The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

"Why do you speak to the people in parables?" Jesus' disciples asked him. And Jesus said, "To you it has been granted to know the secrets of the kingdom of Heaven, but not to them. For to those who have will more be given, and those who have not will lose even what they have. That is why I speak to them in parables, because Isaiah spoke the truth about them when he said that they look without seeing, and they listen without hearing or understanding." Get it?

Jesus' parables are like Zen koans. The Zen master offers his disciple a paradoxical statement, and then, puzzled, the disciple is sent away to meditate on it and is expected to return to the master later to share what he has learned. I'm told that the process is repeated, sometimes for years, before the disciple is judged to have experienced enlightenment. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" the disciple might be asked. "Go home and think about this for a year or two. Give it some time."

Jesus' parables are like that. Instead of giving us two or three main points to memorize, Jesus tells a story. "The Kingdom of Heaven is like this," he says. And then he adds, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear. Go and think about it a while. Give it some time. If you have ears to hear, more will be given to you; if you don't have ears to hear, you'll probably lose interest in the whole thing anyway."

We have listened and listened to the parable of the sower for two thousand years, but we have never really heard it, Robert Capon says. We have not understood it, because, like the people in Isaiah's day and the people gathered around Jesus almost 800 years later, we have stopped our ears and shut our eyes.

This is because we like test-passing religion, says Capon. We like test-passing answers to life's questions. "Lord, why don't you just give us the answers straight out?" we ask with Jesus' disciples. "Why don't you just tell us the right answers to life, the right answers about God? Tell us what we should know and think, and what we should do. Wouldn't that be a lot easier on everyone?"

Matthew liked right answers, too. He was one of us. And that's why, shortly after he tells us Jesus' parable, Matthew explains it to us. He tells us what it means. Or at least he tells us what he thinks it means.

"The seed sown on the foot path is the person who hears the word of God, but fails to understand it," says Matthew. "The seed sown on rocky ground stands for the person who hears the Word and accepts it, but there is little room in him for it to take root. He has no staying power, and when trouble comes along he loses his faith. The seed sown among thistles represents the person who hears the word, but his concern about worldly things chokes it to death within him. And the seed sown on good soil is the person who hears the word and understands it, and who brings forth much fruit." That's the meaning of Jesus' story, according to Matthew. Oh, I'm aware that Matthew presents his explanation as if it's Jesus who is doing the explaining. But I'm pretty sure the explanation is from Matthew, not from Jesus, because the story itself is so much more like the Jesus I know elsewhere, the Jesus who just tells the original story and then says that those are blessed who have ears to hear, letting us hear the meaning for ourselves.

To Matthew, the parable is all about us. It's a story with a moral about the bad guys and the good guys, about the guys who hear and produce good fruit, and those who don't. For Matthew, Jesus' parable is Jesus' way of warning us to be good soil.

And then, having heard the parable explained by Matthew for the umpteenth time in our lives, we all leave church hoping once again that we've got it right this time, hoping that we are the good soil -- We are, aren't we? Because, after all, we're in church this morning, listening to God's Word -- and hoping that if we aren't, well, then at least maybe we can work harder to cultivate our own soil better before the exam rolls around again in three years. Know the right answers about God. Go to church. Be good soil. Work harder to live right. It's all about us, according to Matthew.

But Capon's not so sure. And I'm not so sure either.

I'm reminded of a story about Albert Einstein. After he had passed out the final exams for a course one year, a student ran up to his desk, all excited, and said, "Professor Einstein! The question you've given us this year is the same question you gave on last year's exam!" And Einstein shrugged and said, "That's all right. This year, this year the answers are different."

Now I'm just thinking out loud, but perhaps there is a meaning to Jesus' parable that is different from the one Matthew hears. Perhaps the parable is not about the soil, but about the seed. Perhaps the parable is not about us, but about God and God's scandalous ways. Perhaps the parable is not so much Jesus' way of warning us about our sinful ways as it is Jesus' way of telling us about God gracious way. About God's profligate, wasteful, indiscriminate grace and love, to which there is no right answer, only a response.

Maybe this is what Jesus' parable is all about -- that God just pours out his love and his grace everywhere, on rocky and thin soil as well as good -- just as God's sun shines on the just and the unjust alike. Maybe it's all about the prodigality and indiscriminate love of God, not about the soil, not about us.

But to those who are so left-brained, says Capon, that they insist that God extends his grace only to good soil, that God loves only those who get all the right answers to life's questions and pass the religion test, only those who work hard to earn it -- to those, even what they have will be taken away because they look and look but never see what God is all about. They listen and listen, but never hear.

Hear the Word of God according to Isaiah: "Come to me and listen to my words," says the Lord. "Hear me and you will have life. I shall make an everlasting covenant with you -- to love you faithfully as I loved David." Maybe that's all there is to it. No answer is called for, only response.

"Seek the Lord while he is present. Call to him while he is close at hand.... Let the people return to the Lord, who will take pity on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, says the Lord, nor are your ways my ways. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so are my ways high above your ways and my thoughts high above your thoughts. As the rain and snow come down from the heavens and do not return there without watering the earth, making it produce grain and giving seed for sowing and bread for eating, so it is with my word that comes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me empty, but will accomplish that for which I sent it."

Maybe Jesus' parable, like life, is all about the mystery of the ways of God, about the mystery of God's Word, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Again, I'm just thinking out loud, but maybe God's power is like seed. It's not very big. In fact, sometimes it is so small you can hardly see it at all with your eyes or feel it with your fingers. It's like those small seeds in the little packages you buy in the spring, those seeds that are so tiny and light that you wonder if they really put any seed at all in your package. Maybe God's power is like that, and it just floats down onto the world like seed and sunshine and rain, and is hidden in the earth and disappears. Literally disappears. Like seed. But not without bringing forth what God sent it to bring forth. It's a mystery. Like sunshine and rain, and seed.

But what about the waste? In Jesus' story, seed is just thrown everywhere, helter-skelter, indiscriminately. Wouldn't a prudent farmer sow his seed where he knew the ground had first been properly worked and cultivated and fertilized? If I were God, that's the way I would do it. I don't like waste.

But you know, the more I think about this, the more I think about the Church. The Church is really a very wasteful place. The Bible contains thousands and thousands of pages of spiritual wisdom, but it's scandalous how little time we actually give it. We arrange for really good people to lead workshops on spiritual matters, sometimes paying big bucks to do it, but only a few arrange their schedules to take part. Sunday School teachers work hard on lessons for their classes every week, and we are disappointed that so few children are consistently there. Preachers work for hours and hours on sermons, but on a given Sunday more people are at the mountains or at a ball game or just taking it easy than are in church. We sing our hymns accompanied by a good-sized, expensive organ, when just an old upright piano would suffice. Often as not, we could make do with a smaller building, rather than a larger one. It's all very inefficient, wasteful.

But maybe that's just the way it is with the Word of God. Maybe that's the way it is with forgiveness and love, with grace. God just throws it out on rocky soil as well as good, in small places as well as large, in empty minds and hearts as well as full, on sinners as well as saints.

It's the same with teaching. Most students do enough work to do a creditable job of putting down straightforward, logical answers to exam questions. But I remember wondering, when I was a teacher, if it all ever really made any significant difference in their real lives, until one year when I received a letter from a young man who had been a student of mine five or six years earlier. I remembered him slightly. I remembered his name, but that was about all. I remembered him as an okay student, a so-so student. But here he was writing to tell me that he was about to enter graduate school, that he wanted to let me know that something I had said in his eleventh-grade class had started him to thinking about history in a new way, and that our class had been part of what led him into a new and exciting direction in his studies. And he just wanted to thank me. I didn't even remember saying what he said I had said. You just never know. And I know that many, many teachers have had similar experiences.

Capon's point is that maybe "the parable of the sower says that the Word of God is like a word sown that you don't even remember sowing, that the Word of God, even if you hear it, doesn't sound like very much." Maybe you don't even remember it. "And when it does finally get around to doing its real work, it is so mysterious that it can't even be found at all." Like seed. Like Jesus. Jesus, God's Word Incarnate, is sown, and then dies and disappears. But not before bringing forth the growth God sent him to bring forth.

Waste and prodigality, grace and mystery just seem to be part of the way God's good news comes into the world. God sent his only Son into the world, and we "wasted" him, crucified him.

"To whom has the power of the Lord been revealed?" the prophet asked. "He came to his own who received him not. He grew up before the Lord like a young plant whose roots are in parched ground. He had no beauty or majesty to catch our eyes, no grace to attract us to him. He was despised and rejected by all. He was a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and rejected, an object from which people turn away their eyes. Yet it was our afflictions he was bearing and our pain he endured, while we thought of him as stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way." We have stopped our ears and shut our eyes, our hearts have become dulled, and there is no response in us.

"And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was cut off from the land of the living." Like seed among rocks and thistle.

"For the transgression of the people he was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, a burial place among felons, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth." He was crushed, and he suffered, and died. Like a word sown among those whose ears are stopped.

"And though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he has healed him who has given himself as a sacrifice for sin. He will see his children's children, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand." The will of the Lord will prosper, just as the rain falls from the heavens and does not return there without bringing forth the growth God sent it to bring forth. That God's Word will do its work is a certain as that. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Maybe the answers are different this year. Or maybe there is no answer at all, only response. Or maybe no response. Or maybe a different response.

God just pours out his Word on the world like seed and sunshine and rain, on the just and the unjust, like a sower who throws seed everywhere, indiscriminately. God just pours out his Word on everyone -- on footpath and rocks and thistle and good soil alike, on Jew and Muslim and Buddhist alike, even on Christians, on foreigner and eunuch alike, on black and white and poor and rich and men and women alike, on sinner and saint alike, on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, on the deserving and the undeserving alike, on the receptive and the hostile alike. He wastes it. God is prodigal, extravagant with his love and grace, like one anointing a dying man with precious oil. That's the way God is.

And then, like the farmer, God waits.

Maybe the entire work of God in the world, from the beginning to Isaiah to Jesus to us, proceeds like the work of a seed. It takes place in mystery, in secret, in a way that can be neither known nor answered, only experienced. Only responded to, or not. Maybe there will be a different experience this year, a different response. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.

Isn't that the way it is with the Cross, with grace, with love? Despised and rejected by a hostile world, despised and rejected today as he was in the days of Isaiah and in Jesus' day, God remains so mysterious.

Is this our idea of how a respectable divine operation ought to be run? Shouldn't there be some right answers? Shouldn't there be something with flash, something more noisy and noticeable, like earthquake, wind, or fire, like thunder or fireworks?

But maybe that's not the way it is with God. Maybe, with God, it's more like a still, small voice, like a quiet, mysterious word, or like the sound of one hand clapping. Or like a sower and seed, like sunshine and rain, like precious oil poured out on a dying man. Like love, like grace. Maybe, with God, it's more like one whose love is so great that he lays down his life for his friends, even for sinners. Like Jesus.

Let's go and think about it a while.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.