I have read my share of improvement books over the years, books about self, business, and community organizing. My shelves proverbially and literally runneth over. So I have no idea exactly what book and when, but at some point, years ago, I got in my head the idea that I should have a purpose, a mission statement of sorts. I embraced an idea from the English sculptor Henry Moore:
“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”
I’m not going to pretend that I bring every minute of every day to some great and noble task. Sometimes I just want to get the laundry done or stay cool in the summer heat. But generally, I keep my mission in mind. When I was Director of Learning for a new media firm in Manhattan, that purpose was to give people tools that would increase their creativity and happiness. My purpose as a minister isn’t that much different, still the same basic idea of tools for creativity and happiness, though those are now spiritual tools. Specifically, while being formed for ministry, I was able to name, for myself and those I served, a threefold mission.
One of these is to build God’s just and caring realm, or at least to contribute to its construction. My understanding of God’s just and caring realm is radically different than that of those who understand God as violent, vindictive, punitive, and who pursue retributive justice in human affairs. I see a God of radical love and forgiveness, any violence the result of our projection onto God, for God Herself is a God of redemptive and restorative justice. You know this about me, for like Amos, like Micah, a justice grounded in generosity and love is at the heart of my preaching.
Another of my great and impossible great purposes is to make disciples. Now that gets mighty close to that “e” word, evangelism, a noble idea that often becomes corrupted in practice. But I am not interested in converting heathens or telling others that the religion that is working for them is wrong, though I may disagree with how they treat women, the LGBTQ+ community, and others at the margins. I do admit that I struggle with an amorphous “spiritual but not religious,” for I’m not sure a pick-and-choose religion offers enough structure, discipline, or permanence to change lives, but those folks aren’t really my targets either when I aim to make disciples. If it is working for them, okay then. I don’t exactly believe in a God who is going to send you to eternal torment if you don’t pray the “Sinner’s Prayer” or believe and practice in some exact way. A good God loves a good Jew, a good Buddhist, and dare I say, even a good Humanist.
No, when I say I want to make disciples, I mean make disciples of the millions who have unhappy lives, lives of quiet desperation, even if they have all of the stuff that marks success in our culture. The folks who wrestle with the big questions. The folks that have not been numbed by addiction and consumption, or those who have been numbed by addiction and consumption and are looking for a way out. The folks who are lonely and scared. Because I want them to experience the comfort and joy I find in our way of understanding God and experiencing Jesus, as agents of radical and holy creative love.
Finally, I understand it as my purpose to deepen faith, though faith does not mean adherence to some fixed formula of the divine and the mundane codified by some ancient council or systematized by some Medieval Scholastic. There is a reason I am in a non-credal denomination and studied constructive theology, a reason I have so many friends among the Unitarian Universalist movement, for like them, I understand faith not as assent to a historic given, but instead as a journey into mystery. I’ve said our response to Covid-19 has been like building the plane while it was in the air, but in truth, that is how I understand spirituality too, kinda how I understand life.
Given my commitment to deepening faith, it will not surprise you that today’s parable is a favorite. Or maybe it is just that I was raised by a passionate gardener, though that experience scarred me as much as it informed me. In any case, it is a classic parable. And it has been my practice, when this rolls around in the three-year lectionary, to discuss the preparation of good dirt, for we want to be the good dirt that produces a good harvest, not rocky or thorny ground where things die. Deepen and dig and most of all fertilize, I might say, pointing out not so tongue-in-cheek that fertile dirt requires a certain amount of manure, and we often encounter piles of manure on our spiritual journeys, so we all should be in great shape.
Then I’d go back to one of my core beliefs, one that ties in to last week’s sermon as well, the idea that you get out of things what you put into them. This comes with a challenge to prepare the soil, to spend more time studying scripture, learning about our living tradition, especially for the many of you who are refugees from other, very different, traditions, and of course, praying, for only in deep prayer do we empty ourselves and make room for the holy, for “full of ourself” is our default.
But I don’t have kids, and all of those things, scripture, study, and prayer, are part of my job, one of many blessings of life in ministry. And while there are plenty of tasks on my church to-do list that have nothing to do with God, I suspect I have more time to give to an active faith practice than most folks, and the last thing you need right now is a wheelbarrow full of guilt at a moment when so many of us feel fairly powerless. So I’ll keep that part of my message as short and sweet as I can: try to be good dirt. You get out of your spiritual life what you put into your spiritual life. If you yearn for more, a greater harvest, start plowing. There is plenty of compost and manure in our lives. Use it to your advantage.
Instead, I’d like to share something I was reminded of by the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, Episcopal priest and beloved author. She reminds us that the parable is not called “The Parable of the Seeds” or “The Parable of the Soil.” It is classically called “The Parable of the Sower,” and so maybe we should turn our spiritual study to that titular character, where we find a whole different lesson. The sower is not careful, not the good steward we see in other parables, that we seek to model. The sower does not very carefully insure that every seed lands in perfect conditions, a process that would take far too long. The sower just scatters seed, generously, recklessly. Some of it is going to get eaten by the birds. Some of it is going to wither in the heat. Some of it is going to get choked by thorns. But, you know, manure happens, or something like that…
The sower does not wait for exact perfect conditions to act. They just throw potential out there, in abundance, trusting that the harvest will come in.
Now, agrarians might want to quibble, but Jesus lived in an agrarian culture, he knew about planting and harvesting and livestock, constant images in his teaching, flocks and orchards. He knew what he was saying. Just as he re-framed the Hebrew understanding of God, moving on the continuum from vindictive and co-dependent judging deity toward redeeming and loving parent, so too did he re-frame notions of identity and our zero-sum economics. The more you give, the more you will receive. The preachers of prosperity gospel may have hijacked this message in order to buy private jets, but there is an essential truth in the good news Jesus shared with those people under a violent and extortionate foreign occupation and shares with us still. So let’s, for this one Sunday morning, think of ourselves not as the good dirt, though we can aspire to be good dirt. Instead, let us aspire to be that profligate sower.
Do not wait until you know conditions are perfect. Do not wait until you can be certain that everything you do is guaranteed to succeed. The kingdom of God is about being extravagant, reckless, as we sow seeds of love and justice and forgiveness and wholeness. It is about welcoming not because someone has proven their worth, but because we have more than enough love, more than enough holy imagination, to spare.
It is The Parable of the Sower, and the one who gives life is calling us to be life-bringers in a world touched not just by the death of the body, and all too often by a living death of the soul, more terrible than any hell Dante imagined. And today, today, more than ever…
We were called to sow love and justice in the world even before our current crisis. Our United Church of Christ speaks of aimlessness and sin, and there is aimlessness and sin out there. But there is also loneliness, woundedness. At our best, we bring companionship, healing, truth, and love. We’re not looking for a return on investment. Love is not a zero-sum game where more for you means less for me. We may be physically finite, but we are spiritually infinite. Be good dirt, ready to receive the Word, ready to bear fruit. But also be good sowers. Deepen faith. Make disciples. Let us build God’s just and caring realm of creative love.
Amen.