Van Gogh, The Sower (1888)
Profligate God
Proper 10 Year A
16 July 2017 8 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
When I worked for the Federal
government, each year we went through an exercise to determine whether the taxpayers’
money under our control was being spent well. We tried to establish
metrics—countable and measurable goals—of success and asked ourselves what
results the expense had actually produced, not how many programs or products we
had created. We wanted to count the
concrete outputs of our work, not list put-throughs. One frustration we regularly had in
conducting such analysis was that often the things that were clearly the most
important, long-lasting, and significant were a little too subtle to be counted
and tallied and put onto a ledger tied with costs incurred. We often found it hard to defend our work to
what we deridingly called “bean counters” or “green-eyeshades”: what was most measurable often was the least
important.
We live in a society that thinks of
“the bottom line,” the countable profit or loss, as the most important
consideration, the ultimate story of success or failure. The Left often evaluates government’s success
by the amount of money redistributed and placed into the hands of those who
previously went without. The Right
believes that only a businessman can truly do government the right way,
creating the environment for maximized profit and increased production. In both cases, we aim at a good thing, but
corrupt it by thinking in terms of bottom lines. We are an idolatrous lot,
ignoring Jesus’ wise words, “you cannot serve at the same time God and
money.”
Even in the Church, we talk endlessly
about measures of success: average
Sunday Attendance, percentage of pledgers and tithers and the percentage of
income thus pledged, the numbers of congregation building events—child and
adult baptisms and weddings—versus funerals.
We sometimes tart such thinking by talking more generally of “congregational vitality” and “sustainability
of ministry.” Under such metrics, many
believe the Church of our age is dying.
Heedless of the countless generations before that also doubted the
further viability or sustainability of the Church, we think perhaps we are the
last generation of Christians. This too
is idolatry, for it sets up in the place of a living, loving Christ actively
engaged with the world through the means of sorry creatures such as ourselves,
the image of a Great Corporate Executive in the Sky who expects a larger and
larger bottom line.
Today’s Gospel reading is a great
antidote for such idolatry, Jesus’ Parable of the Scattered Seed.
The interpretation given here is a
separate tradition, added early on to the parable itself. It sees the saying of Jesus not as a parable,
with one point of comparison, but as an allegory, a coded treatment where different
elements of the story stand for different things: the seed is the word of God,
the sower a preacher of sorts, and the various soils different people who react
differently to the word depending on their circumstances. This interpretation is almost certainly the
product of an early Christian pastor, concerned about how his preaching might be received.
But this misses the point the
historical Jesus almost certainly was trying to make. The seed more likely is about the Kingship or
the Reign of God whose arrival Jesus announced, God being in charge of things
here and now. Jesus gave many other
parables comparing God’s Reign to some kind of seed.
In one parable, a seed sprouts and
grows all on its own regardless of whether the person who planted it knows or
understands why it grows (Mark 4:26-34).
Jesus thus says that God’s kingdom comes primarily through God’s acts,
not ours, and arrives despite our unawareness.
Elsewhere, a tiny mustard seed sprouts
and grows into a huge tree-like shrub (Mark 4:31; Matt 13:31; Luke 13:19): tiny, almost imperceptible in its beginnings,
huge, overwhelming, and sheltering in its full growth. That’s God’s Reign.
In yet another, God’s Reign is like a
field sown with wheat in which is mixed noxious weeds whose young plants are
indistinguishable from the good wheat plants (Matt 13:25-40): we mustn’t try to rip out the bad ones lest
we destroy the good ones as well in the process, but rather let God and the
angels do the sorting once the plants are fully grown. Again, God is in charge of the Reign of God,
not us.
In the Parable of the Scattered Seed,
Jesus pictures a farmer at work, broadcasting seed in the standard practice of that
place and time.
Ancient Galilean agriculture was more
variable in its results than ours. “A sower goes out to sow seed and casts it
all over the place. Some falls on hard,
thin ground with hardly any soil. It
doesn’t sprout. Some falls on ground
with soil, but little water. It sprouts
but quickly dies. Some falls on rich
soil infested with weeds, and they crowd it out. Only some falls into good soil with adequate
water and sun and not too many weeds. But
there, the crop yields are so high that they justify the apparent waste and
loss in broadcasting seed.”
We would say that this farmer is
foolish: he wastes his seed stock by
casting it promiscuously, carelessly.
But Jesus argues that the bumper crop that results in that last good, well-watered
soil, vindicates the practice: 100 times back from the seed broadcast.
And this is the heart of the matter for
Jesus. The farmer, like God, is
profligate. He opens his hands and
spreads those seeds with abandon. And
the result is good indeed. Those who might point to the barren bits of
ground, the rocky and sun-burnt soil and claim that no harvest is coming are
wrong. The profligacy of the sower,
while causing the mixed results, is also what ensures success.
Jesus’ point is that when we’re talking
about the Reign of God, we’re talking about God. And God is good. God is compassionate. God is loving. God is fruitful. God is reliable. God is provident.
This is key to Jesus’ teaching. “God
gives the blessing of rain and sun on the wicked and righteous alike” says
Jesus. Like that crazy loving father
with the two wayward sons, the prodigal and the priss, or the crazy woman who
throws an expensive party to celebrate finding a lost coin, or the shepherd who
goes out after one sheep while forgetting the 99, the sower seems foolish,
especially to bean counters who worry about wasted seed stock. But the bumper crop vindicates the profligate
sower.
God is like that sower. We cannot judge
God and say that God’s reign is hopelessly delayed, that good is losing and bad
is winning. The sower cannot be judged by the wasted seed. The garden’s success
is not judged by the bad bits.
We often are uncomfortable with the
idea of a profligate, seemingly wasteful God.
But a God who is too calculating and careful, the God of the
bean-counters, is an idol. One of the
reasons that Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species through
natural selection was so devastating to many people of faith was that they had
been encouraged to worship that idol.
The divines of the age said that nature reflected its author, God, in
its order and design, and that nature’s supposed lack of wastefulness showed
the parsimony of God’s economy. But
Darwin’s perceptive and careful accumulation of data revealing nature red in
tooth and claw, natural selection driven without apparent design by wasteful
death and suffering on monumental scales over the eons gave a death knell to the
image of God as an orderly and rational designer of nature.
Jesus’ view that God is like a
profligate and wasteful broadcaster of
seeds is perhaps closer to the truth. As
Annie Dillard writes, “Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them
when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to
the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place?
This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged
manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything
once…. This is a spendthrift economy. Though nothing is lost, all is
spent” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek [HarperCollins, 2007], p. 66).
Sisters and brothers, if we are to have
faith at all, we must have trust and confidence in God. We must have patience
and be able to see through the dry times, the sparse soils, the apparently
wasted seed. It must have a heart full
of assurance that in the end, love wins.
We too must be wasteful, must be
profligate. We must open our hearts and
hands, and forgive, love, and broadcast the seeds of God’s love regardless of
what the immediate results look like. Our
hearts must be faithful because God is
faithful. God’s ultimate intention is to
love, to heal and to save. God’s Reign
has come. God is in charge, right here
and now. Simply because we cannot see
this at all times and places does not mean it is not so, or that somehow God is
stingy, picky, or capricious. Much of
what prevents the clear showing forth of God’s reign are those pesky weeds we
ourselves cultivate. “Rejoice for God’s
Reign has come” says Jesus, “change your thinking and get out of its way!”
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment