"Broadcasting Life"

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS
Matthew 13:1-9
Ordinary Time, August 20, 2017

On August 6, 1945 the President’s Room of the Capitol could scarcely hold the multitude of white and Negro leaders crowding it. President Lyndon Johnson’s high spirits were marked as he circulated among the many guests whom he had invited to witness an event he confidently felt to be historic, the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The legislation was designed to put the ballot effectively into Negro hands in the South after a century of denial by terror and evasion.

The bill that lay on the polished mahogany desk was born in violence in Selma, Alabama, where a stubborn sheriff handling Negros in the Southern tradition had stumbled against the future. During a nonviolent demonstration for voting rights, the sheriff had directed his men in tear gassing and beating the marchers to the ground. The nation had seen and heard, and exploded in indignation. In protest, Negroes and whites marched fifty miles through Alabama, and arrived at the state capital of Montgomery in a demonstration fifty thousand strong. President Johnson, describing Selma as a modern Concord, addressed a joint session of Congress before a television audience of millions. He pledged that, “We shall overcome,” and declared that the national government must by law insure to every Negro his full rights as a citizen. The Voting Rights Bill of 1965 was the result. In signing the measure, the President announced that “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that’s ever been won on any battlefield…today we strike away the last major shackle of…fierce and ancient bonds.”

One year later, some of the people who had been brutalized in Selma and who were present at the Capitol ceremonies were leading marchers in the suburbs of Chicago amid a raid on rocks and bottles, among burning automobiles, to the thunder of jeering thousands, many of them waving Nazi flags.

These are the opening words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Published just a few months before he inaugurated the original Poor People’s Campaign, in the cover photo you can literally see the pain of the world weighing on him heavily as he struggles with the enormity of the questions of his day.

Fifty years later, on the eve of a new Poor People’s Campaign, we are still grappling with many of these same questions. How can a country that says it’s founded on Christian ideals allow children to go to bed hungry at night? Why can’t a person working a full-time job make ends meet? How do we repent for the sins of colonialism and white supremacy? When evil walks abroad in the sunlight, unmasked, unashamed, what is the appropriate response of those who side with love? Do we ignore it? Do we show up with candles and sing songs? Do we punch Nazis, misogynists, homo- and transphobic bigots in the face?

All of this is to say that is seems the author of Ecclesiastes spoke a deep truth when they said, “There is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See this is new’? It has already been in the ages before us.”

And so we stand here in 2017 in a time that feels like another watershed moment. The rivers flow and divide. The waters mingle and course. And as the rivers rage and roar, we sometimes wonder: will love win in the end?

Once upon a time, in a land far away from here there arrived a brown-skinned Jew who came to remind us of the answer to that question.

He was not the type of person you’d typically expect to roam the halls of power or have his own Wikipedia article. Born in unusual and somewhat scandalous circumstances in some backwater town, he had an uneventful childhood. He was lucky to make it to adulthood alive, really, because he and his people lived in poverty. He never owned a home. He relied on handouts from friends for food and shelter. He lived under the constant oppression of the government, which came in the form of an outside occupying force.

As he grew into manhood, he began to teach.

He was deeply rooted in the ways of his faithful Jewish ancestors. He knew the stories….but he had this way of telling them anew. He put twists and turns into them. People paid attention. He showed compassion on those society said were worthless or gross. He has a soft spot for lepers, widows, sex workers, tax collectors, those possessed by demons. Oh, and he performed signs and wonders. As the Rev. Dr. William Barber is fond of saying, “Everywhere he went, he set up free health clinics.”

In the Gospel of Matthew, we are introduced to this Palestinian Jew named Jesus in the first four chapters. As the story builds, Jesus begins to speak. In chapters 5-7 he preaches the Sermon on the Mount and tells us what he has come to do. Then, in chapters 8-9 he DOES what he has come to do. Having taught through word and deed, he then gives explicit instructions to his followers, “Okay. It’s your turn now. I’m ready to watch you fly. Go. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” [1]

So they do. And everyone lives happily every after.

Just kidding.

What actually happens is they mostly crash and burn. Because they, like us, are human. And if we humans are really good at one thing, it’s messing up. This is why we need patient teachers to pick us up, brush us off, and tell us, “you can do it!”

Jesus is sometimes that kind of teacher. But sometimes he’s cranky, impatient, frustrated…dare I even say a bit hopeless about his students. It reminds me a bit of what I’ve heard from many friends and strangers who are people of color and Jewish this past week, which is essentially this: “Hey, White Christians. We’ve been telling you and telling you for literally centuries that white supremacy is a problem but you didn’t want to listen. We’ve been sowing those seeds of knowledge but you refuse to let the wisdom take root and grow in your heart. Does it really take a group of Nazi-flag wielding people with guns to make you wake up and realize that white supremacy is still a problem?”

Wisdom-bearers get cranky when they say the same thing again and again and no one seems to want to listen.

Which brings us to today’s passage. Jesus has been pouring his all into it but he is just not seeing the results he’d like. The Kingdom of God may be at hand, but somedays it’s still a little hard to see.

And so he begins to teach in parables. This is either a brilliant pedagogical move or totally misguided. In his more cranky moments, Jesus tells his followers essentially, “I’m annoyed that when I speak plain Aramaic to you, you don’t get it. So now I’m going to make it even harder by using parables.”

But the amazing thing is, sometimes they do get it. And sometimes WE get it. At least a little.  Parables are a brilliant pedagogical move because they are the gift that keeps on giving. We keep turning them over again and again. Putting ourselves into different places in the story. Noticing new things we’ve never seen before. And parables put the onus on US as the learners to do OUR work. It’s not like we can just passively download the lesson from a parable. We have to WORK for it.

And of all of Jesus’s parables, this one seems to be kind of a meta-parable. Because, at least according to Jesus’s own interpretation of this parable, this one is a parable about parables. The sower goes out to sow and the seeds are God’s Word. The wisdom that we are to open our hearts to. If the seeds find fertile ground, they multiply and grow and, Jesus doesn’t say this part explicitly, but you know what happens when plants are nurtured right? Many send out more seeds to make more plants.

But when the wisdom finds infertile ground - whether it’s dirt that’s too shallow, soil that’s too rocky, or a field that’s infested with weeds - well, those seeds cannot grow and bear fruit.

Now, Jesus’s own interpretation of this parable makes me a little uncomfortable. Because, the way he tells it, it sounds like we are all somehow predestined to be a particular type of soil. Some of us are just never going to get it. But I like to think that if Jesus had been less cranky and frustrated in this moment, he might have interpreted his own words differently.

I can absolutely see how Jesus - the one who came in the name of liberation…only to mostly be met by people who couldn’t get it together - I can absolutely see how, in his moments of immense frustration, he might have come to the conclusion that some people are just not destined to be great soil.

But I also believe in my heart of hearts in what Carol Dweck and others have taught us about the “growth mindset” the idea that we all have the capability to learn and grow and change. I believe that we all have the ability to become good soil - a place where seeds of wisdom can be welcomed and nurtured and can eventually bear fruit.

But this doesn’t happen on its own. Anyone who has ever attempted to turn create even a small garden plot knows that the work of tilling the soil, clearing the rocks, fighting back against the weeds that threaten to overtake knows that tending soil is hard work. And even though I don’t know much about gardening, I have noticed that soil is often at its very best when it is liberally tended with gross rotting stuff called “compost.” Oh, and also manure.

Creating a life that is like good soil - a life ready for growing, learning, changing, adapting, saying “Huh, I was wrong before. Let me try to adjust” - creating a fertile life that nurtures newness takes hourly commitment and work. It also takes partnership and accountability. We have to have people in our lives who can tell us, “Hey, I noticed you’re seeming a little bit like rocky soil today. Let me help you clear some of those rocks out.”

In the context of this particular moment, when so many of the seeds being thrown at us by the forces of evil are trying to choke out the love that God has sown, I want to say a particular word to the white folks in the room: it is our responsibility to lovingly and firmly tend to our own soil and the soil of other white folks. We have to daily take on the mantle of making sure we are receptive and open to the wisdom that is being offered to us by those who know more about oppression than we do. It is a gift when someone offers us those seeds of wisdom.

And here’s the thing (and this is for everyone now): When we fail to tend to our own soil. When we become rocky, weedy, shallow messes, God is still sowing seeds of goodness, redemption, new life. God is broadcasting new life each and every day. That word - broadcasting - which most of us think of as being about radio and TV, is actually an agricultural word. It means throwing seeds everywhere with abandon.

God continues to broadcast life with audacious abandon. It is the very nature of God to keep trying to reach us. To right the wrongs. To make a way out of no way. To bring new life where there is only stinking, rotting compost. To open us up to risk and growth. To heal the world.


Notes:
[1] I am indebted to Dale Allison for the overview of the structure of the Gospel of Matthew. http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=106