Jesus said:  But 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.  Matthew 13:23

One day during Christian Arts Camp we were talking with the children about seeds, particularly mustard seeds – as in, “if you have faith the size of amustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there”, and it will move.” So one of our activities was to go out on a “seed walk” – just around the perimeter of the Church. The children found all kinds of seeds from trees and flowers and bushes; some were tiny, some were fairly large and prickly. They collected their seeds in a paper cup and took the home at the end of the day.

The next morning we talked about trees – the kind of trees good fruit grows on (because “The Fruit of the Spirit” was the theme for the week), and we reflected on the fact that trees grow from seeds, like the seeds we had collected the day before. So we took a second walk – a “tree walk” – to investigate how many different kinds of trees we could find, and we found lots of them, including a wonderful tangle of raspberry bushes out between the garage and the trash bins. The raspberries had already set and were just beginning to ripen, so the children had a wonderful example of trees or plants that produce fruit, just as we were hoping to teach them about the Holy Spirit producing fruit in each of us: the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

This morning’s Gospel reading is all about seeds.

Jesus tells a story about a farm worker going out to sow crops – broadcasting seed by hand, scooping handfuls of seed from a bag or basket and then flinging them over a wide area while walking along across the field to be planted. And Jesus has lots of details in this story – and, as usual, it’s important to pay attention to the details he includes; they are usually there for a reason.
Some of the seeds in this parable fell on the path – hard-trodden, packed earth where the seeds were eaten by birds before they ever had a chance to take root. In spreading the seeds widely, some of them fell on rocky ground, and others fell among thorns.
Both sets of seeds started to grow, but the ones on rocky ground didn’t have enough soil to send roots down into, and so couldn’t survive the hot sun of the Middle Eastern growing season. And the seeds that fell among thorns also took root, but they had to compete with the bigger, more established, more vigorous plants – compete for sun and rain and nutrients in the soil; they also did not survive. And finally, there are the seeds which fell into good soil, took root, and grew and thrived and produced good fruit – all yielding different amounts, but all being fruitful in some way.

If the way that Jesus told this story, with the repetition of elements and the desired outcome appearing at the end, sounds a bit like the rhythm of a fairy tale or a folk story, it is because that is the pattern of story-telling in oral cultures; it’s the way to draw the audience in and help them understand the speaker’s point; it’s also the way we easily remember stories. But unlike many times that Jesus’ tells parables and leaves the meaning open-ended, in this Parable of the Sower, he gives the disciples an interpretation. We don’t overhear the conversation between Jesus and the disciples that led to the interpretation - that dialogue is in verses 10-17 which the lectionary leaves out; but it is clear that the interpretation is given to the disciples privately, perhaps for their own training and reflection. Jesus wants them to focus on being the good soil onto which the “word of the kingdom,” the Good News of the Gospel, the teachings and message of Jesus falls, and takes roots and flourishes and produces abundant good fruit. That is what Jesus wants for the disciples; that is what Jesus wants for us.

And here is where the details of the story become important: “Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty….But 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."  Jesus was not describing a modern, state-of-the-art crop where the yield could be predicted, and where the fruit would be uniform in size, weight, color and shape – like a hothouse tomato wrapped in cellophane. Instead, Jesus is saying that the fruit – the spiritual fruit of real, human lives that are connected organically to him – will vary; but the outcome will be abundant well beyond the initial investment of the seed.

So the question and the challenge for us is to understand how we can become the good soil that will receive the Gospel seeds with joy and gladness. How can we plow and enrich the soil of our lives, of our hearts and minds, so that the Holy Spirit can grow a good spiritual crop in us?

The first thing we might expect to say is individual prayer and Bible-reading, and those are both very important to Christian life and growth, but sometimes we need to do something else before that, or along with that, so we can really take in what God might be saying to us through our reading and praying. Getting rid of unnecessary distractions is very helpful to developing a healthy spiritual life. Of course there will always be things that pull and tug at us, real responsibilities that it would be wrong to turn away from; but there are for each one of us habits or patterns or activities that really just clog up our “God-channels” and we would do well to find a way to avoid them.

This past winter John and I gave up our cable TV subscription. Part of it was about the cost vs. the value we were receiving, but part of our decision was about the time waster the TV had become for us. It seemed all-too-easy to go from one movie to another on AMC or Turner Classic Movies, or to watch endless re-runs of “Law and Order”, “NCIS” or “House” back-to-back; given the right frame of mind I even sometimes managed to veg-out through several hours in a row of CNN, all the while telling myself what a waste of time it was.

So we let the cable go.

Sometimes we still watch movies on the DVD player; sometimes I even watch a little internet TV, but on the whole it has been a healthy and positive move for both of us, giving us the time and energy to focus on more important things – like our relationship, and like some projects that we have not been able to get to for a long time. I’m not suggesting that everyone should give up TV watching, but I am saying that each one of us has particular distractions that take our attention away from God, and become the thorns in Jesus’ parable, or perhaps the rocky soil that can’t sustain spiritual growth.

The whole purpose of being a Christian, of having a spiritual life, is to be more like God, to let Christ live within us, because that is where we find our deepest meaning, our greatest fulfillment; that is the way God designed us to be – in a relationship with him through which we are, over time, changed more and more into God’s likeness and image. But it’s hard for that to happen if we don’t give God much room to work in.

The more we can pay attention to the Holy Spirit as we go about our work and our errands and our family life and our friendships and our moments of quiet, the more porous to God our lives can be, the more we clear from the soil of our souls the weeds and thorns and rocks that inhabit them - the more we will know both the joy and the purposes of God.

As the poet Mary Oliver says in her poem “The Summer Day,”

“Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?” *

Jesus said: But 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."  Amen.

*”The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems, 1992, Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
July 10, 2011

[Jesus said:] "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."                                                                                                            Matthew 11:28-30

Anyone who has ever caught a glimpse of New York harbor, from nearly any angle, has seen the Statue of Liberty – and for those of us who live in New Jersey seeing the Statue (at least from a distance) may have become fairly commonplace and routine. We just expect it to be there, along with the Verazzano Bridge, the Staten Island Ferry and all of the buildings of lower Manhattan. Except that we learned ten years ago on September 11th that life isn’t always as secure as we want it to be, and change can come violently and in a very short space of time. And in the immediate aftermath of those attacks on the World Trade Center the Statue of Liberty was closed, to be fully reopened to the public only two years ago; even now, you need a reservation to climb up into the Statue’s crown.
So most people only see the Statue from a bridge or a boat or the Turnpike.

Even so, the Statue has become a symbol of America that appears on stamps and mugs and tee-shirts, and all manner of souvenir memorabilia, including those green foam crowns that people sometimes wear on New Year’s Eve as they crowd into Times Square.
But maybe all those mugs and tee-shirts cloud our understanding sometimes; we may forget that the gift of the Statue from the French government in 1886 was not to applaud America as a nation, but to lift up the principle of liberty that is part and parcel of democracy that both France and the US share – an idea in the modern world that was barely one hundred years old when the Statue first arrived in New York harbor. And so it’s worth hearing again the sonnet composed by Emma Lazarus in 1886 to help raise funds to build the Statue’s base; it’s called “The New Colossus”:

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"     [Emma Lazarus, 1883]

That promise of liberty, of freedom to begin again in a new place, of the opportunity for justice and an equal chance, is what has drawn millions and millions of people to our country. They believed in our ideals; they believed the story we told the world about who we are and what we hold good and important and true. And in believing and acting on our ideals and our story, the people who have come to America have challenged us to live up to what we profess, to “walk the walk, as well as talk the talk.”  It is a challenge that needs be re-examined and renewed in every generation as our changes and as the world changes around us.

And this morning I am struck by how closely the words of Emma Lazarus’ poem parallel the words of Jesus in the Gospel reading:  "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

They are words especially familiar to us here at All Saints’ because they are stitched into the side of our altar rail kneelers: Come unto me all that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. These are comforting words – an invitation to bring all our troubles and cares and stresses and burdens to the altar, to give them to God, and then be free of them. We all need to do that at various times, and God certainly asks us to do so. But there is another meaning to Jesus’ words.

In first century Judea and Gallilee the people were burdened on two fronts; they were burdened by their own religious leaders who exercised a very rigid and exacting interpretation of Jewish Law and customs. And the people also suffered under the military and governmental oppression of a foreign power; not only did the Romans make the laws that suited them, but Roman soldiers could compel Jewish civilians to comply with requests that had nothing to do with keeping the law: such as requiring a civilian to give up their coat, or carry goods and equipment, or suffer the indignity of a back-handed slap across the face for resisting a request. That was the every-day reality of life for Jesus, the disciples and all Jews who lived in Palestine.

Jesus’ words were addressed to people who were weary of living under military and political oppression, as well as those burdened, heavy-laden, by over-zealous religious strictures. What a relief, and what a sense of freedom those words must have been to Jesus’ hearers; here, at last, was someone who understood their condition, and (better yet) spoke for God clearly and authoritatively.

And then Jesus takes the image of the yoke, which so often in the Old Testament is a reminder of the Israelite’s slavery in Egypt and of the oppression of foreign powers, and he transforms the image. He says: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Jesus breaks the yoke of oppression, but then asks his followers to take on a different kind of yoke or harness or discipline, one in which we will be paired with Jesus, harnessed together with him, so that our work for God will not be burdensome or over-bearing, but work that is good and will bring rest to our souls – something against which we do not need to struggle and resist.

That doesn’t mean that following Jesus isn’t work, or that there won’t be challenges and disappointments and even sometimes heartaches. But fundamentally our work for God is done not on our own strength, but in the power of the Spirit, according to the purposes of God, with Jesus as our example and guide; that is both freeing and restful. Jesus calls us to freedom, to new life, to learning a new way of being. He invites us to lay aside and give to him all that troubles us, that weighs us down, all that becomes a stumbling block or an oppressive burden – so that we can be free to take on his yoke, to be joined in partnership with Jesus, doing God’s work in the world about us.

And for us as Christians living in America, making our home and our lives here, part of our work for and with Jesus is to re-examine and renew our commitment to liberty in our country – not so that we can do whatever we feel like, but we commit ourselves to liberty so that we can do that which is good and true and right and just – for ourselves and for all who come to our shores.

As we heard in the reading from Deuteronomy, which is one of the lessons assigned for Independence Day: “For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them with food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”  This is what our liberty is for.

Let us pray.
Lord God Almighty, you have made all the peoples of the
earth for your glory, to serve you in freedom and in peace:
Give to the people of our country a zeal for justice and the
strength of forbearance, that we may use our liberty in
accordance with your gracious will; through Jesus Christ our
Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one
God, for ever and ever. Amen. BCP, page 258

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Third Sunday after Pentecost
July 3, 2011