Sermon by Nanette Sawyer | July 16, 2023 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
July 16, 2023

A God of Possibility

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor

Isaiah 55:10–13
Matthew 13:1–9, 18–23

I was sitting in a coffee shop recently and saw a young boy waiting in line with his parents. He stood with his arm around his mother’s leg while he looked around at all the people, all the things in the coffee shop: small and large potted plants, a mural on the wall, platters of pastries, a glass-fronted refrigerator with cold drinks, and people, lots of people. People standing in line with him, people at tables talking, and people sipping and snacking.

His wide eyes took it all in, and his arm never left his mother’s leg. It made me think about how desperate we all are for belonging, for love, for a grounding, a place to call home. His vulnerability and his need seemed to be a perfect image of human vulnerability and need. On the physical level, he needed to be connected to his mother, his caretaker, his protector, while he encountered a larger world and learned about his place in it.

Having been created on a physical level from the seeds of our parents, we live as physical beings and seek physical connection. Our families, whether our birth families or our chosen families, our friends and our communities, our churches, can provide some of the grounding we need and the reminder that we are loved and valued.

At the same time, on a spiritual level we speak of being created by God out of soil and breath, as we read in the book of Genesis. In our liturgies we say that we come from dust and to dust we shall return. But Bible scholars and translators have pointed out that in Genesis 2 God creates humans in the context of a lush garden.

Out of the fertile topsoil from which all the plants and all life come, God takes earth and makes the first earthling. Out of rich humus God creates the first human. And out of the first human, God creates a second human, setting in motion the pattern of humans creating humans, human seeds creating the next generations through the bodies of women.

On a spiritual level, we all begin like these first earthlings, created of the fertile topsoil — a metaphor for the stuff from which all other things are created — filled with the breath of vitality and possibility breathed into us by our Creator.

And like that little boy in the coffee shop, we need to feel our connection to our source, to that which is greater than ourselves, to that which gives us protection as well as connection, that which gives us love as well as courage to expand our world and find our connections to others.

Saint Bonaventure described God as a mystery “whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere” (cited in Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian? p. 173). In other words, God’s vitality, God’s being, God’s self, is everywhere, intermingled with all things. And there is no boundary, no outer circle that marks off the end of God or the edge of God. There’s no place where God is not.

Saint Augustine wrote that “some people, in order to find God, will read a book. But there is a great book, the book of created nature. Look carefully at it top and bottom, observe it, read it. God did not make letters of ink for you to recognize God in; God set before your eyes all these things God has made” (McLaren, Do I Stay Christian? p. 179).

And Meister Eckhart, another thirteenth-century mystic, said, “A person who knew nothing but creatures would never need to attend to any sermons, for every creature is full of God and is a book” (McLaren, p. 179).

As creatures ourselves, created by God, God is in some way in us, closer to us than our own breath (Acts 17:28) with the image of God implanted in us. We belong. We belong to God. We belong to each other. We belong to the creation. We are part of it, not separate from it.

In the Parable of the Soils, we all want to be the fertile soil that receives the seed of the kingdom of God and lets it take root and ground us. We want the kingdom of belonging to grow in us and expand out from us. We want to bear fruit and share robust love and generosity.

But life depletes and challenges us. What begins as rich soil in us, what begins as vitality and possibility, can grow dry. In his explanation of the parable, Jesus describes some of the human challenges we face.

Things get rocky. We let slide those things that would nourish us. We fail to develop the roots that can sustain us. Keeping things superficial can make our joy fragile. When we experience distress or persecution, we lose hope and perspective. We forget the love of God that is always with us. We forget our root and our connection to All That Is. When the seeds of God’s love fall on this rocky ground, the seeds may sprout quickly but they may also shrivel and dry up quickly.

Worries and anxieties, like thorny weeds, increase our forgetting. We forget that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves.

We start to think that everything depends on us, that we are in ultimate control. We measure our value by how the world sees us. We think that we are isolated and alone, rather than part of the flow of life.

The lure of wealth makes us think that we can buy our security, but what we really need is our mother’s leg to hold on to — that reminder that indeed we are connected to our Creator who hovers over us with protective wings.

In the parable, some seeds fall on the path and are eaten by birds. Jesus explains that the birds represent the evil one who takes away what was planted in the heart. The hardening of our hearts is the beginning of evil taking root in us. In our hearts live our desires.

If our desires remain limited to the well-being of “me and mine,” or to the well-being of “us over them,” we will be like the seeds falling on a hardened path. If we let evil snatch expansive love from our hearts, our desires begin to undermine the well-being of creation itself.

Caring for the well-being of others doesn’t mean not caring about our own well-being. It means caring about our well-being as a subset of the well-being of All. The parts cannot survive if the whole cannot survive.

This parable invites us to think about what kind of soil we are and how receptive we are to the seed of God’s word about the kingdom of belonging. It’s sometimes called the Parable of the Soils. But it’s also sometimes called the Parable of the Sower.

In this parable we meet a farmer who is perhaps not a very good farmer. This farmer throws seed everywhere: on the path; on the rocky soil; on the weedy, thorny choked soil; and also some, some, on the so-called good soil.

There’s no telling of the farmer preparing the soil; no tilling, no irrigating, no weeding or thinning. This farmer seems to be wasting seeds, throwing them where they will never sprout or where they will quickly die.

This sower may not be a good farmer but seems to be a very good God. This farmer doesn’t begin with concerns about yield or profit. This farmer doesn’t limit the seed to only that soil that is already ready.

If we are the soils, we are all the kinds of soils. On some days our hearts get hard like a well-walked path and our hearts close down or we slip into self-centered concern.

On other days we are like the rocky soil without deep roots, when we keep things superficial or keep them “nice” but not sincere and deep.

Some days we are the thorny, weedy soils, filled with anxiety and worries about money and fixation on wealth, crowding out thoughts of generosity and possibility.

But God doesn’t give up on any of us. God just keeps throwing seed everywhere. It’s possible that one or two seeds that fall on hardened hearts might wiggle their way into the soil and begin to break up that hardness.

It’s possible that a couple of seeds might fall in between the rocks in the rocky soil and begin to draw more nutrients into that rocky, barren area and dig their roots down deeper.

It’s possible that some of the seeds that fall into the crowded thorny plot might catch a few rays of the sun and grow up past the choked and choking weed bed of anxiety and start to overtake those weeds with wildflowers.

When God plants, God plants with abundance, vitality, and possibility.

Pastor and author Brian McLaren offers this great thought experiment. “Imagine,” he says, “Imagine looking at the universe in its first several billion years: swirling gases, surging energy fields, nothing solid. Or imagine looking at the earth when it was a lifeless planet of rock, water, ice, and volcanoes. Even then, rain forests, coral reefs, savannas with elephants and giraffes, cities with stand-up comics, and Latin jazz were inherent in the possibilities — they just weren’t visible yet. To see that possibility is what faith is about,” McLaren says, “not merely seeing the seeds in the apple but seeing the million apple orchards waiting to spring from those seeds”
(McLaren, p. 213).

God creates with a sense of possibility. And we are invited to create with the same spirit. Not knowing what the future holds, can we trust in the capacity and abundance of God? Can we trust in the vitality and possibility of God?

We are challenged with the questions How will we nourish and care for the soil that is our lives as well as the soil that supports all life? And second, will we sow with wild abandon, trusting in the unfolding of unseen possibilities?

Regardless of our answers to those questions, we can trust that God will continue to sow seeds in us. God is continually sowing seeds of the kingdom of belonging, the commonwealth of the Beloved Community, the reign and realm of God in which All are cared for and All belong.

Thanks be to God for that. Amen.