Hard Ground; Holy Ground
Matthew
13:1-9; 18-23; Isaiah 55:10-13
July 19,
2017
How many
times have you heard the cliché if it was
easy everyone would do it? Most clichés become such because they contain at
least a kernel of truth. I’m not so sure about this one.
I have
failed at a lot of things over the years, and I am way better at some of those
things for having failed at them along the way. I don’t know that I would have
stuck with some of the things I have grown to love if success in them had come
easily. Sure, failure is bitter, but challenge is what makes the eventual
success so sweet.
As
basketball great LaBron James said, “you have to be able to accept failure to
get better.”
Failure
is a great teacher. As jazz musician Henry Rollins says, “We all learn lessons
in life. Some stick, some don’t. I have always learned more from rejection and
failure than from acceptance and success.”
We’re
getting ready to launch our youngest child off to UVA this fall. I was reading
an article last week about elite colleges that offer classes in failure to
incoming freshmen because most of them have so little experience at failing. I
feel well-qualified to teach that class, and I do not feel lonesome.
Harry Potter was rejected by a dozen publishing houses before it became, well, Harry Potter. It took more submissions
than that to get The Diary of Ann Frank
published. Gertrude Stein submitted poems for more than 20 years before the
first one got published. Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance may hold some kind of record for eventual
best-sellers: it was rejected by more than 120 publishers. Heck, who even knew
there were 120 publishers!
And
that’s just the literary world. One of the best Nike commercials that Michael
Jordan ever made begins with an image of MJ, clad in swanky, expensive clothes
getting out of a car to popping flashbulbs. The camera follows him through the
bowels of the stadium on his way to the locker room. His voice-over says, “I’ve
missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games.
Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot … and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I
succeed.”
Life is
hard. Failure is inevitable. At least it is if we try anything difficult.
Jesus
understood this, and that’s probably why he told his disciples the parable from
Matthew with which we began this morning.
“You’re
going out to plant these seeds,” he says to them. “But, you know what? Many of
them, probably most of them, are not going to flourish.”
He
doesn’t blame the sower, and, in truth, he doesn’t even suggest that they are
going to learn from their failures. He just says, “you’re going to try to plant
these seeds in a lot of places, and most of those places are not going to be
very receptive. Heck, even some of the places where plants spring up the weeds
are going to win.”
We spent
a good bit of time in “confession” this morning because to grasp what Jesus is
talking about here we have to understand the broader context. We have to know
something about the ground we’re standing upon and in which we’re trying to
plant seeds.
The
world is broken and so are we. We’re not broken by virtue of our lack of
virtue, as it were. It’s simply the way of the world. I may not be a white-hood
wearing member of the KKK, but I am, nonetheless, complicit in the vast system
of white supremacy that shapes the culture and society of which I am a small
part and it shapes it in my favor. I may not be a violent misogynist, but I am
complicit in a vast system of patriarchy that shapes the culture and society of
which I am a small part and it shapes it in my favor. I may not be a mindless
consumer, but I am complicit in a vast system of consumerism. I may not be
violent – heck, I may even be deeply committed to Christian nonviolence – but I
remain complicit in a vast system of militarism and violence.
And that
long list doesn’t even begin to name my own foibles, faults, and failings, of
which there are more than a few.
The
world is broken, and so are we. Rocky ground, indeed.
One
could be forgiven for asking, “why bother?” After all, what’s the point of
scattering all these seeds if nothing is going to come of it? If they’re just
going to fall amidst the stones or get chocked off by the weeds, why bother?
Perhaps
it’s worth a moment’s reflection on the nature of these seeds we followers of
Jesus are supposed to be sewing. To begin with, if the seeds are the gospel –
that is to say, if the point of this parable is about sharing good news with
the world – then the first thing we should know is that we’re never go to run
out of seeds. Sew all you want, we’ll make more!
As I
understand it, the good news of the gospel can be summed up simply: God is love, and that love is for all of
creation. That good news – like that love at its heart – is inexhaustible.
It won’t run out if you share it. It won’t grow stale if you use if over and
over and over again. It won’t dry up even if you spread it around arid places,
and it won’t run dry even when you do.
Moreover,
the good news of the gospel is for the salvation of the world. Now that’s
pretty lofty language, so let’s get less theological sounding, less churchy in
our language. Here’s why the unconditional love of God for the whole of a
messed up world matters.
Last
Thursday I read this in a blog post called An
Open Letter to My Parents’ Pastor:
Last Sunday you gave a sermon about the authority of Scripture.
About halfway through the sermon, you said some things that hurt a lot of
people very deeply. Towards the end, you mentioned that you don’t care about
hurting people’s feelings (which doesn’t strike me as very pastoral, but that’s
another letter).
Long story short, my parents are leaving [your church].
Here are some things you should know: we’ve been members for 13
years, since I was ten years old. My brother and I were confirmed there; I
preached for the first time there; until recently, I thought I would get
married there.
Another thing you should know: I am a lesbian. I came out this year, after
many years of trying to deny who I was. My parents love me unconditionally. My
mom cried through your sermon last Sunday. My dad calmly collected his things
and told the choir director we wouldn’t be back.[1]
The blogger goes on to cite the all-too-familiar statistics about
the numbers and percentages of queer kids who harm themselves, especially those
from families who reject them.
Her deep and personal concerns resonate with us here for obvious
reasons, and they should remind us, as well, of all of the other circumstances
in which people hear messages telling them that they are not worthy of love,
that they are not smart enough, pretty enough, young enough, successful enough,
rich enough, skinny enough, tough enough, American enough, or whatever other
category of exclusion enough to be worthy of love.
In other words, they have heard – we have all heard – that we are
failures. And that, therefore, we are worthless. Such messages are the language
of a broken world. We all speak that language, but we are called to speak
another one. For while to live a life worth living is to experience failure,
the lesson that Jesus wants us to learn despite that failure is that we are
loved any way.
In that love we are invited to learn a new language: the language
of God’s love which is there for us when we succeed and when we fail, in life
and in death. We are called to speak this language of love to a world that is
desperate to hear it. We may not be clear when we speak it, and we may not be
heard. But the language is inexhaustible because God is inexhaustible and God
is love.
So speak it, and then speak it again. If you fail, try again. If
you are not heard, speak again. For love is love is love is love is love is
love is love. And the good news of the gospel is that God’s inexhaustible love
is for everyone – win, lose, or get rained out. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
7:59 AM
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