Sunday
July 12
Finding Our Own Good Ground
By Marsh Chapel
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For Mother’s Day this year our older son and our daughter-in-law brought me a charming pot, and an hibiscus plant to put in it. The plant was covered in large flowers with crimson throats, then a band of white, and then edges in a beautiful pink, with yellow stamens and orange pistils. The leaves were a dark glossy green, and the bark was a light gray that complemented the rest of the plant but did not distract from the show of the flowers. I was instantly smitten. Now, usually my choices in companion plants have by necessity the constitution of granite. But this was my first hibiscus, and, as I think I mentioned, it was given to me by our children. And did I mention that hibiscus is one of their favorite plants? I really did not want to report back an early death, or a slow demise brought on by rusts, smuts, molds, blights, or plagues of insects. Growing a flowering tropical plant that I did not know in Boston was going to require some effort. My just being smitten was not going to make either the hibiscus or me happy in the long run. So, like many graduates of BU, I decided to rely on research.
Turns out that a modern hibiscus is a bit of a diva. Its ancestors came from China or India, Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands off the coast of Africa, Fiji, and Hawai’i – all places with abundant sunshine, lots of humidity, and high temperatures. I, however, live in a Boston neighborhood with high buildings and tall trees that block much of the sun, with dry air and chilly temperatures for a good part of the year. Hibiscus is also referred to as a “voracious feeder” that requires frequent watering and even washing. It has specific nutrient requirements not just for the soil but also for the fertilizer in the frequent waterings. The required soil and fertilizer are not, of course, easily or cheaply obtained. Fortunately, there are people online who have been living beautifully with hibiscus for years. They are very generous with care information and problem-solving. For a modest price and outrageous shipping charges, they will send you hibiscus soil that feels lovely in your hands. as well as an attractive soluble fertilizer tinted aqua so no one can mistake it for salt. I am still smitten. And so far, my hibiscus plant in its pot is glossy-leaved, putting out flowers, and voraciously eating and drinking, while I cart it around our small yard to find the place with the most consistent sun. Grow lights may be in our future, say around late September.
With all this, you might imagine my bemusement as I contemplated the parable in our Gospel text this morning. A sower goes out to sow. The sower doesn’t care where the seeds go: the path, rocky ground, among the thorns, good soil. And predictably, only the seeds that fall on the good ground grow and multiply. And then Jesus says, “Let anyone with ears listen!” This is just silly, on the face of it. Unlike my hibiscus plant, the seed that the sower is so careless with will provide part of the yearly food crop for their family and their community. Unless the sower is making an experiment to see if the seed will or will not grow in different kinds of ground, why waste it so? Seed is expensive, especially in Jesus’ time, when a lot of it had to be saved from one year to the next. By this time, everyone in the listening crowd would know that the seed being sown in that region would only do well in good ground. The explanation follows, of course, but why go through a story that calls forth a basic response of “Duh,” and tell people to listen to it, and then immediately give an explanation that really has nothing to do with plants at all?
Well, part of the interest in preaching from the lectionary is to see what the lectionary compilers leave out of the readings. And here the compilers have left out something important in verses 10-17, the verses between the story and the explanation. These left-out verses tell us that Jesus is speaking to the crowd in the original story; in the following explanation he is speaking to his disciples, the ones who say they are serious about following him. Jesus tells the disciples that he speaks in parables to the crowd because they are just that – a crowd, that follows him for who knows what reason: it’s a nice day to be at the beach, there might be a miracle, it’s a break from routine, what else? They fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy: “You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears and understand with their heart and turn—and I would heal them.’’
But the disciples are blessed, because their eyes see and their ears hear in their commitment to discipleship, and so Jesus gives the explanation of the story to them. The seed is the good news of the Kingdom of God, and the different kinds of ground are the different kinds of responses of the people who hear the good news. The path response is to not understand or to refuse to consider the good news, and the evil one makes sure that these people will not remember that they have heard anything at all. The rocky ground response is to get all excited, but then not to develop roots through the experiences of discipleship, and so these people fall away when the going gets difficult or the consequences of discipleship are uncomfortable. The thorny ground response is to hear the good news, but to let the challenges of the world and the desire for wealth and success choke out the good news, so that nothing of it can grow. Only the response of the good soil – to hear the good news, to take the time to understand it, to bear the fruit of the kingdom – only that response is to bring forth the desired harvest as each person and community is able.
We noted last Sunday that Matthew is considered among other things to be a manual for discipleship. With this story of the sower, I would like to consider three ways we might take this story for ourselves this morning.
Perhaps the most obvious way is to take the story as Jesus’ exhortation not to respond as did the people with the unfruitful results. So we will not treat the good news lightly or with disdain until we study it, live with it, and live out of it, and join with others who will learn with us, so that we can teach each other our own best ways to grow and thrive. So we will not stay in our discouragement when things get difficult, but we will remember God’s help in the past, and the great joy that is possible with God, so that even the earth shouts and sings together, as in our Psalm. So that we will remember with the Psalmist and with Paul that we are not condemned for our sins, and that the Spirit lives within us and empowers us to grow in love. So we will rejoice in our freedom from slavery to sin and death, and see the possibilities in the challenges before us, and look for the way that God makes for us out of no way. In the good news of the Kingdom we find our own good ground in which to flourish, and through our sharing of the good news we help other people and all creation to do the same.
A second way to take the story is to see it as a statement about how some people may respond to our sharing of the good news. Jesus is very matter-of-fact about it: you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and as we share the good news with others, these kinds of responses are all possible. Some of the more unfruitful responses might be because of how we share the good news, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But people’s responses will be their own. What we are called to do and to be as followers of Jesus is often a challenge or scary or counter-cultural or counter-intuitive for us, so we should not be surprised to find that others may not leap immediately for the chance to join us.
This second way to take the story plays into a third – we are invited to see ourselves as the Sower. While people’s responses are their own, it is our job to sow the seeds of the good news and to cultivate those who decide to be nourished by it. In one sense our sowing is in fact a great experiment: we cast our seed widely to see what will take. And like the Sower in the story, we do not at first in many cases know where the good ground will be in our particular situation, unless we cast our seed widely. Sometimes that will mean doing things that we have not done before, or being with others we have not previously experienced, and we may be reminded that the Seven Last Words of the Church are “We’ve never done it that way before.” Sometimes that will mean prioritizing energy and resources, and we may be reminded that if we are not good stewards, only the squeakiest wheel will get the most grease, and it may not be the one most vital to our mission. But in the end, we are reminded that to find good ground is not enough. Finding our own good ground in terms of what we are called to grow, and where we are called to grow it, and then how we are to grow it, means that a Sower must also learn to be a cultivator, or at least learn who to join with as cultivators, so that the whole fruit of the Kingdom can grow and thrive.
This brings us to our present day, and as was noted above. how we sow our seed, and how we find our good ground to sow it in, are pressing questions right now. In too many cases the seed of the good news has been linked to and even corrupted by Empire, greed, racism, sexism, bigotry, and anthropocentrism. In too many cases individuals and whole populations have been harmed, with results of trauma to this day that hinder human societal flourishing, and human spiritual flourishing. There are two ideas in particular that we might consider as we consider our work of sowing and cultivation.
First, if we do not know what the seed needs to grow and flourish, we cannot help it to root, leaf, blossom, and fruit. It is not about what we want to give. Instead, just as I needed to learn, to ask it if you will, what my tropical hibiscus plant needs to survive and maybe even thrive in New England, we need to learn and discern, we need to ask God, what the Kingdom needs to thrive in our particular situation. This can get complicated. Just as different kinds of seed need different grounds and different conditions in which to flourish, so the vast diversity of the Kingdom’s manifestation in the world needs different grounds and conditions. It depends on the context of our calling. What particular manifestation of the Kingdom’s love and justice does God want to manifest in our context and calling? We will need to discover the details of the people, ground, and resources or lack of them, in our location. We will need to be honest about our own motives, resources, and capacities. And we will need really to pay attention to our prayers and to God’s answers, if we are not to dilute or corrupt the good news for other than Kingdom ends.
Second, it is not the seeds’ fault if they are not able to grow because the conditions they need to grow and thrive are not met. And while it is true that people’s responses are their own, it is also true that a little augmentation of their ground might make it easier for them to receive the good news and take it to heart. If as sowers and cultivators of the Kingdom we insist on scattering our seed in places that we know it will not grow, and we do nothing to cultivate the ground, it is not the seeds’ fault if there is no harvest in spite of our sowing efforts. And if the ground does not welcome our seed it is not the ground’s fault. The ground is what it is, and unless we change that, nothing will grow. Just as with my hibiscus plant, this is where the need for augmentation and fertilization of the ground come in. For too long individuals and populations have been castigated for being unresponsive ground for the good news of the Kingdom. We might want to consider that this is not a surprise, considering the corruption of the good news through its linkages with Empire, greed, racism, sexism, bigotry, and anthropocentrism as mentioned above. Individuals’ and populations’ lives have been destructively affected for generations by these evils, and by the systematic evils that accompany them: poverty, violence, lack of education, genocide, voter suppression, lack of healthcare, and loss of hope. They might be forgiven if they do not respond to the rescue of salvation offered by those who may not be trustworthy and whose message has so often been a cheat. It may be that in order to prepare the ground for the seeds of the Kingdom, we may need to augment people’s lives with justice and the resources of justice for their bodies and minds, before we can plant the seeds of the Kingdom with any hope of appeal to their souls.
Finding, or even creating, our own good ground so that the Kingdom can flourish is a call to be both a sower and a cultivator. In that call the word “ground” has a meaning in addition to its being a medium in which something grows. Ground is a place to lay down roots, and, it is also a place to stand, to take a stand. To find our own good ground as disciples of Jesus is to stand our ground for the sake of the Kingdom, even in the midst of pandemic and national upheaval, so that present and coming the Kingdom may grow and flourish, and that we and all creation may grow and flourish within it. AMEN.
-The Rev. Dr. Victoria Hart Gaskell, Minister for Visitation
