The Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Cycle A 2019-2020

Isaiah 55:10-11 | Romans 8:18-23 | Matthew 13:1-23 or 13:1-9

Oh God, who shows the light of your truth to those who go astray so that they may return to the right path, give all who, for the faith they profess, are accounted Christians, the grace to reject whatever is contrary to the name of Christ and to strive after all that does it honor.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The set of readings today seem to make a very clear, succinct picture of what it is that we believe, and belief is such a tricky thing, because I can ask so many people, “Do you believe in God?”  And they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, absolutely.  It doesn’t make any sense that there isn’t a God.  How could you explain so many things that are — the pattern of everything, and you see the beauty of how everything works together.  And there’s an ecology.”  Anyway, it’s pretty clear that it’s hard, I think, to believe that there is no God.  Sometimes people reject religion, and they claim that they don’t really accept God, but they probably do.  They accept some kind of goodness in the world, but what it is that we’re asked to believe in is a particular way of understanding who this God is.  It’s not just that he created the world.  That’s a very mystical experience.  How do you explain it?  But the real thing is what is he up to?  What is he doing?  Does he have any kind of real influence on the way the world evolves?  You’ve heard me say this over and over again.  We are in this place, where we live now, in order to participate in the overarching work of the human race as we evolve closer and closer into who God intends us to be.  And if you don’t think it’s working, just go back in history, and you’ll be shocked at times how far we’ve come, from a very independent, sort of isolated, self-centered view to something much more communal and life-giving and selfless. 

So we’re engaged in this process, and so is God then giving us a process to do where he said, “Now you go.  You’re here on this earth.  Now you do it.  It’s up to you”?  No, he doesn’t.  He says, “There is a plan that I have.”  And the plan came in the form of a word.  The word is the truth that God has longed to reveal to people, and it’s necessary that they evolve to a certain higher level in order for them to receive the truth of why they’re here, who they are, what this whole world is about.  So we look at the evolution over time of what God has revealed.  In the beginning, it was obvious that God had to say, “There is one source of everything, good and evil, and it’s God.”  We’ve moved from that kind of broad image of a powerful force to a more personal God, a more intimate God, a God who reveals something shocking when it comes to the fullness of his revelation, and that came through the person of Jesus.  And the person of Jesus is called the word made flesh.  And what is that word, that truth?  Well, if Jesus is the word made flesh, then it seems to me that the image that we should focus on, in terms of what God wants us to understand about him, is that he’s a God that wants to enter into our life.  He wants to partner with us in our work.  He wants to dwell within us.  

So this first reading gives us an image of something that is an integral part of that mystical experience of knowing God dwells in me and partners with me, and together we continue to work through this process of growing and changing and evolving.  The image in this first reading is beautiful.  It’s about rain, snow, moisture coming down from the heavens, and he uses an image, it seems, in this passage where it is this image of God’s moisture coming down is part of his will.  And so whatever the moisture is able to accomplish, it is clear that it has a purpose.  It’s to make fertile and fruitful and giving seed, and the seed grows into bread, and the bread is food.  And it’s a beautiful image of saying this moisture that comes down is — I want you to imagine it this way.  “It’s my intention, my longing, my desire.”  God’s desire is that we be fruitful, and what is so encouraging to me is he said, “I’m doing this.  It’s my will, and you know what?  I always get what I want.  I achieve the end that I have in mind.”  Now think about that.  That is, to me, one of the core issues that we should have in our heart as an understanding of who God is.  He is moving, changing, working with, enabling the world to become more and more a loving, healthy environment in which to flourish.  That’s his will.  If you think it’s up to us to do it, then it’s going to lead to a lot of despair at times when things look like we’re going in the opposite direction, but nothing is further from the truth.  No, this is God’s will, that we grow, and we evolve, and it will happen.  And if you participate in it fully, that is a wonderful thing.  If you don’t, you might just end up getting some of the benefit anyway, but the point is he wants people to understand the role that he’s asking us to take on.  And he’s looking for people, maybe not everyone, but he’s looking for the ones that have the capacity, the gifts that he has given them potentially, and he wants to develop them so that they can be truly instruments of God working in the world.  

Now what is this process of God entering into people and helping them to lift an entire generation or an entire group of people?  It’s painful.  It’s difficult, and he calls it — I love the way he says, “It’s like all of creation is longing for growth and change, and when it’s up against that which is not yet transformed, it is like pushing against a major boulder.”  It’s like pushing against something that we don’t have the strength to do it, but we have with God the ability to do it.  But when we’re on our own, it’s groaning.  It is so difficult, but he said there’s something in the whole world God has created that is working toward this goal of evolution, moving toward a greater understanding of why we’re here.  He said that these labor pains, they are there, and we must understand that we are waiting.  We’re waiting as we work, and working, knowing that you’re going to achieve the thing that you set out to do is everything, in terms of success.  So we have a God who is giving us his will, his promise of his will that we will grow and develop, and he’s saying to us that there’s a difficult process, and you’re not in it alone.  There are hearts everywhere struggling against things that rob us of our dignity and our freedom.  We see it more and more now than ever before.  We see movements, protests.  Those are kind of like, when we become aware of something that is causing pain, robbing somebody of what they want, we don’t stand back and act as if, “Well, that’s just the way life is.”  No, there’s something inside of us that says, “There’s something wrong here, and something needs to change.”  And that’s God’s grace working, God’s presence working in you and me, evolving toward this fullness. 

So let’s look at an image then of how we would imagine this is working, and it’s a beautiful image in the wonderful, well-known parable of the sower and the seed.  Parables are so fascinating, because they’re puzzles, and you have to work with them.  It reminds me of the promise that God said.  “The truth is already in you.  So I’ll give you an exercise that will help you find what I’m trying to say by using the images I’m giving you.  And you’ll take those in, and you’ll ponder them and turn them around until all of a sudden something becomes clear.”  So I’ve been doing that all week.  I’ve been looking at this reading, and what I loved about it is — I was trying to say, “What’s the best way of understanding what the soil is?  What does that represent, and what does the seed represent?”  In a way it’s clear that the seed is the part that comes from God to the earth.  We are humans.  The word humanity comes from the same word as the earth.  So the ground is human nature, and the seed is the truth, God’s light, God’s life.  And the best way to describe it is it’s the potential of you growing into an awareness of God’s presence in your life.  So that seed comes in, not as God’s presence initially but as a potential gift from God, a wisdom that you’re given, that the disciples had that no one else had, that you would be able to see and understand.  So this gift of God’s presence enters into us, and there’s a process we need to be paying attention to as to how it works.  And we have three, four images of what it takes for a human being to receive it, and the first is we know that there can be a kind of hardness of heart, a closed-down mind, an unwilling mind to change and receive anything new.  It’s like the earth that’s hard and packed.  It’s a path, and a seed hits that and can’t penetrate it at all.  And so along comes — one translation was birds from the air.  This evil one comes along and takes away the seed.  So there’s a way to be a human being that is so closed and not open to any image coming into us that is not solely about us. Then there’s the sort of adolescent way of hearing the truth, where we hear it, and it’s exciting, and we say, “Wow, I can do all kinds of things if God’s presence is in me, and I’ll be effective.”  Then it doesn’t work right away, or it doesn’t seem to be working most of the time, and they just lose hope and say, “It’s not working.”  There’s the one who’s mature, and he is open to this mystery of God living inside of him, and yet at times they are also lured to other forms of power, other forms of giving them a sense of value.  So instead of being a healer, a life-giver, maybe it would be great to be wealthy or to be powerful and have power over people, and they get lost.  But then there are those who do open their heart, and the difference between all these degrees is not so much just the person’s ability to be open to receive something mysterious like God’s presence, but it also has to do with grace, moisture, God’s life-giving Spirit that comes into us, that softens our hearts and opens us to an awareness of these things that are so hidden.

So the image that we’re getting so clearly in this parable is Jesus is using the path as the image of the scribes and Pharisees, and they’re notorious for not opening their eyes and seeing what’s going on, and they’re not really listening to the needs of people.  Does that sound strange?  It doesn’t.  It sounds like so many organizations, so many institutions, so many things.  Once they stop listening to what’s really happening, once they don’t see what’s going on, once they don’t feel the pain of people, they’re not going to be open to the gift they need to be able to do a healing, transforming work.  So this promise of God is that he’ll open your eyes so you will see.  He will open your ears so you will hear.  He will make you the rich, fertile soil that, when this mysterious process that God has planned for us enters into us as an idea first, we can receive it, and it takes root in us, and we hold it, and we savor it as it grows slowly into a realization that we can become co-workers with God in saving the world.  It’s not just a case of being in the world and doing the right thing and getting a reward.  No, we’re called to be co-workers.  We’re called to be healers.  It’s an amazing, exciting way to understand life, and the most beautiful thing is it’s based not on our effort but on our ability to receive something that does the work with us.

Father, your promise to place within us the gifts that you so beautifully manifested while you walked this earth is beyond our imagining.  You do this without having us to become perfect or become sinless, but you work with our humanity.  And the more you work with us, the more we understand and have patience with others, and we are patient with ourselves.  So bless us with this great, mysterious promise.  Let us believe in it, open our hearts to it and live it, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.