Sowing the Seed

 

The story that Jesus told of the sowing of the seeds, and what became of them, is one of the first we ever learn, isn’t it?
We drew pictures, in Sunday School, or in our primary school Scripture lessons,
of the sower, with his trayful of seeds,
and squiggly seagulls swooping down to grab them before they could take root,
hot sun shining on others,
and lovely scribbly weeds choking still others....
and a few, just a very few, ears of wheat standing up in a field.

And then, perhaps, as we grew older and began to stay in Church rather than go to Sunday School, we would hear sermons on this parable,
and if you are anything like me, what you heard –
not, I should emphasize, necessarily what had been said, but what you heard –
was that Proper People, or perhaps I should say Proper Christians,
were the ones who were the fertile soil,
where the Word could take root, grow and flourish.

But, of course, if you were anything like me, that just made you feel guilty and miserable –
what if you weren’t the good soil?
What if you were the stony places, or the weedy patches?
And I’m sure that there are times when we do allow other things to take priority, perhaps when we ought not.
And there are times when we do rather wither up,
in times of spiritual drought.
All of us go through them, of course.
But it doesn’t help when the preacher starts banging on about how dreadful we are if we are not 100% fully fertile soil, and bearing fruit 100%.
We just end up feeling guilty and thinking that we must be terrible people.

But I don’t think Jesus meant us to think that!
After all, we are told over and over again how much we are loved,
and St Paul reminds us, in the reading we heard from his letter to the Romans, that if we live according to the Spirit,
we won’t be the barren ground Jesus talks about!

Of course, again, if you are like me, you’re apt to think that you can’t possibly be living according to the Spirit, because, pride....
but that’s stupid!
Why would we not be, if we are committed to being Jesus’ person?
You might remember last week’s reading,
where St Paul was being upset about the fact that he found it nearly impossible not to do wrong things, but now he is triumphant –
God’s Spirit enables him to live as he should.
And us, too.

Going back to the story of the sower for a moment, I think that it’s not so much that any given one of us is barren ground,
or weedy, or stony, or fertile –
but that each of us has all of those characteristics within us.
Think, for a moment.
Sometimes it’s really easy to be God’s person,
we can’t think of anything else we’d rather be.
Other times, not so much!
Times when we are tempted to sin,
or times when we want to do something that isn’t necessarily sinful, but isn’t going to help our spiritual lives.
Times when we know God is asking us to do something that we would really rather not....
you know the kind of thing.

But the thing is, if –
or rather because –
we are living according to the Spirit,
we are able to allow God to help us grow and change.
We don’t have to struggle to be good,
we don’t have to struggle to turn ourselves into fertile ground!
That part of it is God’s job.
All we have to do is to be willing to let that happen.

And, meanwhile, sometimes we are the sowers ourselves –
often, maybe, we don’t even know it.
Again, it’s probably as well when we don’t –
nothing worse than a rather forced presentation of the Gospel as someone tries to explain, embarrassed, why they follow Christ.
But sometimes, who knows, just a “Good morning”, or a smile in the right place can tip the balance for someone who may have been despairing;
a box of pasta or tampons in the food bank box might make all the difference to someone’s summer holidays.

Which reminds me – as you know, I’m sure, many families who can just about cope in term time when their children get a meal at school find it a lot more difficult during the holidays.
You will remember Marcus Rashford’s campaign during the pandemic to get children the food they so desperately needed while the schools were closed.
So do consider giving a little more to the various food banks than you usually do – most supermarkets have a box where you can put donations, or you can give money.
Or, of course, bring stuff to Brixton Hill, which hosts a food bank on a Wednesday.
And not only a food bank – there is an advice centre where people can get helped to get the benefits they need, or with housing, or whatever.
Wednesdays, 11 until 1.
It’s also a social session; people are free to stop and chat and have a coffee – it’s basically a descendant of the “warm space” we had last winter.

That’s a bit of a digression.
But the point is – well, the other week we heard Jesus reminding us that whatever we did for anybody else, we did it to him.
So we don’t judge, we don’t look down on people who need food, we don’t try to preach to them.
But who knows?
Maybe one day they will come to know and love God, just because we were kind to them and smiled at them and helped them in their need.

Some years ago now, I read about a church in Colorado whose congregation was mostly elderly, with no young families, but who wanted, and prayed for, a youth group.
One day, their minister was sitting in a coffee shop when he was approached by a group of young people who asked whether his church was a place where people could say goodbye to friends who had died.
He explained that it was, and they explained that one of their friends had just died of an overdose, but his parents had taken his body home before there could be any funeral.
The young people were allowed to use the church to hold their own funeral –
no hymns or prayers, but they spent time telling stories about their friend, and then ate a meal that church members had prepared for them.
One of them said “Oh, I wish we could eat like this every week –
it reminds me of my grandma’s cooking!”
And the church members said “Well, of course you can –
we’re here every Sunday;
you come and bring your friends!”
Those young people may never attend worship at that Church, but the congregation still loves them and cares for them and feeds them every Sunday.

Nearer home, a friend of a friend had four tiny children, including twins, when her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
She was left widowed, but her local church stepped up to the mark and started to care for her, bringing her meals, babysitting, finding clothes for the children that, perhaps, their own children had outgrown but which were still good, and generally caring for her.
I believe that she is now a pillar of that church, although before her husband died she had no idea of faith.

What I’m trying to say is that often it’s not what we say that is the seed we are sowing, it’s what we do.
And not putting pressure on people –
the church in Colorado knew that they would lose the young people if they started insisting they came to church,
or even conformed to any kind of dress code when they entered the building.
My friend’s church knew that someone with four small children would find coming to church very difficult, even if they had wanted to come.

We may never be in exactly that sort of situation, but there will always be times when we are called to love people into the Kingdom of God.
Our duty is to do the loving we’re called to do –
and it’s God’s job to worry about the results!
Whether the seed falls on the path, or on stony ground, weedy ground, or a fertile field isn’t our business –
our job is to sow the seeds.
And our job is also to allow God the Holy Spirit to live in us and transform more and more of us into fertile ground in which God’s Word can bear fruit.

God is good, and, going back to our theme, if we say “Yes” to God, God will help us become more and more fertile ground for growing seed and producing fruit;
God will help us live by the Spirit, the life that leads to life.
And God will help us sow seeds that may or may not fall in fertile ground.
Amen.

God gets involved

 

A new introduction to an old friend!

At this time of year, our Old Testament readings are all about Abraham. Over the last month, if the Old Testament lesson was read, we learnt how God called Abraham to leave his home in Ur
how he and Sarah were childless, but God promised them a child;
how Abraham pre-empted this by conceiving a child, Ishmael, on his servant;
how that all went rather pear-shaped when Ishmael started playing too roughly with Isaac, when he was finally born, and making him cry;
last week, we had that extraordinary episode when God appeared to be asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac;
and now, this week, we come to a nearly-grown-up Isaac, and his search for a wife.

Scholars seem to think that these stories of Abraham,
which had been an integral part of the Jewish tradition,
were collected together and written down during the 5^th and 6^th centuries BC –
this, you remember, was when the Israelites were in exile,
the Temple had been destroyed,
and they had no king of their own.
Only a very few Israelites were left in Jerusalem,
and they had rather lapsed from their traditions and practice.
So the various stories were collected and written down,
possibly somewhat haphazardly, in case it should all be lost.

Abraham himself is thought to have lived in the early part of the 2^nd millennium BC.
Apparently the earliest he could have been born was 1976 BC and the latest he could have died was 1637 BC.
This was in the Bronze age –
he would have had bronze tools, not iron, and possibly still a flint knife.

Many years ago now, Robert and I visited the town of Bolzano,
where they have the museum where the body of Oetzi, the ice-man, is stored.
You may remember that he was found in the Alps about 20 years ago,
having been shot by person or persons unknown.
His body had been preserved in a glacier for over 5,000 years.
The point is, this was even longer ago than Abraham –
he only had a copper axe, as they hadn't discovered about bronze yet.
But the things that were found with him –
his axe,
his coat,
his trousers,
his bow and arrows,
his knife and so on,
you could see just how they were used, and he was really a person just like you or me!
That makes Abraham feel less remote, as he, too, would have worn clothes we recognise, and carried tools we'd know and so on.

Abraham had felt called by God to leave his home-town of Ur in the Chaldees, which in his day was allegedly highly civilised.
They had, apparently, nineteen different kinds of beer and a great many fried-fish shops, if you call that being civilized!
However, they did enjoy other kinds of food, such as
onions,
leeks,
cucumbers,
beans,
garlic,
lentils,
milk,
butter,
cheese,
dates,
and the occasional meal of beef or lamb.
Just the sort of food I like!

There was wine available, to make a change from beer,
but it was expensive, and drunk only by the rich.
They played board-games,
enjoyed poetry and music, which they played on the lyre, harp and drum,
and were generally rather well-found, from all one gathers.

The only thing was that without many trees in their part of the world,
they had to do without much furniture,
and tended to sleep on mats on the floor, for instance, instead of beds.
But definitely a sensible and civilised place in which to live.
When you hear it described, it doesn't sound all that remote, does it?
They were people like us, and had similar tastes to us.

But Abraham had felt called to leave there,
and to take his family and household and to live in the desert.
And they had all sorts of adventures, and sometimes things went very wrong, but mostly they went all right.

And now Isaac has grown up and Sarah has died,
and it is time for Isaac to marry.
Abraham is urgent that he marry a woman from his own tribe,
not a local Canaanite woman, who wouldn't have known about God,
so he sends his servant back to Ur, to find a suitable relation for Isaac to marry.

The servant explains, rather earnestly, how he asked God to show him which the right woman was –
would she offer to draw water for his camels, or not?
That wasn't an easy task –
camels, which can go four or five days without water, like to drink A LOT at one time, so she'd have needed a fair few bucketsful!

Rebecca's family would have liked a few days to get used to the idea,
but the servant says he needs to get back as soon as possible,
and Rebecca agrees to leave next day.
So she and her various maidservants –
one of them may have been her old nurse –
got packed up and ready, and set off.
And eventually they get home safely,
and there is Isaac coming to meet them.
And they get married, and live more-or-less happily ever after!

We sometimes get alarmed about arranged marriages these days;

we know that in those communities where they're still more-or-less the norm, things can go horribly wrong –
think of those so-called “honour killings” we hear so much about!
Even in this day and age, it isn't always easy for someone to escape an abusive situation if they don't know where to go.
But as I understand it, an arranged marriage can be every bit as happy and as successful as one where the bride and groom have chosen one another;

we all know that you have to work at being married,
whether you knew your husband for years beforehand or whether you met him a few days or weeks before the wedding –
or even at the wedding!

I think Rebecca was very brave going off with Abraham's servant like that;

she had no way of knowing who or what was awaiting her at the far end of the journey.
The servant had bigged up Abraham's –
and thus Isaac's –
wealth, and had given her lots of gold jewellery, but was he telling the truth?

But one thing stands out about this story and that is that God was involved from beginning to end!
And God led them all to a happy ending.

I wonder how much we actually believe that God is really involved in our lives?
I know we say we do, but these Sundays in Ordinary Time are very much places where what we think we believe tends to come up against what we really do believe!
After all, not all of our stories have happy endings, do they?
Some do, many do, and for these we give thanks,
but what happens when they don't?
Does God get involved in our lives?
And if so, how does this work, and how can we work with God to ensure a happy ending?

Well, the Bible definitely tells us that God is involved in our lives,
and I am sure most of us could tell of moments when we were perfectly and utterly sure of this.
But equally, most of us could tell of moments when we really struggled with it!
Where was God when this or that bad thing happened?
Does God really care?
In the story from two weeks ago, Ishmael and Hagar in the desert,
we found that God was there with them, even though it hadn't felt like it.

Many of us have lived through enough bleak times to know that one comes out the other side.
We know that, when we look back, we will see God's hand upon it all.
God may not have led us to a happy ending, exactly,
but we can see how God has worked all things together for good for us.

It's not a matter of God waving a magic wand and producing the happy ending we want;

we all know God doesn't work like that.
And it's not a matter, either, of God having set the future in stone so that nothing we can do can change things.
Nor is it a matter of God simply sitting back and letting us struggle as best we can, although everybody feels at times that this is what is happening.

It's more as if God is working with us, moment by moment.
Sometimes we –
or other people –
do things that mean the situation can't come out as God would have wished.
God has a detailed plan for creation, but his plan for our individual lives isn't –
can't be –
mapped out in moment-by-moment detail
since we are free to make our own choices.
But God truly wants the best possible life for each one of us.
The idea, I think, is to stay as close to God as possible,
trying to be aware of each moment of decision and what God would like for us to do.

But, of course, as St Paul points out in the letter to the Romans, that isn't actually possible!
We're a bit crap at actually doing the right thing, no matter how much we know we want to!
It was impossible for Paul to keep the Jewish law in its entirety,
no matter how much he wanted to.
And although we know we are, and I quote, under grace not under the law,
we do tend to find it easier to try to follow a set of rules and regulations than to follow Jesus!
And, of course, we don't follow those rules and regulations perfectly –
how could we?

But Jesus points out that his burden is light!
Sometimes we don't feel as though it is.
“Come unto me all you who are burdened, and I will give you rest!”

I am sure Abraham's servant must have felt incredibly burdened when he went back to Ur to find Rebecca.
But the servant, at least, spent his time moment-by-moment in God's presence.
He trusted that God would lead him, step by step, to the right woman and that God would bring the whole journey to a happy conclusion.
“Come unto Me all you who are burdened, and I will give you rest!”
Abraham's servant trusted God.
I wonder how much we trust God?
It isn't always easy, is it.
Last week's story, how God asked Abraham to kill Isaac,
was very much about trust.
Abraham didn't even argue with God –
he just went ahead and did as he was told, leaving it very much up to God to do the right thing!
Even Isaac didn't struggle –
he was a young man at that stage, not a small boy,
and he could easily have overpowered his elderly father.
But no –
he allowed himself to be bound and laid upon the altar.
And God did do the right thing, as it were, and produced the ram.

And now God did show the servant his choice of wife for Isaac.
And so was born the Kingdom of Israel.
We never know the consequences of our choices –
they may be far more far-reaching than we expect.
But we do need to practice involving God in our everyday lives,
otherwise, when the crunch comes, we'll find it much harder than it need be to rely on him.
“I will give you rest,” says Jesus, but if we don't know how to come to him for that rest, how can he give it to us?
Amen.