Texts:
Mark 4.26-34
2 Corinthians 5. 6-10, 14-17
May I speak in the name of the Holy & Blessed Trinity, One God in three persons.
I remember when Matt and Hannah were at kinder, that one of the magical activities they did was to plant a seed in a paper cup. Each child filled a cup with soil, made a hole in the soil and dropped in a bean seed. They watered it and waited. After just a couple of days, up came the seed, first just two leaves and then a stalk and then, a reaching tendril.
It was one of those wonderful experiments, the first time for most of those children that they realised that a small, hard, dark brown bean, could turn into something else, a growing, tender, leafy green plant.
The growth of seeds is miraculous and inexplicable. How do they do it? Even if we could explain the scientific processes at work, the miracle that is a seed turning into a plant is still beyond comprehension.
Jesus tells us this is what the kingdom of heaven is like; miraculous, inexplicable, transformative, growing.
This is a hopeful story. It is a story of the miraculous nature of faith. The kingdom of heaven grows because of God. We are called to be faithful, trusting planters of the seed but it is God, the good soil, the ground of all being, who gives the growth.
However, this is also a parable that might make us feel hopeless. The reality of the ongoing decline in church attendance tends to suggest that the connection between the kingdom of heaven, God and the Anglican Church of Australia has somehow been lost.
From 2011 to 2016, Anglican churches lost 580,000 members, more than any other denomination.[1] This is a crisis that seems to spell doom for the church we have known. Statistics like this easily lead to hopelessness and blame as parishioners feel fearful of the future and expect their priests to perform miracles to ensure the survival of their parishes.
What does Jesus’ parable of the sower have to say to us?
First of all, it is important to remember the context in which Mark was writing his Gospel. Most scholars believe that it was written around the time of the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. This was a tragedy for the Jewish people. Without the temple the centre of their worship was gone, they had lost everything that was most dear to them culturally and spiritually.
Mark’s community was trying to find a new identity in the midst of destruction and terrible grief. When he writes Jesus’ words about the hope of the growth of the kingdom of heaven, he is not writing from a place of success and strength but from a place of vulnerability and fragility.
In the broader community around Mark, there seemed to be two dominant ways of dealing with the crisis.
- Take up arms and fight back
- Try to blend in and avoid detection.
Mark’s Jesus offers a third way. It is the way of the kingdom of heaven. It is a way of self-giving that trusts deeply in God to bring growth, to work out God’s promises and to bring things to fulfilment.
The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.
There is not a lot of human power in this parable. There is certainly no Super-Priest figure sweeping in to save the day and establish the kingdom through Herculean efforts. No, Christian trust is in God, the good soil who brings forth the growth. That is where the miraculous power comes from. Our role is to faithfully scatter the seed then rest and rise up, waiting on God.
Martin Luther King Jr said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This Gospel reading reminds us that God’s time is not our time. We need to observe, discern, wait. The earth produces of itself, and we watch as the growth unfolds, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.
The Gospel of Mark is short, direct, brief. One of his favourite words is, immediately. For example, the Spirit immediately drove Jesus into the wilderness, Simon and Andrew immediately left their nets and followed him, immediately Jesus called James and John. And yet, in the parable of the sower, Mark describes in detail the process of growth. In a Gospel that is in a hurry, the time taken with this description seems to point to the importance of allowing the growth to take the time that it takes; to wait until the harvest is ready.
God’s ways are not human ways and God’s time is not human time. Mark’s community were in a time of crisis and loss. Our community is in a time of critical decline. In all times and all circumstances, we are called to trust God that God will bring forth growth that will lead eventually to the harvest being ready.
In this waiting time, the epistle has some helpful words for us. Last week, St Paul wrote to the Corinthians that we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal (2 Cor 4.18). This week he goes on to say that, from now on, we regard no one from a human point of view because if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
God, the good soil, brings forth growth and transforms the hard little seeds of potential in us into tender, life-filled shoots. We may not be able to see this transformation yet, but we walk by faith, not by sight, and we no longer look through human eyes.
This means that we no longer see the faults, weaknesses and failures around us. Instead, we sow the seed of God’s love wherever we go and we wait and watch for the growth that we trust is coming. We no longer look at our human limitations, instead we see ourselves and each other as people in the process of being transformed.
And in order for that transformation to take place, we must surrender ourselves to God and be made new. This is all about new life but it is also all about death. Unless we let go of seeing things from a human point of view, unless we give ourselves up to God, there can be no transformation.
Death and life exist together, both are necessary. We must continually die to our limited selves in order to grow into God’s vision of us.
Sometimes the way we tell the Gospel story it makes it sound as though there is the cross at point A and the resurrection at point B and our task is to get from one to the other as quickly as possible. But I don’t believe this is the truth of our lives. We live our lives holding the tension between death and resurrection. We continually let go of the old life in order to be born into the new.
This hurts. It is hard and painful. Dying to self is painful but it is the only way to become a new creation. Seeds that stay seeds never grow. Death, in fact, is necessary for new life to emerge. Those who are included in Christ share in both his death and resurrection; not just at the moment they come to faith, but as a dynamic process that continually transforms them into the image of the One who is true love.
Sometimes the dying means having the courage to release things that have been precious to us; dreams of how we thought life would be, convictions that we have held dear but that no longer serve us, precious things that keep us trapped with our potential unfulfilled. To let these things go hurts. It takes great courage. It is death but it leads to new life, and although we don’t know how, we rest and we rise up and the earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head until the grain is ripe.
I don’t know what this means for the Anglican Church of Australia or for our parish of St Matthew’s Cheltenham. I don’t know the specifics of what God has planned for us. I do know that we are called, just like Mark’s community to find another way forward. Not to waste our energy in fighting, or to give up and fade away. Instead, we are called to faithful waiting and trust in the God who gives the growth. Because the love of Christ urges us on into transformative death and life as a new creation.
We are seeds being transformed by God’s love. We are sowers, called to sow God’s love to transform the lives of others. God’s love surrounds us, the good earth in which we grow. It has already been given to us. This love brings about growth that we do not understand. It enables us to see ourselves and each other with eyes filled with God’s love. See, everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
The Lord be with you.
[1] http://tma.melbourneanglican.org.au/news/anglicans-fall-in-census-280617