The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, 2014 – Genesis 25:19-34; Psalm 119:105-112; Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
How does the church grow? This is the question posed by today’s parable.
The answer is surprising — because it is really very different from the way we think about church growth today.
Mission is these days all the rage. Everyone is doing it, or at least, your bishop hopes everyone is doing it. Anglicans talk about Fresh Expressions and Messy Church; the Pope talks about the New Evangelization. Mission is the thing, the church’s “new black.”
And this is as it should be. Matthew’s Gospel, after all, ends with the Great Commission, the risen Christ’s ringing command to the disciples to go out and make him known: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” Bring them into the church; teach them the way of the Lord.
Our work of mission, this discipleship, this disciple-making, follows from the resurrection of the Lord. For Jesus to be raised is also, by the grace of God, for us to be sent out: our mission is a kind of continuation of the action that begins with the empty tomb, the Word rising now over the world like a sun, and we ourselves given a part in its shining.
Mission is a great privilege, the sharing of Christ’s people in Christ’s own life and work.
In Christ’s work. This seems to me very important. The first principle of mission, this sowing of the seed, is that it speak Christ. To speak Christ, and let the chips fall where they may…that is the task of the disciple/church.
Notice the grand indifference, in the parable, to all method and manipulation. There is no demographic study in preparation for the sowing of the seed, no crafting of the seed for different kinds of soil — turning it into a weed, for instance, so that it might grow among thorns.
There is one sower and there is one seed. There is one God and Father of all. And the one seed is sown in all places and at all times, among all types and conditions of people. There is sovereignty in God’s sowing of the seed. God makes no distinction. The Word goes out to all the world, in good soil and in bad; even where there is no soil at all.
The Word goes out to all the world in the sovereignty of God and it makes no attempt to conform itself to the nature of the soil in which it lands. The Word is always and only the Word. It is Christ that we are called to sow.
Last Ash Wednesday I discovered a new mission initiative — “Ashes to go,” it is called. On your way to work, between the subway and Starbucks, you can pick up some ashes on the fly — an Anglican priest will be pleased to help you. Ashes on the forehead, coffee in hand, and off you go. No repentance is required, or prayer (though a blessing is of course available), or even understanding. Ash Wednesday as fast food, ashes as a commuter app.
And do we think there is depth of soil here? Do we think this is the Word that is being sown? Surely in this way the church gives up the Word, turns it into a shadow of the world it is meant to save. “Ashes to go” is not really Ash Wednesday at all. It is not mission, not the mission to which we are called.
For our calling is to speak Christ.
The sower went out to sow, and he sowed the word. He sowed the child born in a manger, Word made flesh, Jesus from a small town in Galilee. He sowed the man who taught and healed and proclaimed with single-minded insistence the coming of the kingdom of God.
Repent, The Word said, and believe. Repent.
Turn from this world, from the life that does not know God, from the soil in which the love of God cannot grow. Turn from the world, lift up your hearts, and see.
“Repent” is Jesus’ first word. Jesus teaches and heals because that is what is required. The world does not know, and the world is not well. Repent. This is the first word of the good news.
It is no accident that it is the blind men, in the Gospels, who consistently see that Jesus is the Christ. They already know their need, and so they can be healed. So they can receive the seed when it is sown in their hearts. So they can turn and see, and follow Jesus.
What does it mean to sow the seed? It means first of all this word of challenge, and of grace. Repent, and be healed.
The task of mission is not to conform the Word to the wandering rushing world. The task is to speak to this world the Word it does not know and longs — though it knows it not — to hear. The task is to speak the Word.
The task is to speak Christ, poured out in love even for a wandering world, scattered like seed on rocky ground. To speak Christ sown in our hearts, hearts that are, we must know, often dark, often thorny, no fit soil for good seed. Even in our hearts, the Word has been sown. Even here.
And so we speak. So we shout, singing aloud a song of thanksgiving, singing Christ Jesus and the great love of God. This is mission, this song of our hearts, this word that cries out to be heard, word that is Christ and cross and love poured out, word in the midst of the wandering world.
Mission is this word of the heart, the life that makes Christ known.
For Jesus does something curious with this parable. He begins with God, and the seed that is sown, Word made flesh, light scattered abroad in all the places of the world. But he continues with the heart that hears the word; he continues with us, in whom the seed is sown. This too is part of mission, the conversion — or not — of the heart.
In this parable, to talk about mission — the sowing of the Word throughout the world, the growth of the church — is to talk about the state of our own hearts. It is to talk about the life conformed to Christ.
The question in the second part of the parable is why, sometimes, the seed dies and why sometimes it grows. And the answer has to do with discipline. It has to do with a heart that learns to turn to the Word, in the minutes of the days. In the first place, Jesus says, you have to hear the word. Suniēmi, to understand: the Word has to enter in, into your heart, into your mind, into your life. Make a place, make the time, for the Word to enter in.
And the Word has to endure. After the first flush of discovery, when it is a matter of being different day in and day out, after and between the moments of joy there is the work of endurance.
And there is the work of transformation. Not just to hear the word, but to let it come first. In the midst of the distractions and cares of the average day, to let the Word come first. In the midst of the claims of the world, its insistence on money and pleasure and the self-focused use of time, to let the Word come first. This is the final task of discipleship. And it is just here that the temptation is strongest. Because we live in a secular society, by a rhythm that is fundamentally secular. Getting and spending is at its heart, and pleasure, a well-stocked leisure, its goal.
But our goal is Christ. We seek not a holiday but a kingdom, God with us in the everyday, God reigning in our hearts.
And so our life is a discipline, a practice of putting Christ first.
Friday was the feast day of St. Benedict. He is the perfect saint for this Gospel, because Benedict was the saint who left his life to live more completely for Christ. Born into the nobility, born into money, studying in the great city of Rome; he left it all at about age 19 in order to find a life lived in Christ. Benedict wrote the Rule that guides monastic life still, and it is wholly concerned with this: that every minute of every day be lived in the knowledge and love of Christ.
Daily life — all of it, prayer and work and reading and eating and dishes — lived in praise of God. The minutes of the day a prayer, Jesus never far from our thoughts; our small actions an offering up of our lives. The minutes of our day an act of obedience, shaping our life to Christ.
And why? So that in our lives, something of Christ may be seen. This is finally the meaning of mission. This is the Word, the church’s proclamation: this people who look a little bit like Christ. It is the heart that loves him that speaks Christ to the world, and it is the heart that has been conformed to Christ that loves. “What, dear brothers (said St. Benedict to his monks), could be sweeter to us than the voice of the Lord inviting us?”
Mission is this discipline, the daily living into Christ.
“Heart of my own heart,” we sing, in the well-loved hymn; and this is exactly right. This is what Jesus is describing, in the parable of the sower and the seed. Something funny happens with the Greek, at the end of the parable. The masculine pronoun hos, the one who hears the word, becomes the neuter pronoun ho, the seed that is sown.
The parable conflates, in the end, the person who hears the Word, and the Word that is sown. Person and seed become one and it is this that bears the fruit. Heart of my own heart. God sows his son in our hearts, and it is in him that we live and grow and bear fruit.
Claimed by Christ, changed by Christ, wearing Christ in our inmost thoughts: to look like Christ, so that we may speak Christ to the world. This is mission. Amen.
