October 22, 2006 Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost

October 22, 2006 Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
What Kind of Soil Are You?

Focus: God's love as powerful as it is, needs a responsive human heart if it is to bear fruit. Ronald E. Vallet

Jesus' primary way of teaching is very Moravian. It's teaching by example—how he lived his life. What should be important in our lives is what was important to Jesus in his life—spending time alone with God, caring for sick and hurting people, feeding the hungry. Reaching out with love to people on the margins of acceptable society, whoever modern day widows and orphans are—persons who have limited legal rights and resources.

In our last two Wednesday night programs The Rev Dr. Craig Atwood, the theologian in residence at Home Moravian Church and Comenius scholar at Wake Forest University school of Divinity, reminded us the essentials of the faith for our Moravian ancestors was their response in faith love and hope to God's essential actions towards us. The Creator's action in giving us life, Christ's actions in redeeming us and the Holy Spirit's actions in our ongoing sanctification. Where the rubber meets the road in what we as Moravians believe is by how we act. For Moravians our faith is less about what we say and more about how we act, what we do.

But today's gospel lesson gives us the second way Jesus teaches--- by telling a particular kind of story called a parable. At its simplest definition a parable is a metaphor drawn either from nature or ordinary life and engages the hearer because of its strangeness or vividness. When you hear it, a parable leaves doubt in your mind about the story's precise meaning. The goal of a parable is up open the listener up to a new vision of how the world works under the reign of God. Jesus' parables threaten the assumptions by which the hearers in First century Palestine lived by, and properly preached, they have the same result on us today. Megan Mc Kenna calls parables “arrows of God” that pierce through the hard crust of our ego's to infuse a new kind of life in us. A new way of understanding and perceiving the world through God's eyes. Or said another way, the goal of a parable is to upset you, to show you a vision of the world different than what conventional wisdom, the way the world works tells us. One of the important but hard things to do with parables is not to take them personally, but instead to take them to heart.

In taking this parable to heart this morning, let's consider the sower to be a metaphor for how our Moravian ancestors understood God, and the seed to be a metaphor for God's essential actions towards each of us—God creating us and giving us the gift of life and many blessings. Our redemption through the saving work of Jesus Christ, and our ongoing sanctification through the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit. The same seed, the same essential gifts of creation, redemption and sanctification are sowed by God into every one of God's children. God does not bless some of us more than others with some kind of super hybrid or expensive heirloom seed. In the parable all soils-- the hard path, the rocky ground, the soil full of thorns and the good soil-- all received the same seed, the same love and essential gifts from God. But what happens to the seed after it is sown differs greatly from soil to soil.

Let's consider the four kinds of soil described in the parable to be four kinds of human hearts—or in Zinzendorf's theology of the heart—four different ways of responding to the essential seeds God has planted in each of us. Now just as all we human beings are essentially the same—made up of the same organs, blood and bones—all of us are descended from a common parent –whether you call her Eve, Lucy or some other name—though we are each unique and different we are essentially the same—and so it is with different kinds of soil.

The first kind of soil has been packed down by the traffic on the path. This soil is hard and impenetrable, so the seeds stay on the outside unable to give the soil the gifts God yearns to give it. This soil represents those of us who have closed our hearts to any new in-breaking word for God. We think we've heard it all before and know all the answers. We are like the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus day whose assumptions and prejudices do not allow a change in heart or perspective. We don't come to church on Sunday expecting to be changed, to be re-converted, but to perform familiar and comforting rituals and traditions.

The second kind of soil was the kind we often see at really high mountain elevations—a thick layer of bedrock with a thin layer of soil. The seed takes root but is unable to penetrate the bedrock and cannot develop the deep roots necessary for mature growth. This kind of soil describes those of us whose hearts and faith are fine when life is going our way, when we are feeling blessed by God. But when we lose our job, or a loved one, or our health fails, these setbacks and disappointments become barriers to our ongoing spiritual growth and we stop nourishing the seed of God in us. We feel like God has turned God's back on us so we reciprocate, and the seed of faith within us withers and eventually dies.

But my guess is we middle class, educated mostly together folks here at First Moravian are prone to resemble the third kind of soil, the soil full of thorns and weeds. Most all of us experience daily if not hourly, the clamor of competing choices for our attention and our priorities. We get busy with our jobs, our families, our hobbies, following our favorite sports teams that we have little left over to nourish the seed God has planted in us. So much of our time, our talent and our financial resources are given over to competing gods of amusement, pleasure, and comfort that our tithe to God is crowded out. And when we leave this earth our legacy will be an accumulation of stuff and forgotten experiences, not fruit, but weeds. Will you leave this life looking backward at your missed opportunities? Full of regrets as to how you used the intelligence, the time and resources God has given you? Will you depart this world and leave it none the better, for having taken up space and used resources in it?

Jesus calls the fourth kind of soil good soil. Soil where the seed can take deep root and bring forth a harvest of thirty, sixty or 100 fold. Good soil represents an open and receptive human heart. A trusting heart that has faith that, no matter what, the seed will do its work of bringing forth a bountiful harvest. A heart that is willing to risk and this give first priority and allegiance to God and bringing about God's kingdom. When we are good soil our response to the seeds God has planted is to be a generous and cheerful giver of our time, our talents and our financial resources to the work of God's kingdom, whether through this congregation or other avenues available to us in Greensboro and the greater Moravian church.

So what kind of soil are you? I know I've been all four kinds of soil in my life at different times and under various circumstances. When I've shut out God because I was a know-it-all teenager and young adult my soil was like that on the path. When I was consumed with career and family obligations my soil was one big patch of competing weeds and priorities. But what Jesus tells us in the parable, and what I know to be true from my own life, it is when I am “good soil” a person with an open and receptive heart to receiving the gifts God has given me and using my time, my talent and my financial resources for God's work that lasting fruit multiplied more than I could dream, is brought forth.

Whatever kind of soil we each are now, we can commit ourselves anew right now to be more fertile, more friable, deeper and more responsive to the seeds God has already planted is us. The choice is up to each one of us. What kind of soil will you choose to be?