Rev. Katelyn Macrae
July 13, 2014
Text: Isaiah 55:10- 13 and Matthew 13:1-9;
18-23
We had a kid once who came to
camp. He was a city kid, and this was his first time in nature, his first time
with bugs and grass and lots of trees, and swimming in the lake. It was all new
to him.
We also had camp pigs that summer
on loan from the Heifer Project. He loved to walk by the pig pen, any chance he
could get.
Which was great, except for two
things -
One, he could have spent all day
at the pig pen, which made it hard when the campers were supposed to be doing
other things.
Two, the pigs weren’t so good at
staying in the pen.
No matter how much reinforcement
was put in the fencing, the pigs, mysteriously, found a way out. They would run
around camp and then the staff would have to go chase the pigs and put them back
in the pen.
Have you ever chased a pig?
Pigs do not want to be caught,
let me tell you that!
I think that God’s love is kind
of like the pigs escaping from the pen, no matter how much reinforcement is put
on the pen – God’s love wants to escape, it can’t be contained. Or maybe God’s
love is a versatile, grow anywhere, GMO-free seed.
---
Our story today comes from a
series of parables in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus used everyday objects - mustard
seeds, coins, fish nets, seeds and soil – in his parables to illustrate his
lessons. Today there were so many people gathered to hear Jesus’ that he had to
go out in a boat in the middle of the lake just to be able to see everyone and
teach them. Jesus was attracting a lot of attention.
Writer Barbara Brown Taylor
suggests that Jesus used these everyday images in his parables to stand in for
other things so that he would not get arrested while teaching. He taught in
such a way that he people who knew what he was talking about would get his
point, and those who were out of the know would just shake their heads in
confusion.
Today’s parable is one of the
most recognizable – it’s called the Parable of the Sower.
This is the title, but yet so
much of the focus of the story seems to be on the ground that the Sower visits
– a well trod path, rocky ground, thorny ground, and finally, fertile soil.
As I hear this story, I can’t
help but wonder – how do I get to be the good soil? Am I the rocky soil? Am I
full of thorns?
In fact, I was going to bring in
some compost today for the children’s sermon and have a conversation about what
makes for good soil. I was going to have mix all of this stuff up together and
see what happens as the compost decomposes. However, I didn’t think that the Trustees
would be too keen on having a compost bin in the Sanctuary!
In her book Seeds
of Heaven, Barbara Brown Taylor, writes that we have a 1:4 chance of
getting to be the right kind of soil. Who doesn’t want to be the good, fertile
soil?
But if we keep our eyes on the
dirt, we’re likely to get lost in the weeds, and miss the greater point of
Jesus’ parable.
It’s called the Parable of the
Sower, not the Parable of the Soil, for a reason. Notice that the sower sows
seeds everywhere, not caring where they will land, how evenly spaced apart they
are, or what kind of fruit they are predicted to yield. Imagine God as the
sower, sowing seeds extravagantly, indiscriminately.
Season after season, God sows
seeds in fertile fields, and war zones, and well trod paths. God sows seeds
through the shopping malls and parking lots, and hospital rooms, and even pig
pens at camp. God sows seeds of God’s word, and when these seeds take root,
they bear the Fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness,
forgiveness, patience, self control, generosity, and faithfulness.
They bear the fruits of the
spirit in sometimes unexpected places.
---
It was not an easy week at camp for our city
kid. He had to go home a bit earlier than the other campers. As a staff we
wondered, did we fail him because he didn’t make it through the full week? We
had to ask ourselves, how do we define “success” at camp? Is staying through
the whole week the most important thing? In the days that the camper was here –
what kind of community did he experience?
When we
started to think about it this way, we realized that whether or not he stayed
until Saturday, he still got to come to camp, and discover new things, play
outside, and be a part of a community who loved and cared and supported him the
best ways that we could.
Our job as
camp staff was to help create experiences where our campers might be recipients
of some of God’s seeds. We showed this camper God’s love – and maybe, maybe,
something took root in him.
---
Yesterday I
attended the 25th anniversary celebration at Covenant Hills Christian Camp near
Cabot, VT. Covenant Hills is a camp co-founded by the Vermont Conference of the
United Church of Christ and United Methodist Conference. Former Richmond
Congregational Church Member Fran Walker sold some land to the camp to help
make it possible.
It was my
first time at Covenant Hills, but as I listened to people speak about the power
and the importance of this camp and its impact on their lives, I was continually
impressed with the similarities with my own experience at UCC camps in Maine and Connecticut.
One of the
statistics that Jeff, the camp co-director, highlighted is that if a child
attends Sunday School every Sunday for a year, they get about 52 hours of faith
formation. But, if a kid attends camp for one week – they get about 130 hours
of hands-on faith formation, learning how to be a part of a community,
experiencing nature, and learning about the connections between Creation and
our Creator. That is more than double what a child will get if they attend Sunday
school every Sunday. As a local church is so important to support this camping
ministry, encourage our kids to go to camp, and support them with scholarships.
As
demographics shift, and people, especially our families, have more and more
choices about where and how to spend their summers, and their Sunday mornings,
we must also be open to new ways of being church, so that our camps, and our
churches, will have a future 25, 50, 100 years from now.
Jim Thomas,
a staff member at the Vermont Conference, came and preached here at Richmond Congregational
Church in March. One of the challenges he issued from this pulpit, is that we
need to be out and visible in the community. We need to go where the people
are, and be out and visible in the community. Similarly, one of the goals of
the new directors at Covenant Hills is to make their programming more
accessible and open to people of all ages by offering more opportunities for
retreats, intergenerational camping, and possibly a series of Confirmation
retreats for churches across the state.
It sounds like a Sower approach! Taking
seeds out and sowing them about joyfully all the while knowing that some will
land in rocky places, some will land among the thorns, and some will land in
the fertile soil and take root.
Only God
knows what the soil composition is. There’s not a special way to measure
success in the Kingdom of God. Even the parable says that the yields will be
different, some thirty, some sixty, some hundredfold. Likewise, we can’t necessarily
measure success with predicted yields or only look for the most fertile soil.
In Tielhard
de Chardin’s poem The
Slow Work of God he writes, “We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something
new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.”
De Chardin encourages
us to trust in God working in our lives in God’s time, and to
remain open
to the process.
As we move
together as a faith community in this new relationship together, and dream and
vision how God is calling us, let us be
sowers, casting about God’s seeds of love – freely, indiscriminately, joyfully –
wherever we go.
May it be
so.
Amen.
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