SPEAKER_00: May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
SPEAKER_00: The man who hears the word but understands it not, the man who hears the word with joy but falls away at the first sign of trial or persecution, the man who hears the word but is rendered unfruitful by an undue care for worldly things, the man who both hears and understands the word, and so bears fruit and yields a rich harvest.
SPEAKER_00: These are the types of human responses upon hearing the good news of the gospel which Jesus presents to his disciples today.
SPEAKER_00: As an aside, the verses omitted from the middle of this morning's reading make clear that whereas the parable itself is offered to the multitudes, the explanation is offered only to the disciples, and I'll return to that in a moment.
SPEAKER_00: But first, I want to suggest that most people who have been involved with the church for any length of time will have known people who correspond to each of these types of responses to the gospel that Jesus identifies.
SPEAKER_00: Indeed, it can be a comfort to the hard-pressed pastor or missioner who encounters such characters to know that Jesus also knows and understands them.
SPEAKER_00: It's also important to say that this parable is not in any way an invitation to be judgmental about the faith of others.
SPEAKER_00: The illustrations used by Jesus are not hard and fast categories which a person enters once and stays in forever.
SPEAKER_00: Most people will fit most closely into different bits of the parable at different times in their lives, because the journey of faith is the work of a lifetime.
SPEAKER_00: What I think is even more intriguing and worth each one of us considering about ourselves is that we will each have here and now different bits of our lives and different bits of our faith that most closely resemble these different categories all at the same time.
SPEAKER_00: When I preached a few weeks ago on the calling of St.
SPEAKER_00: Matthew, I introduced an everyman character by the name of Disciple, suggesting thereby that Matthew's call has much to teach every aspiring follower of Jesus in every age.
SPEAKER_00: And so today I want to bring Disciple back into the narrative as we consider how the parable of the sower might relate to us.
SPEAKER_00: So here is Disciple.
SPEAKER_00: We know already that he has accepted God's call.
SPEAKER_00: And yet, however much disciple might like to think that he is a good man of God, the perfect example of rich soil, the fact is he is not, or at least not completely.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, there will be the rich soil, wherein disciple is faithful in saying his prayers and attending mass, committed to reading his Bible, diligent in charity and almsgiving.
SPEAKER_00: But alongside that will be the occasions when the worry of the world or the lure of a better and more attractive offer distracts him, and before he knows it he has done those things which he ought not to have done.
SPEAKER_00: There will also be seasons of life when a trial comes, if not outright persecution, then perhaps ridicule or marginalization because of his faith.
SPEAKER_00: And what then of disciples' supposedly rich soil?
SPEAKER_00: Finally, there may very well be a little piece of disciple's life of which he is ashamed, and which he is unable to integrate into the rest of his life of faith.
SPEAKER_00: Who knows what that might be?
SPEAKER_00: The possibilities are almost endless, but in this little aspect of disciple's life, even if in no other, the evil one will have succeeded in carrying off the seed that has been sown.
SPEAKER_00: So disciple is a jumbled up mixture of responses to the gospel, competing impulses within him all at the same time.
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if you can see something of disciple in your own life.
SPEAKER_00: If so, the clergy are available to hear confessions by appointment.
SPEAKER_00: If not, perhaps you ought to look again.
SPEAKER_00: As Bishop Lindsay Irwin was fond of saying when he was the administrator of the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, if you think you've got nothing to confess, then you're guilty of the sin of pride.
SPEAKER_00: But the great thing about being a member of the church is, as we've heard before in recent weeks, that we are all in this together.
SPEAKER_00: If you are disciple with rich and rocky soil all mixed in together, then so am I.
SPEAKER_00: So is the person sat next to you, and so is every person who has ever lived, except Jesus and his blessed mother.
SPEAKER_00: Another thing that we all share, all of us, is that God has planted the seed of faith within us.
SPEAKER_00: The human response to the sowing of that seed is important.
SPEAKER_00: It determines which of the categories we've been considering apply to us, and when and to what extent.
SPEAKER_00: But we must keep perspective here, or else we will fall again into pride.
SPEAKER_00: The primary agent in this story is the sower, God.
SPEAKER_00: And as in nature, so in humanity.
SPEAKER_00: It is God who gives growth to the seed.
SPEAKER_00: Our task is to cooperate with that work, to allow God the space to work within us, to transform our lives so that day by day and week by week the soil of our lives becomes richer, more fertile, less rocky.
SPEAKER_00: This is unlikely to be a linear progression, a straight line towards holiness.
SPEAKER_00: Rather, Leonard Cohen captured something of the reality in his lyric So we struggle and we stagger down the snakes and up the ladder, to the tower where the blessed hours chime.
SPEAKER_00: Today's parable reminds us that for disciple it has been ever thus.
SPEAKER_00: For all disciples it has been ever thus, and God does not condemn us for it.
SPEAKER_00: There is, in fact, only one group of people who are condemned in this part of St.
SPEAKER_00: Matthew's Gospel.
SPEAKER_00: In verse 9, Jesus says, He who has ears let him hear.
SPEAKER_00: And this is the final verse before the excised text, as we heard the passage read this morning, and in those missing verses that come in the middle of the passage, it becomes clear that those who are condemned by Jesus are those who deliberately and knowingly shut their ears to the good news that is being offered to them.
SPEAKER_00: These people, Jesus says, look without seeing, and listen without hearing or understanding.
SPEAKER_00: This is why the explanation of the parable is offered only to the disciples, in other words, to those who are willing to listen, and willing, at least to try to understand.
SPEAKER_00: It is clear from the context that Jesus is condemning the religious elites of his day, the scribes and the Pharisees, those who are so puffed up with their own self-righteousness that they are unable to see the kingdom of heaven unfolding before them.
SPEAKER_00: Nowhere does Jesus condemn those who are in all honesty and good conscience, trying to find their way to the truth.
SPEAKER_00: Rather, he condemns only those who have so closed their hearts and their minds to this search that they cannot recognize the one who is the truth incarnate, the very way, truth, and life, when he stands before them in person.
SPEAKER_00: This is the trap which we must avoid, because it is a trap that leads us to deny the seed which God's grace has sown in us and in our fellow travellers.
SPEAKER_00: It leads us to shut up our ears so we can no longer hear when God calls.
SPEAKER_00: Let me finish with a sonnet on this gospel passage addressed to Jesus Himself by the priest poet Malcolm Guite.
SPEAKER_00: The poem addresses precisely the interplay between the general and the specific, between the every man and each individual believer, that I've been trying to address this morning.
SPEAKER_00: I love your simple story of the sower, with all its close attention to the soil, its movement from the knowledge to the knower, its take on the tenacity of toil.
SPEAKER_00: I feel the fall of seed a sower scatters, so equally available to all.
SPEAKER_00: Your story takes me straight to all that matters, yet understands the reasons why I fall.
SPEAKER_00: O deepen me where I am thin and shallow, uproot in me the thistle and the thorn.
SPEAKER_00: Keep far from me that swiftly snatching shadow that seizes on your seed to mock and scorn.
SPEAKER_00: O break me open, Jesus, set me free.
SPEAKER_00: Then find and keep your own good ground in me.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.