The Rev. Astrid Storm

Homily for the Feast of St. Francis

Today we celebrate the feast day of St. Francis, the 13th century saint who did much more in his life than he’s usually remembered for.  He worked in a leper hospital.  He wrote hymns, including our hymn for today. He founded and administered what even in his lifetime became a large religious organization, the order of the Franciscans. He built and repaired small struggling churches. He even fought in the crusades before his conversion, an experience that inspired his message of peace and non-violence.

So there’s much more to St. Francis’ life than his love for animals, and yet these are the stories that move us the most - stories like how he once stopped along the road so he could teach a large flock of birds how to praise God.  How he called animals his brothers and sisters.  Perhaps the most famous one is the story of St. Francis and the wolf in which he persuaded a wolf living just outside the small town of Gubbio to stop harassing the townspeople, and, for their part, taught the people a few lessons about how to love animals.  He is also supposed to have staged the first live manger scene to help people better understand the Christmas story.  And finally, according to his earliest biographer, his donkey wept at his death.  

I’m not sure but what St. Francis himself might be a bit surprised that he’s remembered for these stories rather than for his other achievements.  But to me, that says as much about us as it does about him - us, and our need to hear someone telling us we’re not the center of things.  That there’s a whole world full of creatures that God delights in quite apart from us.  

Plenty of Christians over the years have talked as if we’re far more important to God than everything else that exists, and, even worse, that we can do what we want with God’s creation.  But, thankfully, every now and then saints like Francis come along and put us in our place - right alongside the birds, wolves, donkeys, dogs, cats, hamsters, squirrels, turtles, whatever other animals we might have here today - and all creatures great and small.  

So today we give thanks for them, and for the life of this gentle, humble soul, St. Francis.

The Parable of the Unjust Wages

Our Gospel reading for today continues what seems to be a series on some of Jesus’ more difficult parables.  This one is called the Parable of the Unjust Wages.  In it, a landowner hires some workers early in the morning and puts them to work.  A few hours later he hires more workers and puts them to work.  Then again, in the afternoon he hires still more, and they start working.  When it comes time to pay at the day’s end, he pays the late-comers first, giving them the same wages he gives to those who arrived early in the day.  So no matter how long you worked that day, your paycheck was the same.

The parable speaks for itself, but to get a better sense of how outrageous this is, I came up with some modern-day takes on it:  the colleague who comes onto a project late but gets the same amount of credit and bragging rights on his resume as those who worked on it from the start.  The co-worker who receives the same pay but doesn’t have the degree (or graduate school debt) that you have.  The woman who works twice as hard as her male colleague but whose paycheck is the same.  These are ways this parable might play out today, and when you think about it in contemporary terms like this, you see why it got his hearers so riled up.  In fact, in a lecture on this parable that I listened to this week, the lecturer guessed that this parable is what got Jesus killed.

I’ve heard several sermons over the years trying to mute the parable.  For instance, maybe Jesus was talking strictly about how things work in heaven, not on earth.   Or perhaps God, like the master in this parable, might favor generosity over justice, but that’s not how we’re supposed to structure our work places or societies.  I’m not sure those are distinctions Jesus would have drawn, but in any case, I’d like to put to one side the question of how we relate this parable to the real world (in that sense, at least) and focus instead on a couple other, simpler, lessons it has to teach us. 

The first about coveting and contentment.  I’ve never read this in the context of a recession before, but doing so brought to mind some of the things people were saying when it all started in 2008.  Bear in mind, this was long before we knew how terrible this recession was going to be.  Long before we’d heard the word “double-dip” in connection with it.  Long before we or at least someone we knew lost a job.  Long before whole countries started going into default.  Long before all this, some of us more naive folks were sort of romantic about the recession because we thought of it as way to get away from the pressures of keeping up with our neighbors, or a chance to scale back and focus on what really matters.
In particular, I remember one friend of mine, a freelance writer who was forever complaining about her finances and how she couldn’t ever go out or do anything fun, saying how glad she was that everyone else would now have to live more like she’s always had to live.  

Comments like that really made me aware of how much our contentment and sense of what is enough is based on what others have, rather than on our actual needs.   We all know it’s a hard impulse to fight, the impulse to compare ourselves with others and to let their possessions dictate our needs.  And maybe something a little like that is going on in this parable.  Each person receives his wages at the day’s end, and nowhere does the parable say that the first worker to arrive received a meager or insufficient wage.  As far as we know, he wasn’t upset because he couldn’t go home and feed his family or pay his bills; he was upset because his neighbor who worked fewer hours got the same thing.  He began to compare and to covet, and that’s where his problems started, as they often do with us.  Again, this parable may be about much more than that, but that’s an aspect of it that I can understand and relate to.  

Another lesson the parable might have to teach is about how God values each one of us equally, at whatever stage we are on our Christian journey.  Which may be a good transition into the baptism of little Chloe Jean.  Like the workers who started out early in the morning, some among us have been following Christ for eighty or ninety years (Teresa and Jean); others fifty, others twenty; and others, like little Chloe, are just setting out.  But no matter how early or late, long ago or recently, we began to love him, the wages of God’s love in return are the same.   And those wages are surely enough - and more than enough - for us.  Amen. 

Reflections on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11

I’m going to start today’s sermon by doing something I’ve been hesitant to do in previous commemorations of 9/11 that I’ve been a part of, and that is, share what I was doing that day. 

The hesitancy comes from the fact that I wasn’t even in this area at the time, and that my story is probably the least interesting in the room.  In 2001, I had just graduated from Divinity School and was working my first job at a church out in Ohio to fulfill a 2-year commitment to my home diocese.  On the morning of 9/11, I showed up at work and found out what had happened from the church secretary.  Then, like much of the country, we spent the morning glued to the television watching events unfold. 

In the early evening, we did a church service for the community, and then, after that, I drove home, picked up my college friend who lived nearby, and not knowing what else to do, we drove down to a place in Columbus where we had heard they were collecting donations for the victims’ families.  The “collection center” was a bunch of strangers with big industrial sized buckets taking money from people out their car windows – just the sort of thing that, any other day, you might be rightly suspicious of.  But I guess it was worth the risk to us just to feel like we weren’t completely helpless.

Finally, late that evening and after some more television, my friend Jessica and I took a walk around our neighborhood.  This next part is a memory I think I repressed until recently, not only because it’s a bit cheesy, but also because it’s illegal.  We came across a stretch of fairly newly poured wet sidewalk, and something in me just had to write in it.  So I knelt down and, with my finger, carved out the words “Sept. 11, 2001 – Never forget.”

It’s strange to think back to what that meant to me at that time.  Before long, it would become a sort of call to revenge - a reminder to keep the anger alive so we could get back at our enemies.  But on that first evening before our reactions were organized and interpreted and our various narratives to help us explain the event took shape,  Remember 9/11 meant something more like Remember the compassion and connectedness inspired by our feeling of vulnerability that day.

I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first let’s look at our Gospel reading.  Peter here asks Jesus how many times he has to forgive his brother.  He suggests seven times, probably having in mind an Old Testament command to forgive three times, and figuring he was being pretty generous.  But Jesus, not impressed with Peter’s generosity, says you have to forgive not seven but seventy seven OR, in many translations (because the original Greek isn’t clear) seventy times seven times – or, in other words, so many times it’s difficult to count them.  In his usual, provocative way when talking about things like love or humility or forgiveness, Jesus is being more demanding that seems humanly possible.

It’s a hard reading for a day like today.  And in fact the bishop of New York gave us the option of using different readings – these readings, if you can believe it, were set down in 1994, long before anyone knew they would fall on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.  I can maybe see where the OT text where all the Egyptians are wiped out is one we might just as well skip.  For that matter, I can see where this harsh text on forgiving is one we might happily skip on a day like today.  But then again, you don’t pick and choose the context in which you read passages on forgiveness, and something tells me that Jesus wouldn’t have softened his message even – and especially – today.  So I decided to let it stand.

Plus it got me thinking about this saying that you hear a lot: forgive and forget.  You know, of all Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness, both here and elsewhere, you never hear him say to forget after you’ve forgiven.  In fact, quite the contrary.  In the Bible, people are often called to remember times when they’ve been hurt and vulnerable.  Remember when you were slaves in Egypt.  Remember when you were lost in the wilderness. Remember when Jerusalem fell and you had no homeland. Remember, as we do each week when we celebrate Communion, when Christ was betrayed and crucified and sealed up in a tomb.

In both our readings and our rituals, we’re forever remembering terrible events.  But of course the purpose of all this remembering isn’t to stoke our anger or get revenge, but to make us better people – the kind of people we are after major tragedies, when we’re most fragile and also most generous.

I spent some time this week listening to radio interviews with New Yorkers looking back on that day, and I was struck by how many of them spoke about the overwhelming generosity of those days immediately following the attacks, and, at the same time, wondered where all that goodwill had gone in the decade since.  We’ve done a lot of remembering as a culture this past decade, but maybe not the kind that makes us more compassionate.  So, as we grapple with what it means to forgive on a day like today, let’s also remember what happened so that we might leave here better people – the people we were that day ten years ago.

If Your Neighbor Hurts You

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Some Sundays I preach on a particular reading because I like it.  Other Sundays, I preach on it because I don’t like it, and - I’m sorry to say - today’s Gospel reading falls in that last category.  
This passage, in which Jesus tells his disciples how to deal with problem people in the church, is the Biblical basis for the practice of excommunication.  In it, Jesus explains that if you have a grudge against a brother or sister in the church, you are to go directly to him or her and try to reconcile.  If that doesn’t work, you take your complaint to two or three other church members, and you all approach the offender.  If that doesn’t work, then you let the whole church in on it.  And finally, if that doesn’t work, then the person becomes “as a Gentile and sinner” - that is, he is cast outside the fold. 

Before commenting further, I feel it’s worth mentioning that there’s some question whether Jesus even said these words - first, because it’s only in one of the four Gospels, Matthew, and whenever a saying of Jesus appears in only one Gospel, it’s fair to wonder whether this was something he said (or at least said often enough to be remembered).  Also, because Jesus himself hung out with tax collectors, prostitutes, Gentiles and sinners of all sorts, so it seems unlikely that he would say that those who are cast out of the church will be like Gentiles and sinners, whom he was eager to include.  And finally, because Jesus probably didn’t have in mind the creation of the Christian church in the way it’s described in this passage, and so neither would he have had in mind setting down rules for it to live by.  All that would come later, after his death, resurrection, and ascension. 

So, it could be that the Gospel writer Matthew or someone else added these instructions.  Or it could be that Jesus said something like it, but in a slightly different way or a different context - we don’t really know.  In any case, as Episcopalians, we’re probably a bit too eager to just remove this passage from Jesus’ mouth.   Many of us, myself included, came to the Episcopal Church to escape more judgmental traditions, and we like the latitude of belief and the inclusiveness this church provides.  So I thought that, rather than dismiss it or list all the reasons I don’t like this passage, it might be more challenging - and productive - to consider what in it could be useful, even if we don’t make it a matter of church policy.  

The first thing I thought of was that it reminds us that conflict will happen in a community of people, even the church.  I can’t even count the conversations I’ve had with people who are incredulous that someone in their own church could do such-and-such.  It’s not that we don’t know better; it’s just that, without really thinking, we just set the church up to be that place without conflict that we long for.  And when it’s not that place, our disappointment and anger are that much greater.  If Jesus did say these words in connection with the emerging Christian community, it’s comforting that he knew it wasn’t going to be without its conflicts.  

Another good lesson in this passage is that it encourages direct communication with someone who has hurt you in some way.  One of the worst things in any community, and especially the church, is when we complain about someone to everyone but that person.  What I like about this procedure is that it assumes people have dignity, and that they shouldn’t be gossiped about as if they didn’t.  

Connected to that, the practice of directly approaching someone has the added advantage of forcing us to really think about whether the matter is all that serious in the first place.  If we’re too embarrassed to say to another what bothers us, maybe our taking offense is more about us than about that other person.  But we tend not to step back and really reflect on that possibility if we just spout our complaints to a third party.

On this subject of directly approaching someone, I also wanted to briefly mention an interesting version of this passage by the poet Willis Barnstone in his translation of the New Testament.  Instead of saying “If your neighbor sins against you go and tell him his sin (or fault),” Barnstone translates it: “If your neighbor hurts you, go and tell him of your hurt.”   His project in his translation was to get closer to the Jewish context in which the events of the New Testament occurred, and I think for him the language of “sin” has taken on such freight in the Christian tradition that removing it from this passage brings it back to its real purpose: learning how not to hurt each other.  So, in his view, trying to remove sin from a community isn’t about condemning a fixed set of behaviors to make a community pure, but it’s about learning not to hurt each other.  I like that emphasis a lot more, and it makes me less apt to ignore this passage.

Which leads me to a final lesson that I like here: that our wrongdoing isn’t just between us and God; it’s between us and a community.  Next time we consider doing something hurtful, it’s important to really think about how it will affect those around us.  

So there is a lot of wisdom in this passage.   And ultimately I’d just like to say that I’m touched by Jesus’ emphasis on the community - as I often remark on here at St. Nick’s.  Again, we don’t know what kind of community he thought would be gathered in his name, but he knew it wouldn’t be perfect.  And as long as we strive to honor and love each other, his promise is that he will be with us.

And Pharaoh Knew Not Joseph

The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost - August 21, 2011

This week’s Old Testament reading brings us to the second book of the Bible, the book of Exodus.  The first book, Genesis, left off when Joseph died.  Joseph (you may recall) was the last of the patriarchs who was sold into slavery by his brothers but then went on to become the manager of Pharaoh’s household and eventually brought his whole family from Canaan to Egypt where they could live a better life.  And the book of Exodus follows that family as they grow into a whole nation (the nation of Israel), become slaves of Egypt, and are eventually liberated by Moses.

Our passage for today takes place probably about four centuries after Joseph and his brothers died, and it begins with this wonderful line that should only ever be said in the King James version: “And Pharoah knew not Joseph.”  Meaning that this new Pharaoh had no loyalties to the descendents of Joseph, whom he now used as slaves.

You know, you could wring several sermons from that line alone: “And Pharaoh knew not Joseph.”  It reminds us how quickly fortunes can change, or how large-scale political decisions are often influenced by ordinary human relationships, with their loyalties, vendettas, loves, and so on.  These many years later, there was no Joseph to drink a glass of wine of an evening with Pharaoh, so Pharaoh ceased to care about Joseph’s people and made them his slaves.

But back to our story.  We learn in it that the Israelites are reproducing prodigiously, and Pharaoh wants to put a stop to this so they don’t get so powerful they can revolt.  So first, he summons the Israelites’ midwives, and tells them to kill all the sons that they help deliver (to which I want to say, whatever political advisor came up with that idea should have been fired!).  Of course, the midwives don’t do what Pharaoh asks, because – as they claim – the Israelite women are so hearty they give birth before the midwives can reach them.  Even as a kid I remember thinking this Pharaoh was pretty dumb for buying that line.

So then he concocts another plan: if the midwives won’t kill the Israelites’ infant sons, then he’ll give that job to his own people – again, probably not the smartest plan.  But this doesn’t seem to go anywhere, either.

Meanwhile, an Israelite woman gives birth to a son whom she manages to hide for three months. (Now, this to me is proof that the Egyptians couldn’t be trying too hard to follow Pharaoh’s orders to kill the Israelites’ infant sons, because I can tell you first hand that you CAN’T hide a newborn very easily.)  But, after three months of hiding him, his mother puts the baby in the Nile in a basket, and prays for the best.  

Soon, none other than Pharaoh’s own daughter finds the baby.  So she draws him out of the water (the name “Moses” means to “draw out” as the story tells us), finds a Hebrew midwife to finish nursing him, and then raises him as an Egyptian prince.

It’s such a horrific and wonderful story - both at the same time. On one level, you have this terrible, bloodthirsty leader trying to exterminate a people in the worst possible way, by killing their infant sons.   On another level, though, you have ordinary people who seem to be paying barely any attention to him.  Some of them just ignore him.  Others, like his very own daughter, go further, actually rescuing and rearing the Israelites’ sons.

To me, this is a story about the goodness of ordinary people, even when their leaders have turned corrupt.  Our political leaders aren’t exactly Pharaohs, but sometimes today my faith in humanity comes from the fact that most of us tune them out a lot of the time.

Taking a few more liberties with the story, it could also be about how ordinary, face-to-face interactions can transcend the differences that might otherwise come between us, like ethnic, religious, or political differences.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to an interview on the program “Speaking of Faith,” which was part of this “Civil Conversations Project” they’re doing.  Krista Tippet was interviewing the Ghanian-British-American philosopher Anthony Appiah, and a point he kept returning to is that huge ethnic or religious differences that divide us and fuel so much evil in the world look a whole lot different when we actually get to know the people who hold them.  One thing he said struck me:

“Sometimes [he said] people think that the only way to deal with these big differences between religions around moral questions is to kind of face up to the difference directly, but I think often sidling up to it is better.  And sidling up can be done by not facing Islam, but facing Layla, and Achmed and Mohammed, with whom you don’t talk about religion most of the time; you talk about soccer.  You talk about rock music.”

As I imagine it, by the time Pharaoh came along with his terrible plan, most of those Israelites and Egyptians had too much in common – soccer, music, or, in the case of Pharaoh’s daughter, the common experience of mothering a beautiful baby – to take his orders seriously. 

I guess, to close, I come back to that line I like so much: “And Pharaoh knew not Joseph,” and am reminded that it’s about putting a face on the enemy.  And once we do that, suddenly they’re no longer an enemy, but a friend.   May God give us the strength to understand our enemies, and make them our friends. 

Leap … Or Keep on Rowing?

Well, today’s choice between the Old Testament and the New Testament readings was a little easier than usual, because I don’t think I need to tell you that it’s wrong to throw your brother in a pit and then sell him into slavery like Joseph’s brothers did to him.  So we’re going with our Gospel reading about Jesus and Peter walking on the water - a good story for a rainy summer Sunday.

I hardly need to summarize this story, it’s so familiar.  In the oldest version of it, from Mark’s Gospel, Jesus sends the disciples out on their own in the boat to cross the Sea of Galilee while he stays behind to pray.  Somewhere in the middle of the night, a storm rushes in and they struggle to stay afloat.  Then Jesus walks toward them on the water and enters their boat, upon which the storm stops and everyone and everything is calm.

Matthew’s account adds one more piece to the story - and it’s the piece that you can hardly imagine the story without.   When the disciples see Jesus out on the water, rather than just waiting for him to reach them like they do in Mark’s account, Peter asks Jesus to call him, Peter, out of the boat so that he can walk on the water, too.  So Jesus summons Peter, Peter steps out of the boat, he begins to sink, and Jesus rescues him.  Only then do they enter the boat, and the storm stills.

Matthew might have put Peter into this story because, much more than the other three Gospel writers, he’s interested in Peter’s role as the leader of the twelve disciples (and Peter, of course, eventually comes to be thought of as the first pope or leader of the Western church - something Matthew could never have had in mind in 80 AD, but he did envision Peter in some sort of leadership role).  What’s interesting to me about this is that you would expect Matthew’s Gospel to present Peter in only the best light, given his leadership role; but he doesn’t.  Peter is ambiguous.  Sometimes he’s heroic, other times a little proud and impulsive.   And when we come to this story, it’s not entirely clear which view of Peter we’re supposed to take.

So, for instance, the traditional way of reading this story views Peter as doing something heroic when he stepped out of the boat.  We’ve all heard this version before: how it’s a story about taking risks and accepting challenges, and, once you do jump out of the boat, not letting your fears of failure sink you.  That’s the sort of nothing ventured, nothing gained version, and it’s still probably my favorite, since I think most of us take far too few risks on behalf of our faith.

But you could also see Peter’s jump out of the boat as something less than heroic.  For instance, maybe Peter was trying to stand out above the others by leaping out of the boat rather than staying in it and rowing with the others.   Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to try to distinguish yourself and stand out, whereas the hardest work in life is to keep on faithfully and quietly rowing right alongside everyone else, even if that’s not very glamorous or memorable.

Thinking about this brought to mind that passage from Ecclesiasticus that we read some years on All Saints’ Sunday (and I’m sure you’ll recognize it):  ”Let us sing the praises of famous men …/ [that] were honored in their generations, / and were the pride of their times. / Some of them have left behind a name, / so that others declare their praise. / But of others there is no memory; / they have perished as though they had never existed; / they have become as though they had never been born, / they and their children after them. / But these also were godly men, / whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten; / their offspring will continue forever, / and their glory will not be blotted out.”

There were eleven others in the boat that day rowing.  Maybe they are the real unacknowledged heroes of this story, not Peter.  And maybe the best thing we can give to the world and to our offspring is all those quiet, simple acts that go mostly forgotten.

Another less-than-glowing view of Peter might say that, by jumping out of the boat and trying to walk on water, he was trying to do what only God could do.   A few years ago I read somewhere (and, as always, I forgot the source) that the only person who didn’t struggled with a Messiah complex was the Messiah himself.  That’s really profound when you think about it.  So often we hold ourselves to some standard of perfection that’s more worthy of God than the flawed human beings we are.  There’s wisdom in leaving the walking on water to God, and in giving ourselves some grace to be less than perfect.

In the end,  you could probably wrestle all day about which of these two ways of viewing Peter is best supported by the context and Matthew’s Gospel and all that; but maybe it’s meant to be read both ways.  Sometimes we’re called to step out of the boat - not to walk on water, maybe, but to take risks in the name of faith - but other times stepping out of the boat might be more a matter of pride, overreaching, or holding ourselves to an impossible standard than it is an act of faith, in which case the best thing to do is just to stay put.

May God give us the wisdom and discernment to know when to keeping on rowing, and when to leap.

And Leah’s Eyes Were Lovely

Sixth Sunday After Pentecost - July 24, 2011

As of today, we are now about halfway through our several readings from Genesis on the life of Jacob, stories that have always been among my favorite in the Old Testament - especially this one.  In this reading, Jacob meets and marries his two wives, Rachel and Leah.  But how he gets there is rather unusual.  While traveling in the country of his uncle Laban, Jacob meets and instantly falls in love with his beautiful cousin, Rachel.  So he and Laban strike a deal where Jacob agrees to work for seven years, in exchange for which he’ll be given Rachel as his wife.

The seven years (as the story says) fly by, and the wedding night arrives.  Only instead of giving him Rachel, Laban tricks Jacob by giving him his older daughter Leah.  Somehow Jacob doesn’t figure out it’s the wrong woman until morning, and so he and Laban soon strike another deal where he’ll work an additional seven years for Rachel, who becomes his second wife.

Actually, after our reading, Jacob adds two more women – not officially wives – to his retinue of women, and between the four women they have twelve sons who become the twelve tribes of Israel (which we hear a lot about in the OT, and which become the basis for the twelve disciples in the NT).

Anyway, this story was obviously puzzling for me as a kid – and I’m sure was most vexing for my Sunday School teachers.  For instance, we were taught in church that marriage was between one man and one woman and that was how God ordained it from the beginning of time; and yet here you have Jacob, the very father of the twelve tribes of Israel, with two wives and two concubines, as well.

I also remember being disgusted at twelve years old that Jacob fell in love with and married his cousins, Rachel and Leah.  In fact, I distinctly remember asking my Sunday school teacher, Mr. Pendleton, about that, and his response was that there weren’t very many options in those days.  (God bless all Sunday school teachers!)  

But of course the biggest thing about this story that stumped my child’s mind was Laban’s trick.  I didn’t really understand what went on at a wedding night, but I still knew it was pretty far-fetched to claim you didn’t even notice you were with the wrong person until the next morning.

But details, details.   And once you manage to get past some of these oddities of the story, there are some good lessons to be found here.  In this case, the most famous one is that this is a story about how we treat others.  Two scenes before this one, Jacob had stolen his older brother’s birthright or inheritance by tricking their blind father into giving it to him, instead of his brother.  And so what happens here is Jacob’s comeuppance. 

If you were reading this in the context of the Bible, you would read these stories one after the other. And so you’d get that Laban his uncle deceives Jacob in much the same way he deceived his brother, and also that Laban rights Jacob’s wrong by putting the eldest daughter before the youngest – the very opposite of what Jacob did when he put himself before his brother Esau.  If you didn’t get that, the two stories contain a lot of the same words and phrases, to remind you that they belong together.  There are even some versions of it in the Jewish tradition where Leah actually scolds Jacob the morning after the wedding for what he did back home to his brother Esau.  As if waking up with the wrong woman weren’t bad enough, he then has to sit through a long sermon.

So one point this story makes is that how we treat others is how we can expect to be treated in return, as Christ would later express in the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have done to you.

Another lesson that’s often taken from this story is about accepting things and people as they are, not as we wish they were.  This is a slightly more creative reading, but it sees Rachel and a Leah as if two sides of the same person: Rachel is the person we think we’re getting; but Leah is the reality - the person we wake up beside the next morning. That person who isn’t quite what we thought we were getting can be a spouse – and usually is, as Andrew can tell you – but it can also be a friend, a family member, a job, or a church – even God.  Anything or anyone in life that we’ve built expectations around, only to have them turn out differently.

And when we get to that place, there are two ways forward suggested in the story.  The first comes in the words of Laban to Jacob, who tells him to stick around another seven years.  That is, be patient, because eventually expectation and reality will meet.

The other way forward when reality confounds us is to train ourselves to see the beauty in it.  I read a wonderful homily this week where the preacher talked about the ambiguous description of Leah’s eyes in this story.  Our passage here calls them “lovely,” but the fact is, nobody knows what the Hebrew word describing her eyes really means.  It could mean lovely, but, based on closely related words in the Hebrew Bible, it could also mean “weak” or even “ugly.” 

To some extent, it’s our choice how we see the people and circumstances in our life.  We can say they’re weak or ugly when they don’t turn out how we want, but we can also say they’re lovely.  And to be able to see what life really gives us as beautiful is, I think, one of the challenges and triumphs of the Christian life.

In fact, when you think about it, Christianity is kind of built upon this notion.  Christ himself disappointed many people who had much higher, loftier expectations of what a Savior was supposed to be.  And when he didn’t turn out how they wanted, many shrugged him off as weak and never looked back.  But a small band of disciples waited it out, until they saw that what Jesus brought to the world not as ugly or weak, but lovely – and ultimately far more powerful than even their highest expectations

But back to our story. “Leah’s eyes were lovely.”  Next time things don’t turn out quite like you wanted, remember that line, and look again.

Homily on the Parable of the Sower

July 10, 2011 - The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Today, right in sync with summer, we begin three agricultural parables from Matthew’s Gospel – Jesus’ first parables.  We’ll see as we progress that these parables, even while they deal with pastoral images, aren’t always very pleasant.  But then, I guess any farmer could tell you that what goes on in the fields isn’t always very pleasant, either.

This week, though, we’re off to a pretty gentle start with the parable of the Sower.  In it, a sower goes out to sow seeds.  Some seeds fall on a path, and birds come along and eat them up.  Others fall on rocky ground, spring up but then quickly die.  Still others fall among thorns and are choked.  But then some fall on fertile ground, and grow up to yield a rich harvest.

When the parable is done, our passage skips over some verses, bringing us to the second part of our reading: the interpretation of the parable.  So, the seeds that fall on the path are like those who hear Christ’s teachings but don’t understand them and so nothing comes of them.  The seeds that spring up quickly on rocky ground but then die are like those who are enthusiastic at first, but then wither away once the real work of nurturing the plant begins. The seeds that fall among thorns are like those who are concerned with other things that choke out the desire to follow Christ’s teachings.  And finally, the seeds that fall on fertile ground are those who are receptive to the message and continue to grow and nurture it as time goes on.

It’s very rare for Jesus to have interpreted a parable like this.  Usually his parables are left open-ended, and even a little confusing.  In fact, in our missing verses, the disciples gripe that Jesus isn’t saying things clearly enough; that people aren’t used to religious instruction that puts so much of a burden on the hearer and can’t he just give them what they want?  And so on. 

So, it could be that Jesus either responds to their complaint by interpreting the parable, or someone else a bit later on, agreeing with the disciples’ complaint, added this interpretation to make the parable a little easier to understand.

We don’t know.  But in any case, while I like the fact that parables are often deliberately obscure to challenge us, I also really like the interpretation given here – that those who hear God’s teachings are like different kinds of soil, sometimes fertile and receptive to those teachings, sometimes not.

Of course, you’ve always had people in our tradition who have interpreted this to mean that these different soils are different groups of people.  And such people always, of course, identify their own group with the fertile soil and everyone else as the rocky or shallow soil.  But perhaps a more honest way to read it is that, at various times in our lives or maybe all at once, each of us is those different types of soil: sometimes a bit rocky, thorny, or shallow, but also sometimes rich and fertile and ready for God to grow in us.

I’m a member of the Common Ground Farm down the road, which has made me slightly (stress:slightly) more aware of the way soil works.  For instance, I had never really thought about how much soil can change.  Often, you don’t just have bad soil over here and good soil over there, but bad soil can become good soil and vice versa.

So, sometimes soil that won’t grow anything just needs to rest.  The farm had to reduce its output this year and next because they had a whole field that was too spent to produce food.  So now when I go to pick up my food, the field that just last year we were picking food from is lying there, resting for a few years until it’s ready to grow food again. There’s a nice spiritual lesson in that about the importance of sometimes doing nothing so we can be of use to God and others.

To be more fertile, soil can also be plowed up and turned over and mixed with the richer soil down deep.  Again, there’s a nice spiritual lesson in this: that to be fertile soil for God’s teachings to take root, sometimes we have to be willing to be broken up and turned over, even when it hurts.

There are probably plenty other examples that the more experienced gardeners among us could point out, but these couple of examples remind us that, whatever kind of soil you feel like you are now, it’s not intractably what you are; it can and will change. 

The growing season is now well underway, but it’s never too late to get our soil ready for God’s love to grow in us - 30, 60, maybe even 100 fold.