many times we’ve failed. It doesn’t matter how
many times we’ve screwed up. I’m sure God has sown thousands of seeds in my
life that have gone to waste and produced nothing, but — incredibly,
unbelievably — God still keeps throwing seeds at me and some of them take root
and bear fruit. I know that. I see that. I can count on that. And so can you.
God will not stop until we are all bearing fruit, until each one of us is a
gorgeous garden, fruitful and beautiful beyond our wildest dreams, yielding
thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold! That is what it means to hear this
parable from within the kingdom, from within the mystery.
And hearing it
from within also changes the way we serve God. After all, why hold back? God
doesn’t. We sowed tons of seeds this week at Summer Celebration, and I’m sure
lots of them were wasted — but not all of them. One child who
participated, not a member of this
parish, proved to be a bit of a handful. He was constantly talking, constantly
misbehaving, and seemed to never pay attention. Then one day at the Bible
lesson, the leader, Aidan, asked why anyone would ever want to kill Jesus. The
other kids were quiet, but that boy piped up: “Because he loved people they
didn’t want him to love.” And, boom, in an instant, a kingdom seed bears fruit.
That kid was right on. If there is a way to reach us, God will find it. Doesn’t
matter how many millions of seeds are wasted: this sower never runs out of
seeds — or patience. With any of us. And we can live and minister accordingly.
Right this
moment, the Risen Christ is sowing seeds in all of us. He doesn’t want us to
hear about the kingdom as outsiders because being outsiders won’t change us at
all. Jesus wants us to live the kingdom as insiders. Every time we hear a
parable, all of us are invited into the heart of the mystery, into the heart of
God. Everyone is welcome to it, but you have to come in to get it. Be in on the
secret, and let your mind be blown and your heart expanded by the amazing love
of God — available right here, right now.
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