(Sermons are a spoken art form…a great deal of the meaning comes from how they are preached, please consider listening along if possible - sermon starts at 17:45)
Matthew 13 The Parable of The Sower
My very favorite things I heard about during Covidtide was that in May 2020, a couple of months into the stay-at-home order, millions of people asked Google, Are birds getting louder?
I’m pretty sure birds were exactly as loud as they’ve always been. It’s just that for the first time in our lives, we weren’t out creating noise pollution, so we actually could hear what had always been there all along. It was good timing too…since hearing birdsong actually lowers cortisol levels in human beings. Some think it’s because if birds are singing it means there aren’t any large predators around – it signals to our paleolithic brains that we are safe.
Anyhow, I thought about that whole are birds getting louder thing this week, because the other day I was trying to meditate- not so much out of piety as out of desperation. Like maybe if I could quiet my mind for a few minutes, I’d feel less wobbly. Maybe I could finish a sermon. Maybe I could finish a thought. And of course maybe this time I could finally become that imagined, improved version of myself.
So there I sat, 6:30 in the morning, windows open to draw in the cool air. And in from the window on my right came the relentlessly pounding, screeching, meditation-ruining construction noise from a 6 story apartment building going up behind our house. Immediately it stoked my rage at the years we’ve had to endure constant noise and closed lanes and trucks taking every parking spot just so some developer can make money they probably don’t even need. (The fact that I did not think a single thought about how 6 stories of apartments could really help the Denver housing shortage proves why I need meditation to being with.)
So… when the agitation subsided, I realized the from the window on my left, came a very different, but quieter sound. From that side of the house streamed the delight and surprise of birdsong.
In my right ear, deafening chaos of a construction zone, in my left, the morning chimes of my feathered neighbors.
Two different sounds, happening at the same time. But when I focused on the grinding diesel engines, which was easy to do because they were so much louder… but when I focused on them not only did my agitation return, but the birds seemed to just …disappear.
Of course the birds didn’t disappear. I just literally couldn’t hear them when I was tuned into something else.
I thought about all this because in our Gospel reading, Jesus tells a Parable— that familiar story of the Sower’s seed falling on a path where the word of the kingdom is snatched away, and then on rocky ground where the word springs up but fades away, then among thorns which choke it out, before finally falling on good soil where the word bears fruit.
My entire life I have heard this as Jesus basically describing 3 kinds of lousy Christians and 1 kind of good Christian. And then we, the hearers of the parable are left with like, spiritual test strips left to determine the ph level of our souls and adjust accordingly.
As if thorns can be scolded by a parable into becoming good soil.
As if rocks can pull themselves out of the ground through sheer force of positive thinking, a meditation app, and a cute gratitude journal.
So after a lifetime of hearing this parable as a judgment on the soil, and used as a Sunday School moralism on how to make sure you are the good kind of Christian – well after a lifetime of this, something broke me open this week while studying this text. It was when I wondered: what if Jesus isn’t describing three ways to be bad and one way to be good? What if he’s just describing the unavoidable seasons and situations we naturally find ourselves in as real human beings living in a world that can be very harsh?
Tone of voice can be hard to decipher in both text messages AND in scripture. But if we can read this with a harsh tinge to Jesus’ voice can we not also read it as our Lord saying these things with nothing but the softest, most merciful tone? Maybe Jesus is telling this parable with the deepest compassion for what life is just like.
I mean, you didn’t choose to be too immature to make rooted choices when you were younger. You didn’t choose the rocky place in you where the voice of your alcoholic parent still lives. You didn’t choose the thorns that grew up around your heart because someone betrayed you.
Friends, this parable isn’t a referendum on our soil quality – it’s a story of how God is not stingy with the good news. God apparently just tosses it absolutely everywhere without concern for where it lands, scattered all around, even pouring out of a hole in their burlap bag.
Recently I was talking to another recovering alcoholic about the 11th step which says: We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God. He said if there’s such a thing as conscious contact with God, there must also be such a thing as unconscious contact with God. And that felt like such grace to me. Like birdsong which is there when I have ears to hear and when I do not.
Which means yes, sometimes we find ourselves in fertile seasons of awareness. And sometimes we don’t. But none of that changes God’s proximity to us by a single inch.
It helps to know that the word translated ‘word’ isn’t just a word like we think of it – in Greek it’s logos; the word philosophers used to describe the logic holding the universe together, even when we don’t perceive it.
When I choose to hear the parable of the Sower with a compassionate tone, that is what I hear. I hear the promise that I have had a lifetime, and so have you, of both conscious and unconscious contact with God.
Don’t get me wrong, moments of deep devotion, ecstatic praise and devout prayer, are a gift. They just don’t happen to change the contact we actually have with God. They only make us momentarily aware of it. Which is also a gift. I mean, to have conscious contact with God is to hear the birdsong of God’s mercy even while surrounded by the noise pollution of human ridiculousness.
But the times when we’re choked by the grinding noise of unwanted construction, internal criticism, and a relentlessly dreary news cycle - when the clamor of the world drowns out the logos of God, the Word is just as close to us as when we receive it in good soil. The word surrounds us still: written on the broken tablets of our hearts, falling like rain in the tears of the forgiven, harnessed in the laughter of our children.
Because the Word of God’s Kingdom, sown throughout our lives, is nothing less than a divine counter melody to the chaos and lies of this world.
It’s a song about a God who doesn’t have the decency to be strategic with grace, who has never once in the history of the universe run a cost-benefit analysis on who deserves good news.
This is the truth that is sung by angels — angels who hover equally over rocky ground and good soil.
This word, this logos, is a pounding counter-melody to human ambition and greed and pride, it is a song that eternally says:
Only God is God.
And we are his.
And forgiveness is always more powerful than resentment.
And there is strength in mercy.
And perfect love casts out fear.
And we are never alone.
And God’s strength is perfected not in human pride or glory, but in our weakness.
And that Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
And that death is defeated.
This is the Word of God’s birdsong holding the universe together even when we don’t perceive it.
I know that some of you walked in here this morning as good soil — conscious of your contact with God, your heart an open window. And some of you walked in with a jackhammer running in your right ear so loud you can barely hear the organ.
But you are not here to figure out what kind of soil you are. You are here because the Sower doesn’t check first.
So when you leave this building and go back into the news, the grief, the diagnosis, the argument you’re still having in your head with someone who isn’t even in the room, it is entirely possible that, again, you will not be able to hear birdsong. That’s not a failure of your faith. That’s just what we call, “Tuesday”.
You don’t have to Google whether grace got quieter. It did not.
The important thing to know is that The word of God’s kingdom, that deeper truth spoken by the prophets and hummed by Hebrew midwives and encoded into the spirituals of enslaved people and pounded by drums of freedom, and whispered behind the backs of tyrants… no matter what season of life you are in, that counter-melody of divine truth surrounds you like birdsong. It always has. It always will. Tilt your head ever so slightly and I think you can hear it.
Amen.
Be sure and join me and Scott Erickson this Wednesday at noon Eastern for this week’s Keeping It Together With Nadia Bolz-Weber!
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