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Lee Barstow
June 13, 2008
First Congregational Church, Hadley, Massachusetts

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
   and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
   giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
   it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
   and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Matthew 13: 1-9

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: ‘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!’

 Plenty of Good Ground

This church is a great place to give a sermon on the parable of the sower. If there were ever a congregation that can appreciate the value of good soil, this has to be one, set as we are  here amongst farmland with soil as rich and deep as anywhere in the world, next door to the farm museum.

Good soil… the starting point for good growing, no matter which seed is planted. For the seed to reach its potential, the soil must be good.

In Jesus’ parable, the seed is the kingdom of God. What grows from this seed? Everything we need. Love. Beauty. Sustenance. Happiness. Comfort. And all the rest. That’s the promise.

And it all starts with the ground onto which the seed falls.

So let’s take this metaphor Jesus has given us and see what we can learn from it.

Let’s put ourselves in the picture. Let’s get an image of ourselves as the ground onto which the seed of God’s potential falls.

And let’s not limit ourselves to being one kind of ground, because that’s not how life works. Let’s allow all the types of ground within us. Let’s allow in the whole world of landscape that’s inside there, including the hard-packed as well as the fertile.

Can you see in yourself the paths of life’s hurriedness, where the birds eat the seed? How about the thorns of worrying over things we can’t change or—going beyond the images in the parable—don’t we all have within us ice caves of resentment and grueling mountains of ambition. Let’s also remember the areas we enjoy… the lush fields of accomplishment, the wildflower meadows of love for friends and family, the hills and seashores where we go because of the view, where we’re filled with awe at the sheer beauty of God’s creation.

You get the point. As we travel through our days, we present many types of ground onto which the seeds of God’s grace fall, and some of our places are more fertile than others…

Now let’s consider the seed – the other part of the metaphor. Here’s the thing about this seed: it’s a constant. Unlike the ground it falls on, the seed of God’s grace never changes. Always and in every moment God offers us the full potential of his love. It can be hard for us to remember this. Sometimes it feels like the hard places are all we have for receiving God’. Sometimes we know there is good soil somewhere in us, if only we could find it. The good news is that there’s plenty of good soil to be had. With trust in that and a little patience, we will find it.

Of course, lots of times we find ourselves in a fully grown garden unexpectedly. a delight that seems to come out of nowhere. Did you ever see the movie “Driving Miss Daisy”? Near the end of it is a scene where this happens. Jessica Tandy is in a nursing home, clearly in pain—emotional as well as physical. She is being visited by Morgan Freeman—the chauffeur her son forced on her many years earlier. Despite the daunting path they have traveled—through prejudice and classism and all the rest—he has become simply her best friend. And in this scene, after some harsh words from her, he feeds her a spoonful of pudding, and then Jessica Tandy shares with us an image of the grace of God. The way she savors that pudding is as if all the potential for joy in the world were wrapped up in that one taste. Her eyes close, she rolls the sweet softness around in her mouth, and for a blessed moment, she is happy. When least expected, in the midst of pain and hardship, the ground was right, and the seed of God’s grace bloomed into pure delight.

Miss Daisy needed to cooperate, of course. She needed to be willing to receive the gift. She might not have. She might have kept her focus on her pain—whether current or expected—and stayed hardened to the possibilities. It is always possible for us to believe our mind when it tells us to expect the worst. It’s a kind of pride, and like all pride, it chokes out new growth.

The reverse of pride is humility–knowing our true place in the scheme of things. Knowing what we are capable of and what we are not. Knowing that our expectations can never measure up to what God’s creation has in store for us.

It can be really hard to hold to our place, to stay humble, ward off our expectations, and look to God for guidance. I came across an example of this the other day in a radio broadcast. It was an interview with President Jimmy Carter conducted by a woman named Krista Tippett on her weekly radio show called “Speaking of Faith.” The segment was called “The Private Faith of Jimmy Carter.”

During the interview, Krista asked President Carter when during his presidency he found himself having to act in ways that contradicted his faith, and he talked about the Iran hostage crisis, when fifty-two Americans spent 444 days in captivity on the grounds of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The crisis defined his presidency and ended it when he was voted out of office for not taking decisive action.

Carter explained that a primary goal of his presidency was to be true to what he saw as his religious duty to promote peace. “I felt as a Christian,” he said, “that I was worshipping the Prince of Peace, not preemptive war or a war. And so I did all I could to keep our own country at peace and also to promote peace for others.” As commander in chief, President Carter never ordered the launching of a missile or the dropping of a bomb. He kept our country at peace.

During the the hostage crisis, he says, “Overwhelmingly, my associates recommended that I take military action because our nation was crying out for me to do so, you know, to punish these … [hostage takers]…. But I resisted … that political advice, and I tried to resolve the case peacefully. I had two goals in mind—one was to honor the principles of my country and not to do anything to hurt my nation's reputation or its well-being, and the other one was to bring every hostage home safe and free. And so I would say that I prayed more intensely and more frequently during that year of my life than I did any other time in my life.”

In the face of those risks, those demands for action… he prayed. He sought God’s guidance. We may disagree with his decisions, and yet we can admire that he stood his ground and truly sought the good soil of his faith, trusting that God’s seed would grow right, despite all evidence to the contrary.

And in the tenets faith, things turned out that way, as he describes in the interview: “Eventually, my prayers came true because I didn't violate the principles of my country or hurt my nation in any way, and every hostage came home safe and free, even though it may have cost me re-election.”

The irony is, the hostages were released on January 20th, 1981, just minutes after he left office. But he is okay with that, he says, because the hostages came home safe and free, and no American bombs were dropped on innocent children or other people.

His actions didn’t end with prayer, of course. The lesson here is that they started there, in the faith and humility. In the interview, he shares about one action where these virtues took him. “During the Iran hostage crisis,” he says, “I really studied the Qur'an. I read it. I tried to learn its basic premises. I even brought in, every week or two, scholars to explain to me the difference between the different Islamic faiths, the Shiites and Sunnis, for instance, so I can understand what was happening that I might get the hostages back. And I found then, as I have always found in Hinduism and Buddhism and so forth, that Christianity and Islam and the other religions… have the same basic principles and mandates concerning relations between human beings. They all promote peace. They all promote the alleviation of suffering. They all promote generosity. They all promote humility.”

And there it is… “humility”… the basic condition of good ground. Jimmy Carter had it, and the 52 hostages no doubt owe their lives to the fact that he did.

 “Humility”… the word from the same root as “humus”, meaning soil. The same, root, in fact, as “human,” which isn’t surprising when you recall the second creation story in Genesis: “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground,^* and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

We are, each and every one of us, made from earth. It is our natural birthright to be good soil. We are at home in humility. What’s more, no matter how far we stray from the good soil at times, it is always there to be found again, and we will always find it. As my friend Tom Fisher likes to recite from a sermon he once heard, “God don’t make junk.”

We are the ground within which God’s love grows. We are rocky places twisted pines grow. We are thorny patches that bloom into beautiful roses. Sometimes we are pavement, and even then God’s seed finds the cracks, where God makes flowers to grow and crack the cement.

And in the end? That’s when we’ll know the true glory of being God’s ground, when the precious gift of our true nature will be revealed: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

We are God’s children. The miracle of God’s creation is inside us, growing and waiting to take root.

May it be so for each and every one of us.

Amen.