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When the Word Takes Root
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
October 29, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Isaiah 6:6-13
Mark 4:1-20

“‘Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundred-fold.’ And he said, ‘Let anyone with ears to hear listen!’”

I wish I understood this parable simply! I wish I could, in good conscience, offer the parable of the sower this morning as a little morality play concerning how we ought to become good soil, soil that is receptive to God’s gracious Word and generous in our stewardship. I wish I had only to rehearse the obvious (faith being tough in the following ways) in order to arrive at the overwhelming (thirty and sixty and a hundred-fold yield). But given that this is Reformation Sunday, Mark’s careful setting of Jesus’ parable amid those who are given to understand and those who are not compels me to do business with that most difficult of Reformed doctrines, the doctrine of election and its more unnerving companion, the doctrine of predestination.

What interested John Calvin about this parable more than the parable itself was the decision of Jesus to speak in parables. He spoke in parables, Calvin thought, to the end that some understood and others were left out in the dark. Why, he asked, was the privilege of understanding peculiar only to a few? It is a preacher’s question. The question was first posed to Calvin in 16th century Geneva by people who appeared to be impervious to the gospel, an observation that led Calvin to struggle mightily with this mystery. The reason the disciples heard, according to Calvin in his exposition of the parable of the sower, “certainly will not be found in themselves; and Christ, by declaring that it was given to them, excludes all merit.” Jesus rather “declares that there are certain and elect men [sic.] on whom God specially bestows this honour of revealing to them his secrets and that others are deprived of this grace. No other reason will be found for this distinction,” Calvin declares, “except that God calls to himself those whom he has gratuitously elected.” In other words God in perfect freedom, with no need on God’s part to be known by any of us, has chosen from the foundation of the world to be known by some, says Calvin, in Jesus Christ. There we have it: election and predestination!

But what do we have—or, as the question implies, what have we missed--when it comes to understanding God’s furtive address to some and not others? Julia Sweeney [of Saturday Night Live “Here’s Pat” fame] once numbered herself among those who did understand. In the midst of her brother’s long dying and her own diagnosis of cancer, she had heard God’s address and had high-tailed it back to her Roman Catholic roots. That was then. Just now she has announced her return to the reasonable ranks of those who look and do not perceive; who listen and happily do not understand.

Sweeney has, in a word, had it with God. In her one woman show, “Letting Go of God”, she chronicles her loss of faith, a loss precipitated, in part, by her somewhat untutored reading of the Bible as well as by a class in quantum physics. The physics bowed her down before the god of human reason while the Bible stood her up against the God of revelation. Specifically she was startled in her reading of the Bible by how angry Jesus was all the time and how impatient. So in her monologue now playing off Off-Broadway, she takes Jesus on by way of our text in Mark:

But, in a sense, God has done just that in Jesus: has said just what God means in him. The Word that was in the beginning with God is the same Word that, in the fullness of time, became flesh and dwelt among us. This is as clear as God’s speech gets…as clear, Sweeney would say, as mud! The parable teller, you see, is himself the parable, the puzzle, the dark saying, God’s Word hidden in the reality and mediated in the complexity of a human life. In this life, death and resurrection in fact say finally what God means, says Jesus so that between our birth and our death we may know the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God which surpasses human knowledge. Apparently we do not understand. Explain this to us, Jesus’ would-be followers have demanded of God’s revelation from the beginning.

“Listen,” says Jesus in response to our pleas, and wouldn’t you know it: he begins to teach us, says Mark, in parables…in words whose meaning we may be destined to miss! “The sower went out to sow. And as he sowed…” we hear of the sower’s reckless abandon in sowing. There is risk; there is waste; there is an absence of caution. The sower simply throws the seed everywhere: on the path, on the rocks, among the thorns. What could he possibly expect? Surely the sower knows better, we think. But then why has he chosen to scatter the seeds where they have no chance to grow, where they will surely be rejected?

Here the parable is silent, as most parables are, about motives. And here we would do well, I think, to bracket Mark’s own take on the matter. In fact, the sower disappears offstage almost immediately…out of the range of our questions…leaving us with the seeds and the field and the inevitably bad endings: seeds eaten by birds before they could sprout…seeds spouted but then scorched by the sun…seeds rooted alongside thorns that choke them. But the sower set out to take these risks, did he not? To scatter the seeds without a thought…to sow with an abandon we cannot fathom. What in the world is to be made of such failure and so of the earth’s predestined barrenness?

In this way, Calvin reminds us, God intended from the beginning to elect some and reject others. Right! “Jesus says that he speaks to the multitude in an obscure manner because they are not partakers of the true light. And yet,” Calvin goes on, “while he declares a veil is spread over the blind, that they may remain in their darkness, he does not ascribe the blame of this to themselves, but takes occasion to commend even more highly the grace bestowed on the Apostles, because it is not equally communicated to all.”

Now such an understanding of God’s Word has been known to make people stop listening, has harden hearts against the possibility of faith. “Listeners,” wrote the late New Testament professor and friend Donald Juel, if left here “are left at the mercy of God without any way of controlling how the encounter will turn out. And almost without exception, they become unsettled and angry. ‘That sounds like predestination,’ [they say.]. Or, ‘If that’s the way it is, I suppose I’d prefer to be on the outside, with those not included.’ Or again, ‘I will not believe in a [such a] God.’ [These are the ones] for whom the ancient words of the parable are intolerable,” Juel observes, and for whom “…there appears no alternative but to disbelieve.” Enter Julia Sweeney, stage left!

But there is one Reformed theologian who has heard differently, heard in Jesus’ parable not first a word about the saved and the damned nor a word concerning individual human beings in relation to God’s election and predestination. Rather he has heard a word concerning the destiny of the One telling the story who is Sower and Seed and Soil and so the Savior of our lives. Predestination--the doctrine of God’s election and rejection for which we Presbyterians are known--has to do with Jesus, said Karl Barth, and only then…through Jesus, with us! He was the Word chosen from the beginning and predestined to become flesh; and he was this even as he was also God’s Word destined in the fullness of time to be rejected. He is the Word God scattered so extravagantly on the earth and so the Word picked off at every turn. Yet he alone on earth is the one who receives God’s Word: he is the good soil yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold! In him we were chosen from the foundation of the world and destined in love to be God’s own!

Listen! he says, and we listen as those who long to be rooted in him and to know him: know him not as an idea or a principle or a system of belief…neither as an object of contemplation nor as a vision at the end of our grasp. Rather we long to be rooted and grounded in him in such a compelling way, says Barth, that we cannot be neutral but are summoned to give ourselves—our heart, mind, soul and strength—to him in return.

To my surprise as much as yours, the text has led us on this Reformation Sunday to the substance of Christian stewardship. Rooted in the rich depths of his love, we may let go our grip on every other thing and trust the yield will be given: thirty, sixty, a hundredfold! But notice how our theme has been transformed from an admonition directed toward our better effort to a prayer we say together to the God who is our sure Redeemer. “Keep it growing”, we ask, dig us deeper the soil that sets us free. “Keep it growing,” we pray, knowing now that Christ alone is the One in whom God’s word has taken root. “Keep it growing,” we plead, believing as we are grounded in Christ’s love that this congregation’s ministry has a prayer. “Keep it growing,” we sing, certain the that future of Christ’s church is in God’s hand! Pray then, writes John Dominic Crossan in response to this parable, for a miracle: not for “organic and biological development” but for the gift and for “the graciousness and the surprise of the ordinary, pray for the advent of bountiful harvest despite the losses of sowing”, pray for the end of your own neutrality and so for the giving of yourself away for love’s sake!

I think even those who do not yet understand pray this still. When Terry Gross asked Julia Sweeney on this Thursday last what it was like not to be able to give to her daughter the community of faith her parents had given to her, she said that on the one hand, it did not seem to be so traumatic not to give her the easy answers. But on the other hand, said Sweeney, “we live in Los Angeles and we are not part of a religious community. I mean, we belong to this tennis club that is sort of like a big YMCA in our neighborhood and we see people there, but…I mean, it’s not as good; it is a loss for her. I wish I could give her the upbringing that I had with the parishes and the neighborhood. I mean, to me that was fantastic. I wish we could go to church on Sundays. Like, I don’t know why I don’t keep it up. We just don’t have that and she doesn’t have that…and I haven’t exactly figured out what the replacement for her is.”

Let those who have ears to hear listen and let us together, as we make our pledges, beseech God to keep this community of faith growing deep in the soil that is Christ Jesus, for the sake of the six year olds in cricket clubs and for the sake of the sixty year olds in tenements and so for the sake of the world, the whole world chosen by God from the beginning in Christ and destined in love to be his own forever!

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