Proper 10, Year A: The Four Soils

 A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark
Proper 10, Year A
The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

I remember when we first moved here to Utah my parents came for a visit and wanted to help tame our overgrown and overplanted garden. The previous owner had been living in Chicago for three years and none of the beds had been tended. Maintenance consisted of cutting the grass, and that was about it. So we went cheerily off to Home Depot and got spades, weeding tools, pitchforks, gardening gloves--everything you could possibly need to get things looking shipshape. I took my stance by the back fence, raised my pitchfork over my head like some Weekend Viking Warrior and brought it down with a mighty swipe. The tines didn’t sink one inch into the soil and all I had to show for my efforts was a cloud of greyish dust and some loose fillings. The beds had been left untended, unwatered,  and neglected for so long that they were hard as concrete. So we had to do all sorts of work to bring the soil back. Compost, peat moss, regular watering and turning the soil. Slowly, the beds started to loosen up into something less concrete-like. Slowly we could get a shovel into the ground. And eventually we were able to weed, and trim, and plant. But it took a lot of hard work to even get to that point. 

In today’s Gospel we encounter the parable of the Sower--Jesus’ teaching on nature of the Kingdom of God. Jesus gives us a picture of four different types of soil--the path where birds eat up the seed, rocky ground where there isn’t much soil for the seeds to put down roots, thorny patches where the cares of the world choke out the seeds, and the good soil that brings forth grain. One way to understand  these four different types of soil is that they represent or are symbolic of varying degrees of receptivity, openness, and co-operation with grace. If there’s one thing that God the Father as sower does it’s to cast the seed far and wide--there’s no one left out, no soil that doesn’t have access to the seed. This is what Episcopal priest and food critic Robert Farrar Capon calls the small “c” catholicity (universality, inclusivity) of the picture of the kingdom that Jesus is trying to unfold for his first listeners and for us. Just like the invitation to the wedding banquet that goes out to everyone, the seed here is cast indiscriminately--without any cold calculus of who’s in and who’s out; without any notion of deserving and undeserving, of those who merit a seed and those who need to work a little harder to earn it.

This would have been deeply disturbing for the people around Jesus who heard this for the first time. They come to this story with a deeply entrenched idea that somehow Jesus as Messiah and Israel as God’s chosen people is an exclusive, elite club. Suddenly Jesus comes along and starts shaking things up. He starts to break down that exclusivist picture of the Kingdom of God and replaces it with one that is all-inclusive, and literally without boundary--paths with birds, rocky ground, thistle patches, good soil, the invitation to the Kingdom, the love of God, goes out to all without exception.

But there remains a difference in the fruitfulness of the different types of soil, doesn’t there? There’s a difference between seeds that get plucked up by birds (like the sparrows do the grass seed in my backyard) and seeds that actually manifest the fruitfulness, love, and transformative justice and reconciliation that is the Kingdom of God. And here is where my metaphor of reclaiming our concrete garden only goes so far, because in that metaphor the way to get seeds to sprout is to put in a lot of back-breaking effort and toil. In the spiritual life, it’s a little different. In the spiritual life it’s more about letting ourselves be worked upon by grace. Accepting our acceptance as Paul Tillich says, letting ourselves be loved into loving, a matter of willingness rather than willfulness.

That’s why Mary, seated at the feet of Jesus--open, attentive, receptive and listening to the one thing necessary--is our icon for discipleship. She’s the perfect embodiment of letting grace work on the hardpan of our souls. Mary’s little mustard seed of a “yes”--”Let it be with me according to your word”--to the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation is another example. It’s that gentle, effortless effort of consenting to God’s presence and action in our lives that starts to loosen the hardpan of our lives and nudge us into more fruitful, God-bearing cooperation with grace. 

One caution is not to think of the four types of soil shouldn’t be understood in an overly linear manner. They describe different aspects of each of us. And at different times of our lives, different seasons of the spiritual life, we find ourselves being made aware of the different soils that make us up. The point is not to pretend that the hardpan of prejudice, the hardpan of our habitual patterning inherited from teachers, parents and nation doesn’t exist. We have to embrace that hardpan, love it, have compassion for it. Or better, we need to learn to see that the hardpan is already embraced and loved for it to shift, change, and transfigure. The last thing we want to get into in the spiritual life is to divide ourselves against ourselves, to decide that there are good bits and bad bits, parts we need to split off, exclude, or deny and others we want to hold up for others to see. God loves every part of ourselves. God is the one “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid.”

Something very interesting happens, though, when we broaden our perspective and don’t simply see our lives as a kind of assembly line that moves us from rocky ground to rich soil. We develop a kind of clear-sighted honesty about ourselves. We’re grounded, earthy, and humble--a little less likely to decide we’ve reached the end of the line when there’s a big patch of hardpan causing a lot of harm to self and others. If we take that more wholistic view--this is me, this, too, is me--what we’re actually doing is allowing receptivity to God’s grace to do its transformative work. It’s not so much about becoming perfect soil under our own steam, as it is about acknowledging the full range of our complicated, messy, humanness warts and all. It’s in that acknowledgment of what Zorba the Greek calls the “whole catastrophe,” that change takes place. Not by trying to fix ourselves in a frenzy of self-improvement, but by letting ourselves be as we are, by letting everything (nothing left out) be held in love.

We were talking in Bible Study the other week about different dimensions of what it means to live a life of radical welcome. There’s the outward dimension, of course, of welcoming the stranger, opening our doors to those who might not have felt invited, or connected to our community. This is important work and programs like TEC’s Invite, Welcome, Connect can provide us with models and blueprints for how our parishes might become places of welcome for all people. But there’s another dimension to this welcome, a more interior dimension. And that’s where we learn to welcome those parts of ourselves that we’d rather not notice, or that we mistakenly think we’ve successfully hidden away from God and other people. 

Paradoxically, it’s in recognizing, naming, going towards and welcoming those bits of ourselves that we tried to bury or split off with love, that starts to change them. In welcoming all aspects of ourselves--our anger, resentment, fear, worry, anxiety--and not just the pretty parts, we come to taste the peace that passes understanding. We come to know in our bones that nothing can separate us from the love of God. We come to know that hardpan and rich soil aren’t two totally different things. That sometimes the places where we’re stuck, where the ground seems impossibly hard and unworkable, actually provide us with the greatest opportunities to open to grace, to heal so that we can be that healing balm for others. Sometimes the darkness, our woundedness, is exactly the place where grace can do it’s most transfiguring work.

There will be times in our lives where we’re walking over rocky ground and stubbing our toes at every turn. There will be times when all of our hard work vanishes like birds pecking away at newly sown seed. There will be times where the cares of the world--power, prestige, possessions--so dominate and constrict our perceptions that it’s hard a catch a glimpse of the Kingdom at all. That’s called being human. That’s why it’s called the spiritual journey. The last thing we should do is straight-jacket ourselves, or others into some idealized picture of who we think we should be and who we think others should be--judging ourselves and others for their so-called progress or lack of it. Letting ourselves just be ourselves in a spirit of gratitude for what arises gradually blossoms into our being able to let others be themselves, too. Whether they’re hardpan, thistle patches, or rich deep soil we let them be. And letting them be, just as they are without trying to fix or fiddle, is just another word for love.