The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
July 13, 2008

Proper 10 – A
Isaiah 55:1-13
Romans 8:9-17
Matthew 13:1-23

“Why do you speak to the people in parables?” the disciples asked Jesus. And Jesus replied, “To you it has been granted to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but not to them. For to those who have will more be given, and those who have not will lose even what they have. That is why I speak to them in parables, because Isaiah spoke the truth about them when he said that they look without seeing, and they listen without hearing or understanding.” Get it?

Jesus’ parables are like koans. The Zen master offers his disciple a paradox, and then, puzzled, the disciple is sent away to meditate on it and is expected to return to the master later to share the insights he has gained. The process is repeated, sometimes for years, until the disciple is judged to have experienced enlightenment. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” the disciple might be asked. “Go think about this for a year or two,” the master adds. “Give it some time.”

Jesus’ parables are like that. Instead of giving us two or three points to memorize, Jesus tells a story. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like this,” he says. And then he adds, ”He who has ears to hear, let him hear. Go and think about it a while. If you have ears to hear, more will be given to you; if you don’t have ears to hear, you’ll probably lose interest in the whole thing anyway. That’s the way life is.”

We have listened to the parable of the sower for two thousand years, but we have never really heard it, Robert Capon insists. We have not really heard it, because, like the people in Isaiah’s day and like the people gathered around Jesus almost eight hundred years later, we have stopped our ears and shut our eyes.

This is because we prefer test-passing religion to parables, says Capon. We like clear answers to life’s questions. “Lord, why don’t you just give us the answers straight out?” we ask with Jesus’ disciples. “Why don’t you just tell us the right answers about God and life? Tell us what we should know and think, and what we should do. Wouldn’t that be a lot easier on everyone?”

Matthew liked clear answers, too. He was one of us. And that’s why, shortly after he relates Jesus’ parable, Matthew tells us what it means. At least he tells us what he thinks it means.

“The seed sown on the foot path is the person who hears the word of God, but fails to understand it,” says Matthew. “The seed sown on rocky ground stands for the person who hears the Word and accepts it, but there is little room in him for it to take root. He has no staying power, and when trouble comes along he loses his faith. The seed sown among thistles represents the person who hears the word, but his concern about worldly things chokes it to death within him. And the seed sown on good soil is the person who hears the word and understands it, and who brings forth much fruit.”

That’s the meaning of Jesus’ story, according to Matthew. I’m aware, of course, that Matthew presents his explanation as if it’s Jesus who is giving the answer. But I’m pretty sure the explanation is from Matthew, not from Jesus himself, because the parable itself is so much more like the Jesus I know elsewhere in the Gospels, the Jesus who just tells the original story and then adds that those are blessed who have ears to hear, leaving us to hear meaning for ourselves.

Matthew turns the parable into a story with a moral about the bad guys and the good guys. Who are the good guys? The ones who are good soil and who receive the Word and produce good fruit.

And then, after hearing Matthew explain the parable for the umpteenth time in our lives, we all leave church hoping once again that we’ve got it right this time, hoping that we have the right answer and that we are the good soil, and hoping that if we aren’t yet, well, then at least maybe we can work harder this year to cultivate our own soil better before the exam on this parable rolls around again in three years. Know the right answers about God. Go to church. Be good soil. Work harder to live right. The parable is all about us, according to Matthew.

But Capon’s not so sure. And I’m not either.

I’m reminded of a story about Albert Einstein. After he had passed out the final exam for a course one year, a student ran up to his desk, all excited, and said, “Professor Einstein! The question you’ve given us this year is the same question you gave on last year’s exam!” And Einstein shrugged and said, “That’s all right. This year the answers are different.”

Now I’m just thinking out loud, but perhaps there is a meaning to Jesus’ parable that is different from the one Matthew hears. It’s not that I think Matthew’s interpretation is altogether wrong, but just that I think it’s not the only one, and not even the primary one. Perhaps the parable is not primarily about the soil, but about the Sower. Perhaps the parable is not primarily about us, but about God and God’s scandalous ways. Perhaps the parable is not so much a warning about our sinful ways as it is Jesus’ way of telling us about God’s gracious way. About God’s profligate, wasteful, indiscriminate grace and love, to which no logical, left-brained answer is even possible, much less appropriate or helpful.

Maybe this is what Jesus’ parable is all about – that God just pours out his love and his grace everywhere, on the just and the unjust alike, on rocky and thin soil as well as good – and then God sits back and waits to see if he gets a response. And then, when he does, he just pours on more grace. Maybe the parable is all about the prodigality and indiscriminate love of God, and about ears.

But to those who are so left-brained, says Capon, that they insist that God extends his grace only to good soil, to those who insist that God loves only those who get all the right answers to life’s questions and pass the religion test, and that God extends his grace only those who work hard to earn it – to those, even what they have will be taken away, because they look and look but never see what God is all about. They listen and listen, but never hear.

“Step back,” say the French, ”in order to leap farther.” Maybe this is part of the wisdom of Jesus’ parable today. Maybe, like all reformers, maybe even as Savior, Jesus is leading us to step back and consider what God has been like all along: “Come to me and listen to my words,” says the Lord through his prophet Isaiah. “Hear me and you will have life. I shall make an everlasting covenant with you – to love you faithfully as I loved David.” Step back into the past with God, so you can be prepared to leap into the future with God and his grace, into his kingdom.

“Seek the Lord while he is present. Call to him while he is close at hand.... Let the people return to the Lord, who will take pity on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, says the Lord, nor are your ways my ways. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so are my ways high above your ways and my thoughts high above your thoughts. As the rain and snow come down from the heavens and do not return there without watering the earth, making it produce grain and giving seed for sowing and bread for eating, so it is with my word that comes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me empty, but will accomplish that for which I sent it.” Maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe these words from Isaiah are the key to Jesus’ parable, to which no answer is called for, just response to the ancient and eternal graciousness of God.

Maybe Jesus’ parable, like life, is all about the mysterious ways of God, about the mystery of God’s Word and grace in the world, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Do we have eyes to see and ears to hear? “We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God.” This is not a warning from today’s “religious right.” These are the words of Abraham Lincoln during the midst of the Civil War, an earlier time of conflict and crisis in our nation’s history.

“We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us,” Lincoln continued in a warning to our nation that echoes God’s warning to the people in the wilderness. ”[We] have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to God who made us. It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.” (Proclamation for a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer, April 30, 1863)

Is this us today, a people like our Hebrew ancestors and our national Fathers, a people with ears that do not hear, and with the lines of our national credit and power and pride now stretched perhaps thinner even than Napoleon stretched his on his way to Moscow and disaster?

Do we, as individuals and as a people, have ears to hear the way it is with God’s grace – that God’s grace is catholic, that the seed of God’s Word is sown indiscriminately, that his rain and his sunshine fall on bad soil as well as good, watering and feeding the earth, while God waits for a response? Do we have ears to hear the way it is with God’s grace – that God freely pardons those who return to Him, those who “humble [themselves] before the offended Power,” and confess our sins, and “pray for clemency and forgiveness.” Do we have ears to hear that God just wastes his Word in the world, throwing it out on rocky soil as well as good, in small places as well as large, in empty minds and hearts as well as full, on sinners as well as saints, and then, like the farmer, God just waits for response. Do we have ears to hear that when God’s Word does finally get around to doing its work in the world, its power resists capture by any logical left-brained explanation of ours, because, like seed buried in the soil, it does its work mysteriously. Like Jesus. Jesus, God’s Word Incarnate, is sown, and then dies and disappears. But not before bringing forth the growth God sent him to bring forth.

Prodigality, grace, and mystery just seem to go hand in hand when God’s good news comes into the world. God sent his only Son into the world, and we “wasted” him, crucified him.

“To whom has the power of the Lord been revealed?” the prophet asked. “He came to his own who received him not. He grew up before the Lord like a young plant whose roots are in parched ground. He had no beauty or majesty to catch our eyes, no grace to attract us to him. He was despised and rejected by all. He was a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and rejected, an object from which people turn away their eyes. Yet it was our afflictions he was bearing and our pain he endured, while we thought of him as stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way.” We have stopped our ears and shut our eyes, our hearts have become dulled, and there is no response in us.

“And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was cut off from the land of the living.” Like seed among rocks and thistle.

“For the transgression of the people he was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, a burial place among felons, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.” He was crushed, and he suffered, and died. Like a Word sown among those whose ears are stopped.

“And though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he has healed him who has given himself as a sacrifice for sin. He will see his children’s children, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.” The will of the Lord will prosper, just as the rain falls from the heavens and does not return there without bringing forth the growth God sent it to bring forth. That God’s Word will do its work is a certain as that. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

But where will it take root? Who knows? God is a sower who throws his seed everywhere, indiscriminately. God just pours out his Word on the world like seed and sunshine and rain, on the just and the unjust alike. He just pours out his Word on everyone – on foot path and rocks and thistle and good soil alike, on Jew and Muslim and Buddhist alike, even on Christians, on foreigner and eunuch alike, on black and white and poor and rich and men and women alike, on sinner and saint alike, on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, on the deserving and the undeserving alike, on the receptive and the hostile alike, even on Christians. He wastes it. God is prodigal, extravagant with his love and grace, like one anointing a dying man with precious oil. That’s the way God is.

And then, like the farmer, God waits for those who have ears to hear.

“But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us. We have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to God who made us.”

Maybe we would do well to take a step back, back to the Scriptures and to our original vision as a people, in order to hear well enough to take the leap of faith necessary to jump into God’s future. Maybe we need to remember that the entire work of God in the world – from the beginning to Isaiah to Jesus to us – proceeds like the mysterious work of a seed, in secret, proceeds in a way that can be neither known nor answered, but only experienced. And only responded to, or not. If we step back and hear and remember, maybe the answers will be different this year. Or maybe there is no answer at all to be had, only response to be made. Maybe there will be a different experience this year, a different response, a greater harvest. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.

Maybe – who knows? – maybe this year we will remember the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us and will humble ourselves before the offended Power, confess our sins, and pray for clemency and forgiveness, and God will freely pardon.

Isn’t that the way it is with the Cross, with grace, with love? Despised and rejected by a hostile world, despised and rejected today as he was in the days of Isaiah and of Jesus himself, God and his Word and his grace remain so mysterious.

Is this our idea of how a respectable divine operation ought to be run? Shouldn’t there be some right answers? Shouldn’t there be something with flash, something more noisy and noticeable, like earthquake, wind, or fire, like thunder or fireworks? Like war?

But maybe that’s not the way it is with God. Maybe, with God, it’s more like a still, small voice, like a quiet, mysterious word, or like the sound of one hand clapping. Or like a sower and seed, like sunshine and rain, like precious oil poured out on a dying man or an ailing nation. Like love, like grace. Maybe, with God, it’s more like one whose love is so great that he lays down his life for his friends, even for sinners. Like Jesus.

Let’s go and think about it a while.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.