Genesis 25: 19-34
Romans 8: 1-11
Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23
“Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of what will be.”
Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180)
Carl Jung once said that we spend the first half of our lives building our personal kingdoms, and the second half defending them. You get to my age, and you start to think, I’ve arrived. Everything I’ve got, I think, is the pinnacle. It’s the result of my hard work. I should rest on my laurels. Change becomes viewed as a threat.
The problem is, the Gospel is all about change. Jesus came preaching, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Repent has come today to mean, renounce your sins. But that’s not what it means in Greek. The word in Greek is metanoia, and it means change. Change, because the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. The world is changing, because the world has to change when the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Change, because you and I have to change when the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
And the Kingdom of Heaven is always at hand.
Jesus teaches us the all-too-familiar Parable of the Sower, and we listen to it half tuned out, because we know what He’s saying, we’ve heard it a thousand times. “A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed….” We know what it means, because we’ve heard it our whole lives. We imagine the seed has already blossomed and is even now bearing fruit in our lives.
We don’t remember what the farmer knew: that every year the seed has to be sown again. There’s not one single crop we plant and harvest, and then it feeds us forever. Every year, it’s a new start.
And that’s what Jesus means when He says, The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. We’re like farmers, and our lives are like crops. This harvest may have been plentiful, but this harvest is over. Time to plant the new seed and start the new harvest. That’s how God’s Kingdom is. It always starts over from the beginning, because the Kingdom of God hasn’t arrived yet—but it’s always at hand. It’s always just around the corner.
One thing I’ve often noticed about churches. They don’t like to change any more than people do. I bet some of you have caught on to that. If a church has done something the same way for a thousand years, but it’s not working anymore, people still resist changing. Often we feel like it’s an insult, like you’re saying that it was a bad idea. But no, it wasn’t a bad idea. It’s just something that worked for awhile, but doesn’t anymore. The situation has changed, so we need to change to address the situation.
There’s immense good news in the Parable of the Sower. God, who is the sower, throws the seed of the Gospel pretty much indiscriminately anywhere. The soil could be rocky, or weedy, or covered with birds. Or it could be good soil. And if it’s good soil, it will bear fruit.
The soil, brothers and sisters, is you and me. It’s our hearts. The good news is that God offers the gift of the Gospel and its fruit to us just the way we are, with the soil we’ve prepared, the soil we’ve spent our lives preparing. Whether the soil bears fruit and brings forth a crop has a lot to do with how well we’ve prepared the soil beforehand.
A great tradition of the church is that, when you come to communion, you have “prepared your hearts.” Basically, the assumption is that in order for the bread and the wine to bear fruit in our lives, we need to have prepared the soil ahead of time so it’s ready to receive the seed that God is offering here. If the soil is rocky, we need to dig the rocks up. If it’s weedy, then we need to get the hoe out and do some serious weeding. If there are crows stalking about, we need to put up a scarecrow and wave our hands about and scare them off and keep them off. And anyone who farms or gardens can tell you that preparing the soil is a perpetual job, as is nurturing the crop once it begins to flourish. We have a moment, a wonderful moment when the crop multiplies, and we can enjoy it; but that moment passes, and it’s time to get on with preparing for the next crop.
So we don’t get to rest on our laurels. But the Good News is that every moment is a new beginning, and that each of us, as we are, can be, as Marcus Aurelius once said, the seed of what we are to be. And the Good News is also, that it’s never too late to change. We can always prepare the soil. God is always sowing the seed, so the opportunity is always there. What we’re always striving for, what we can never cease to strive for, is for each of us to be more like Jesus Christ; and for the church and the world to be more like the Kingdom of Heaven. Since we’ll never arrive, but we’re always striving, that means we will always, always need to change. But the Good News is that God is always planting in us the seed of the better person and world we are called to be. We just need to remember to prepare the soil.