A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Starting today and continuing on through the month of July, the lectionary for our Gospel readings gives us some of Jesus’s parables. You know that I love the parables. They are so simple and yet so rich. Like a seed sewn on good soil, a parable can take root within us. It can grow and blossom and produce thirty-fold, sixty-fold or a hundred-fold, and nourish us spiritually. Over the years I have invited you into the parables in many ways. I have often asked you who are you within the parable?
Take today’s parable, for instance, the Parable of the Sower. Are you the sower? Are you sowing the seeds of God’s love in this world? If so, where are you sowing them? Are you making sure to sow it in both the good and bad soil? What do those seeds look like? What is the fruit that they produce?
Or perhaps you see yourself as one of the seeds. What kind of seed are you? Where is it being sown? What is it producing in this world? Or maybe you hear the story, this parable, and think of yourself as the soil. What kind of soil are you? Are you the path that everybody walks over? Or maybe you are the thorny soil that chokes the good seed and keeps it from growing. Or maybe the rocky soil that doesn’t really take root, or perhaps you are the good, rich soil that the seed can take root in. Whatever kind of soil you are, is there some way you can tend to the soil that you have been given in this life? Can you clear away some of those thorny weeds from it? Can you till the soil so it can be even richer, so when the seed lands on it, it will thrive? Where do you see yourself in this parable?
One of the things I love about these parables is that the simplicity of the story gets to meet the richness and complexities of our life. And the place where those two things meet is a rich creation of God at work in this world, and it is remarkable. Beautiful things can happen from that.
But this is not the only way to think about the parables. Parables by definition are vast and rich with lots of different ways to see and understand them and enter into them. They have a whole multiplicity of meanings, and that is designed intentionally. That is what parables are meant to do. The way I usually invite you into the parable by thinking about who you are within it is not the only way to think about the parables.
I want to give you another way to think about the Parable of the Sower. I have a story for you. This way to understand the parable came to me about a year or two ago. I was back at Virginia Seminary in the chapel, and they had recently installed three new stained glass windows: one for the Father, one for the Son, and one for the Holy Spirit. They are beautiful stained glass windows from a British artist named Brian Clarke. In the window of God the Father is the beautiful image of creation. I sat there and looked at that window, I prayed in front of this window, and I was reminded of God who made the world, who made this whole creation, and in doing so called us all good. Desmond Tutu says God made it in love. It was love bubbling over. I thought of all of this as I was looking at the window, and thought of all the ways God invites us into that creative act, inviting us to be stewards of His creation. The beautiful leaves depicted in the stained glass window reminded me of that work we have been called to do, to take care of God’s creation. It is a beautiful window, and I love it.
I also spent some time looking at the window of the Holy Spirit and praying in front of it. The window has an image of a dove which reminds us of Jesus’s baptism when the Holy Spirit came down like a dove. As I sat in front of this window and looked and prayed, I thought about the ways the Holy Spirit is like a dove, and I thought of other images of the Holy Spirit, like wind which is depicted by all the blue in the stained glass window, or the flighty, bird-flying sense of the Holy Spirit in the way it comes and goes. I thought about Jesus’s baptism. I thought about my own baptism and what it means to be baptized into Christ and become his hands and feet and heart in this world. It is a beautiful and profound window for me.
Then there is the window of the second person of the Holy Trinity, the window of Jesus. This one is much more abstract. It has blobs of color. I was intrigued by the window, but I didn’t really quite get it in the ways that I got the other two. But as I stared at it I began to see the image of a person. I could see a heart in the middle of it, and I thought perhaps the window is reminding me of Jesus’s love. What is the greatest commandment? To love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. The great Christmas carol says Love came down at Christmas. Jesus’s love is so profound. There is no greater love than this than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, is one of the ways he describes the action of the cross. Love is at the core, the center of Jesus’s life and his ministry, his teaching, what he wants for this world, and what he wants us to do in this world. I began to think it is a beautiful window as I could see the heart and think of Jesus in that way.
I was sitting there one day, pondering this window, praying in front of it, thinking about Jesus’s love, and one of my professors came up to me. She asked if I knew the story behind this window. I said no, so she went on to tell me the British artist named Brian Clarke is well known as an artist of light. Most of his windows are abstract. He is interested in the ways that light refracts through stained glass. Sometimes he cares more about the light and the way it shines through the window than the subject of the window itself. She went on to tell me that what he did for this window was that he went to Canterbury Cathedral. He looked at the floor where light was shining through a window, and the image it was making as the day went along. He then drew a picture of that light shining on the floor, and from that picture he made the window at the Virginia Seminary. So that window is the light shining through another stained glass window in Canterbury Cathedral. The window the artist used was the Parable of the Sower, and it looks nothing like the window at Virginia Seminary. The light transformed the image into something quite different on the floor.
I started thinking about how rich it is that the window of the Parable of the Sower looks nothing like Jesus, but the image created by the light coming through the window did remind me of Jesus. That was an interesting recognition for me. In the window of the Parable of the Sower, maybe I see not just the sower but also the image of Jesus shining through the window. That is what an icon is meant to do. You are to pray and meditate in front of an icon until you get to the point where you don’t really see the image of the Saint. You are supposed to see through the image of the Saint and see God. Icons are meant to be windows to God. They are images not of what is shown, but are images to draw us in to see beyond them. So maybe this Parable of the Sower window is doing the same thing when it was transformed into the window of the second person of the Trinity.
As I was sitting there thinking and praying about it, I began to wonder if the parable itself is an icon. In the parable, not the window or the light refracted through it, but in the parable as I hear the story can I see beyond it, or listen beyond it and hear God? What if it is not about me for a moment? Maybe it is a story fully about God. It doesn’t mean we take away the other ways of looking at a parable. As I said, parables are meant to be rich and multifaceted with lots of ways to enter into it. I do think you should take some time this week to think about this parable and where you find yourself in the story. Think of yourself as a sower, think of yourself as the soil. That is a rich way to look at it. But what if there is another way? What about instead of thinking about me, we think about God. I started praying and meditating on this parable and thinking that the sower sows seeds even where it’s not good. The sower is willing to waste seeds on the path and on the rocky soil and among the thorns, and yet some will land on good soil as well.
It is not a story about a sower. It is a story about God’s love, the heart at the center of Jesus’s life and his ministry. Jesus who is the incarnation of God in this world, the love that came down at Christmas, love is the center of God. God is love, 1st John teaches us. That is what Desmond Tutu says about creation. God’s love bubbled over into creation. It is all about love. As our Presiding Bishop says, if it’s not about love, it’s not about God. It is all about love.
So as I hear the parable of the sower, I think about God’s love and how abundant God’s love is, that God is willing to waste it. God is so utterly inefficient. God would not get through Business School because God is willing to waste seeds, is willing to waste love on paths and on rocks and on thorny places, even though it is not necessarily going to take root and thrive. But God has more love to waste. God loves us more than we can ask for or imagine, as Bishop Powell ends almost every one of his sermons, because it is true. This parable of the sower reminds us that God’s love is that abundant, that God can waste it, throwing it left and right, wherever God wants because God’s love for us is that immense.
It is a beautiful and rich parable and there are so many ways to enter into it. One of those ways is to remind us of the abundance of God’s love for you and me and for all of us in this world.
AMEN
