Sermon for July 12, 2020 6th Sunday after Pentecost House of Prayer Lutheran Church
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23; Romans 8:1-11 Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
One of the joys of summer for many people is gardening. Many of us learned how to garden while perhaps complaining about it as a kid--but have come to appreciate it as adults. I learned a bit of gardening from my dad, who grew great tomatoes and rose bushes. My family and I moved into our current house in Racine last fall--so this is our first summer planting a garden there. We built three raised beds, put in the topsoil, and planted things like tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, string beans, cucumbers. We planted our spinach and lettuce kind of late in the spring, but if we just would have had the cool summer weather like last year they probably would have been fine. Instead it’s been so hot and they didn’t do so well. That’s the thing about gardening--you can never be sure how things are going to turn out. Every year the weather is different, the rainfall, the last frost, the first frost--always different.
Even the soil is different. We didn’t have any compost to mix in with the topsoil this year. But when fall comes around, we’ll mix compost in with the soil and get ready for next year. It makes a big difference. Have you ever thought about what exactly compost is? It’s made up of stuff that has died--grass clippings, corn silk, apple cores, fallen leaves, stuff like that. Stuff that has finished it’s time for growth and is now decaying--and all that decaying matter will enrich the soil, and something new will grow.
It’s death and resurrection! It’s a witness to to what Christian theology calls “the Paschal Mystery”--Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. It’s a witness to our theology of Baptism: we die to sin by being joined to Christ so that God will raise us to eternal life. Gardening teaches us that death and resurrection is in the world all around us--and really, there is no new life without first a death of some kind. This is a truth that can be hard to accept, and our human nature often rebels against it. We often really don’t want new life to come out of death--what we really want is the life we know to just keep going without any change. But that is not the way God has designed creation. God has designed things so that the Holy Spirit brings new life out of death.
As St. Paul puts it in Romans 8, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” We have a powerful God whose Spirit lives within us and activates our faith. God’s Spirit is active in our human weakness, our imperfections, our mistakes, our mortality, our sickness, our worries, our anxieties, our fear--all of that is compost, the decaying matter of our lives. And when we hand it over to God, the Spirit mixes it in with the reality of the world around us, so that it becomes the soil for God to grow something new. To bring life out of death.
Do we trust God to do this work? Do we trust God to be active in our lives, even when life is turned upside down? Do we trust God to be working in our church? In our community? In the world? Do we trust the promise of the Holy Spirit--who is powerful enough to raise Jesus from the dead--do we trust that same Spirit to also be powerful enough to raise new life up for us?
Do I trust God enough to realize--hey, I don’t know what the future holds, but I know God holds the future! Do I trust God enough to acknowledge there are many things that are beyond my ability to control--but God is still going to be working in ways I can’t even understand?
God is very generous and non-discriminating in how the Holy Spirit goes around growing life out of death. Jesus talks about this in our gospel reading today, the “Parable of the Sower”: “A sower went out to sow”--and he sowed seed all over the place. The sower didn’t ask the hardened path, or the rocky ground, or the thorny thistles to clear itself up first before getting seed scattered upon it. No, the Holy Spirit just went ahead and scattered seed. The same generous gifts were given to all, regardless of how well they were prepared to accept it. And in each situation--from the rich good soil to the hard-packed dirt of the well-worn path--in each situation the Holy Spirit raised up new life. Even the hardened path, where the seeds could not take root, yielded new life because the seeds became food for the birds. They nourished the birds, who then flew somewhere else and fertilized the ground with their droppings.
Death and resurrection is really all around us! The gifts of God are all around us. Even in the hardest and most challenging times, which I think we can agree, we are living through now--God has gifts for us, because the future is not ours to own, but it is God’s to lend. While it’s uncomfortable to have to deal with a pandemic and with social unrest across the country, these things are a call for us to look for how God is at work sowing seeds to bring new life out of the hardened path and rocky soil and thorny thickets we’re going through.
God will be found within the difficulties of our present time, just as God was present within Jesus as he died upon the cross. That’s the way God works, to raise up new life out of the things that feel like decaying matter turning into compost around us. So in the Parable of the Sower, Jesus is teaching us: Do not ignore the difficulties of the present time. Don’t walk away from them. Don’t discount them or deny them. Because the Holy Spirit is scattering generous amounts of seed all around.
Sure, it’s easy to praise God when life is easy and the good soil is yielding 30 or 60 or 100 fold. Our faith in the Christ of death and resurrection calls us to praise God by persevering through the tough times, knowing that God has gifts of reveal to us. God has new life to grow. We don’t know how long it’s going to take. Will it be a season? Will it be a year? Will it be a generation? We don’t know, and it is not ours to know. But we can be sure God is doing stuff for our sakes--God is scattering seeds. And God’s Spirit is empowering each one of us to be doing stuff--scattering seeds of love and service for our neighbors. Amen.