Roots and Shoots

Happy Friday, Blue Roomies, and welcome to new subscribers!

It is HOT here in NoVA. Hope you’re staying cool and comfortable, wherever you are. We’ll keep it cool here in the Blue Room with recipes like this:

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Ed and I did some prepping for Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey with a conversation about Epic Tales and Hero’s Journeys. You can listen at the Pop Culture Pastors Hour page, or at Pop Culture Pastors Hour on the podcast app of your choice.

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This week I’m sharing my sermon from last Sunday at Trinity Presbyterian, Herndon VA, which received a nice response… and not just from fans of Les Mis, though who isn’t a fan of Les Mis?

Below is the audio, plus a lightly edited transcript of the recording. By the way, I share all my sermons on the Blue Room podcast, so if you don’t want to miss one, look for it on Substack or in your favorite podcast app.

Steady on!

Before I get to the scripture this morning, I want to give you a little preview of our Upside Down Book Club in which we’ll be sharing what we’re reading this summer. Actually, I’ll share a different book after the service when we gather! But I have been reading Les Miserables, Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel.

Of course, this is the original work that the musical is based on. I have long been a fan of Les Mis and the story of Jean Valjean and his transformation from a petty criminal who spent 19 years in a prison labor camp after stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s children, to a true hero, a true servant to those around him. Now if you know Les Miserables, the novel, you know it is lengthy. I knew I was in for a bit of a slog when I saw on my e-reader that the table of contents is 40 pages long. So let me just say as I’ve been getting started that it has been kind of tough going. The first section of the book feels a lot like throat clearing. There’s very little plot. There’s a lot of digressions.

It is sort of a setup for the action that I hope is to come. The first part of the book is about the bishop, the Bishop of Digne. And we see the bishop doing the ordinary tasks of ministry. He’s praying. He’s reading. He’s giving away his income to the poor.

It feels like reading a session report that Stephen and I might write for the session each month, if that report were 148 pages long. And as I was reading, I was asking myself, what is Victor Hugo up to with so much background about a character that doesn’t figure prominently in the narrative as a whole? He is there for one moment and then he is gone. Why do we spend so much time with setup? And then I read this week’s scripture and I understood. So let’s listen to it now. Here’s the text.

Well, as I said, I finally met Jean Valjean in the novel after about 150 pages.

And if you have read the novel or if you’ve seen the musical or the play or other works based on this story, you know that the bishop shelters Jean Valjean in his own house, gives him dinner, and gives him a comfortable place to sleep on a cold night. And Jean Valjean, who is a former criminal, who is used to finding his way using his own wits by exploiting others, steals some silver from the bishop’s house. Now later when the police bring Valjean back to the bishop’s house for this confrontation, the bishop says, Oh, those were a gift. Those were a gift that I freely gave to this man that he may sell them and make something of himself. In fact, you forgot the candlesticks that I also want to give you.

And after the police have left, the bishop says to Valjean, You will use this money to become an honest man. “You no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you, and I give it to God.” And after that moment, Jean Valjean is a changed man. Whether his life produces a hundredfold or sixty or thirty, he bears fruit for those around him.

Now here’s what I finally understood about the bishop, and about Hugo’s long description of him, thanks to this parable from Matthew. Victor Hugo is taking his time. Victor Hugo is setting up a pattern… a pattern of prayer, of reading, of ministry with the poor.

For years and years the gospel had taken root in the bishop’s life.
The seeds were planted one season after another.

And so what felt like far too many pages was actually showing how the gospel works. And I realized that the author had pulled me into the story. And so by the time Jean Valjean knocks on the bishop’s door that night, the answer is instant. It’s instinctive: Come in.

And that is the kind of faith that Jesus is talking about here. He’s talking about lifelong preparation. Not just preparation, but practice. Seeds are being scattered all the time all around us and some of them don’t really amount to much, and some of them grow abundant with deep roots and prolific growth.

And Jesus tells this parable about that process, and in between the parable and the explanation of the parable, he gives listeners some instruction, which he doesn’t always do in parables. Sometimes he just lets the story speak for itself, but this time he gives us instruction.

And it is not “Go and do likewise.”
It is not, “Be like the gardener.”
It is simply, “If you have ears to hear, listen.”
Understand what I am telling you.

Take it to heart, that God is the sower and we are simply the seeds. Or maybe we’re the soil.

This parable asks us to consider what kind of soil are we cultivating with our lives, with how we are living.

We’re told that some seeds fall on the path, that place where the soil is worn down, where so many have walked before, and I think about all of my comings and goings. And how often do I, do we, take the time to sit, to not be so busy, to receive God’s love right where we are, right where God is prepared to meet us.

Some seeds fall on rocky ground, and that invites us to consider the places that we are simply lacking depth? Where are the places we can content ourselves with superficiality, not with the richness of good soil?

And some seeds fall among the thorns. And there are so many thorny places in our public life together. Places where rancor and polarization and cruelty seem to have the final word.

But then there’s the good soil. And if you are a gardener, you know that good soil is the result of many seasons of careful tending, of turning it, exposing it to the air, letting the nutrients proliferate, composting it. Be good soil, Jesus is inviting us. God is the one who provides the shoots and the fruits. And that can take a long time. But that is the work before us if we are to be good soil.

Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer and professor and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which challenges bias in the criminal justice system, especially against the poor and people of color, and particularly children. And he gave an interview in the last few weeks and he said, in talking about slavery,

We often make the abolitionists the hero of that story. That they were the leaders who brought about emancipation, who won that struggle. And he said, I think that is incomplete. He said, I think that’s even bordering on dishonesty to say that the abolitionists, the ones who fought against slavery, were the heroes there. He said, no.

The heroes were the 10 million people who were enslaved over 246 years, who found a way to hold on to their humanity, to hold on to their dignity. He said there’s nothing that contributed to abolition more than staying human in an inhuman system, staying human when being treated as an enslaved person, to hold on to dignity When being denied that dignity. To hold on to humanity when their humanity was being crushed.

Now what Stevenson is describing is twelve generations of ground being cultivated. That perseverance, that insistence on humanity and dignity, bore fruit in a hundredfold ways… ways that are still unfolding today, imperfectly, incompletely, but still happening.

Those 10 million enslaved people were the means—in their resistance, their perseverance, their dignity—they were the means for God to work God’s purposes out for this nation.

They were a living example of that line of poetry you may have heard, that countless movements for liberation and freedom have adopted as their own: They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.

God wants to bear fruit, and that is the work that God is up to. But notice that even in this parable, even in the places where the seeds didn’t bear that fruit in the moment, that very little is wasted here.

In some cases, the birds eat the seeds. Well, birds need to be fed too! And after those seeds are digested, not to get too graphic about it, those seeds are… dispersed, and they may be able to grow somewhere else.

And then the rocky ground. Over time, those roots and seedlings that come up in the crevices of the rocks but then wither away in the sun, over time, over a long period of time, those roots and those seedlings break down and form soil themselves, and then they break down the rocks themselves in a process called biological weathering until, if you can imagine it in the future, those rocks break down completely and soil can be there.

And the thorns even, even the thorns, can actually provide shelter for fledgling plants. They can trap moisture and keep the temperatures more moderate. And again, not right away, but over time, plants can take hold in those places too.

Now we don’t think on that time frame, and the parable doesn’t give us that time frame either, but God works on that time frame. God does what we not only can’t imagine in the moment, but can’t imagine in the future.

We want to be good soil. We want to practice the things that the bishop practiced over 148 pages, those ordinary acts of kindness and goodness and mercy…

…Kindness to the people right around us, so that someday when someone knocks on our door and needs it, we will be able to serve. We want to be that good soil. But the good news is that our gardening God is the one in charge.

The process is slow. But it’s unrelenting.

It cannot be stopped. It’s generational.

And with God as the sower, God as the gardener, God as the cultivator, the fruit that comes will be ripe, it’ll be juicy, and it will nourish this world.

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