Third Sunday after Pentecost (sermon text)
Scriptures: 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13, Psalm 20, 2 Corinthians 5:6-17, Mark 4:26-34
Sermon text:
Have you ever had the ending of a sports game “spoiled”? Maybe you were talking with a friend who already saw the Colts game you had missed but recorded for later, and she tells you, “Yeah, the Colts were ahead by two in the late game. Wilkins kept the ball and the clock ran down!”
Maybe you weren’t ready to know the ending, but it’s still hard not to be excited that your team won. Even if you didn’t watch the whole game, and it might not feel like you “earned” the happy ending, at least it ends well.
What if it was for a sport you didn’t understand? “The batter clipped the winning boundary and fine-legged off Dernbach! You should have seen it!” That describes a winning play in a recent cricket match.
Today’s psalm uses the closest thing in ancient texts to sports – battlefield metaphors. Two of the greatest assets to a warrior of the time, chariots and horses, would give an advantage over enemies. Yet the psalmist writes, “Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses, but our pride is in the name of the Lord our God.”
In some ways, Jesus’ ministry was like a fascinating, brand-new sport; he captivated the masses, and everyone’s eyes were on him… but even his closest followers, to whom Jesus had explained the rulebook, had never seen a full game, and they had no idea how the final play would go, and how the game would end. Most significantly, to their ears, he kept telling them that it would end in what they could only hear as a loss – his death on the cross.
God is limitless, infinite, but our understanding of God is confined to our limited, finite expression; therefore, we rely on metaphor, images, and parables.
Unlike the disciples, we know how the game ended; we’ve heard all about the miraculous winning play: the ultimate defeat of death on the cross transformed into the ultimate victory of Jesus’ glorious resurrection and ascension. We know how the game ends – but do we really understand the final play? Do we “get” Jesus? Maybe not so much.
We sing songs like “Amazing Grace” and today’s hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” to remind ourselves that God’s abundance is absolutely beyond our understanding – God’s grace, absolutely, is unending, but really think about the first stanza today when you sing it – we are the beneficiaries of the “streams of mercy, never ceasing” that pour fourth from God in love. “Never ceasing.” Endless, overwhelming abundance. That’s how God gives.
We have the benefit of God’s endless abundance, we’ve heard the full story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and we have the Holy Spirit as our advocate, yet we STILL sin, we still read human limitations into Jesus’ story, and our faith – God help us – may not always have the quality of “confidence” Paul describes to the Corinthians.
And then we turn to Jesus’ parables about seeds. Today’s Gospel reading is a continuation from one of the best-known parables of Jesus, usually called either the parable of the soils or the parable of the sower.
You probably know this one: somebody spreads grain seeds haphazardly, and depending on where the seeds land, they fail or thrive under predictable conditions – birds eat the exposed seeds, heat withers the plants with shallow roots, weeds choke some plants, and finally those that find “good soil” thrive. Jesus reveals to only his disciples that the seeds are “the word,” and he explains the parable line by line – take a moment, if you haven’t lately, to read Mark chapter 4 in its entirety.
Some over the years have read into these seed parables predestination, or the sense that some people who hear God’s word will by the will of God fail as Christians, and others (surely us) are “good soil” and therefore we “just get it” and will thrive!
That reading is tied to our mortality, the assumption that what is sown – God’s word – is limited. Mark’s cantankerous Jesus reminds the disciples in chapter 10, “‘It’s impossible with human beings, but not with God. All things are possible for God.'” Look at the sower. We could understand this character to be God, or Jesus, but Jesus makes a special point to equip his disciples, who after his resurrection FINALLY do get it and become ministers – or sowers – of the Gospel themselves. And we as followers of Christ take on this work, the work of sowing, of spreading the Gospel, and being a part of the Kingdom of God that spreads outward like a mustard shrub, that incredible image in today’s reading.
And wow, can this process of growth be difficult. Jesus’ own ministry exemplifies the challenge that we, thousands of years later, face in our lives as followers of Jesus. Jesus sows the word and over and over again, yet it doesn’t seem to find good soil.
Jesus doesn’t give up on the people in Mark, and we step into their shoes every day – we don’t get it either, at least not always. The message Christ has for us – that we are loved and forgiven and therefore FREE and thereby TRANSFORMED to love and forgive others – falls on hearts hardened by sin, some days our hard hearts, some days those around us, but ALWAYS – and this is the grace in this parable – ALWAYS, the seed is endless.
Days when we only meet rocky soil, or birds swoop in and seem to steal our reason for joy, the word is still there, God’s word is still there, Jesus is still beside us, the Holy Spirit is still our advocate – some days humbling us and correcting us, other days picking us up to enfold us with boundless love. The incarnation of God’s love is Jesus, human and divine. We, who hear the story of Jesus, and with the witnesses to the resurrection and sinner-saints of all times and places, we may live in the spirit of abundance, rather than scarcity.
We’ve read the rulebook and we will still miss plays – but we know and may trust in how the game will end: even death, which seems most limiting to us, becomes victory in Christ. We are limited, finite, and God loves us exactly the way God made us, hearers and bearers of the word; our lives are the soil. Let us be attentive to the seed God plants and nurtures within us. God nurtures it in ways we will see and in ways that will surprise us. Let us be confident not in ourselves but in God, who makes all things new.
-Pastor Will Bevins