“Christ the Seed of Life”

July 10, 2005

Scripture Reading:   Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerrr

Seeds are amazing.  They are everywhere and abundant.  The oldest seeds I know about were found in the tomb of the Egyptian king Tut.  When they discovered his tomb they found some of the jars of supplies which were still sealed from the day 3,000 years ago when they laid him there.  One of these jars had wheat seeds in it.  People wondered, “Do seeds every get too old?”  So they planted some of these 3,000 year old wheat seeds just to see.  They sprouted and grew.  As you all know Egyptians believed that their king would live in an afterlife.  So they would fill these lavish tombs with supplies for the king when he resurrected on the other side of death.  Certainly the Kings body, at least,  never made it to the afterlife.  For all their attempts to preserve him, his bones and dried skin were still wrapped and embedded under the lavish gold mask still surrounded by various intricately carved and painted sarcophagus’s.  As much as the King never did come back to life, the seeds, however, did.  The 3,000 year old wheat seeds grew and flourished as if they had just been planted on the day of his death. 

Carrot seeds are the lightest seeds that I know of.  They are tiny and fragile and blow away easily.  They are not like the heavier bean and radish and corn seeds.  I read a story this week about a boy watching his father plant carrot seeds.  He watched the hoe handle make the burrow yet the seeds seemed too insubstantial like dust.  The boy said, “They won’t grow.  The dirt is too heavy.”  But, they did grow.  Soon enough supplying bushels of carrots. 

Seeds often just plant themselves.  The day care center I took Ian to when he was little never bothered to clean up the previous years Halloween pumpkins.  They carved them out on newspaper.   They left them on the newspaper, seeds an all, for weeks.  Frost came.  The pumpkins froze, thawed, shriveled, and sank into the newspaper.  Then with a shovel they tossed the whole mess behind the picket fence.  That summer, guess what?  Pumpkin plants were growing.  They did so well on their own that they used these pumpkins for the next year’s Halloween. 

Several years ago Dave and I took the boys on a hike in Tamworth New Hampshire, off of Route 113A.  The path we chose is called, “Bear Run.”  It was aptly named because although we didn’t see any live bears we saw plenty of bear dung.  After two hours of following bear dung on a path one gets philosophical about it.  It is dark, almost black, and most of all it is riddled with seeds.  Clearly the seeds had a thing going with the bear dung.  UPS step aside.  Over tens of thousands of years of evolution the sweet blueberries have call out to the black ursines, “Eat me!  Eat me!”   The bear gladly does so.  Then the seeds get carried and delivered throughout the forest, with a nice packaging of fertilizer to help the seeds along upon arrival.  Long after the sound of our footsteps disappear, and the only sound left is the blowing of the wind and the rustling of the leaves.  The seeds come alive, root themselves, and produce berries, lots of sweet purple berries to cry, “Eat me!  Eat me!”

Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth century English mystic known for her spiritual visions saw a vision of a seed, a hazelnut.  She says, In this vision God showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and it was round as a ball.  I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and though, “What may this be?”  And it was answered:  “It is all that is made.”  I marveled how it might last, for it seemed it might suddenly have sunk into nothing because of its littleness.  And I was answered in my understanding;  “It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it.”

Jesus talked about seeds in the scripture passage from Matthew that was read this morning.  These hard life producing nubs.  Some fell on the path and birds came and ate them.  Other seeds fell on rocky ground where they sprang up and quickly were scorched by the sun and withered away.  Other seeds fell among thorns which chocked them.  But some fell on good soil and brought forth a lot of grain.  They brought forth much more grain than anyone expected.  Some brought forth a hundredfold, some sixty and even thirty fold was stunning abundance. 

When Jesus talks about seeds he is talking about the Word of God.  He is not talking about “words” of God but the Word of God.  That is he is talking about the inner meaning and griping authority of the scriptures.  He is talking about the scriptures getting under your skin.  Have you ever read the scriptures or heard the scriptures and it grabbed you?  Has it ever seemed powerful and important and stirred something in you that was deep?  Has it ever seemed as if the scripture was looking directly at you, addressing you, like the eyes of an icon staring at no one else in the room but you.  Have you ever had that experience?

A young woman, Nadine, describes has.  Nadine was in her early twenties.  She was not raised in Christianity and knew nothing about it, really.  She was self absorbed, slightly flighty – typical American in some ways.  None the less, she describes her experience of the Word of God grabbing her to her friend Don.  This is Don Miller who wrote the book, Blue Like Jazz.    Her experience of the Word of God happened when she was reading the very same part of the scriptures where Jesus talks about sowing seeds.  She says to Don:

We would eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes and read the Bible, which is the only way to do it, if you ask me.  Don, the Bible is so good with chocolate.  I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn’t.  It is a chocolate thing.  We started reading through Matthew, and I thought it was all very interesting, you know.  And I found Jesus very disturbing very straightforward.  He wasn’t diplomatic, and yet I felt like if I met Him, he would really like me.  Don, I can’t explain how freeing that was, to realize that if I met Jesus, He would like me.  I never felt like that about some of the Christians on the radio.  I always thought if I met those people they would yell at me.  …

 

But, listen, this is the best part.  We got to the part of the book where Jesus started talking about the soil….”Soil?”  Yeah, There is a part in Matthew where Jesus talks about soil, and He is going to throw some seed on the soil and some of the seed is going to grow because the soil is good, and some of the seed isn’t because it fell on rock or the soil that wasn’t as good.  And when I heard that, Don, everything in me leaped up, and I wanted so bad to be the good soil.  That is all I wanted, to be the good soil! …”

 This is often how the Word of God feels when it is being implanted in someone’s soul like Nadine’s. 

It is very important that we understand that these seeds of God’s Word can grow in us.  Let me explain why.   Often people talk about receiving Jesus Christ by faith as Lord and savior.  If we do, they continue, we are forgiven of all our sins.  That for them is what Christianity is all about.  It certainly is admirable and does touch on an important part of Christianity. But, I have to admit to you, whenever I hear that concept it doesn’t go very far with me. 

I wonder, how have I really changed just because all my sins are forgiven?  Often it can seem like no more than installing a spell check program on my computer.  I am a terrible speller.  However, I can install software that is programmed to check my spelling, and I don’t have to worry about my spelling anymore.  For instance, “bycicle” is quickly and automatically switched to “bicycle.”  Is this what happens to my sins?  Is Jesus a kind of human software program that quickly erases and corrects my failures in the eyes of God?  The problem with the spell check is that I never bother learning to spell correctly.  I depend on it.  The problem with all my sins begin forgiven is that I don’t know if I really change or not?  In a famous prayer of confession it says, “Grant that we may serve You in newness of life, to the glory of God.”  Where exactly does the newness of life come in?

Some people say the way we are transformed is by the gratitude we feel when we are forgiven.  That, they say, makes us pass along grace and forgiveness, and reconciliation to the world.  This certainly can and does happen.  Surely it is important.  For instance, at the airport a teenager disembarks.  He has green hair spiked four inches high in all directions.  He has piercing on his eyebrows, nose, lip and his ears are perforated.   Tattoos crawl up his arms.  Who is going to meet this youth?  What will that person look like?  Indeed, a small plum woman in a dark blue jacket and plain sneakers with neatly combed gray hair runs up and kisses him.  “Joey!  Welcome home!”  The scary looking youth, smiles warmly, “Mom!”  He kisses her.  There is parable in the scriptures a lot like this.  And Joey, although as strange looking as he could possibly be, is loved and welcomed.  He in turn has the ability to love and welcome others. 

Forgiveness of our sins can be a powerful agent of change inside of us.  It can inspire a feeling of gratitude and love for others.  Yet, I wonder if that keeps us stuck in thinking about our sinfulness all the time so that we then can feel the great gratitude of grace.  Would it be like running 5 miles not to get in shape but to simply feel grateful when we stop that we don’t have to run anymore. 

This week the London transportation system was bombed.  Three bombs went off in their subways and one on a bus.  Of all the important statements that world leaders said, the one that struck me the most was that by London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone.  He said, I want to say one thing:  This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty or the powerful, it is not aimed at presidents or prime ministers, it was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners.  That isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted faith, it’s mass murder…”   Also, this week the ambassador from Egypt in Iraq was kidnapped and murdered.  The London bombing are claimed to be by an al Qaeda inspired group.  The murder in Iraq is claimed by Abu Musab al Zargawi and his gang.  Both are barbaric murderers. 

Often the news will flash Zarqawi’s picture on the screen.  At first he looks very different than we do.  He has a scraggly beard.  He is wearing a funny hat.  Bin Laden looks different than we do.  He too has a scraggly graying beard, and will wear a turbin and robes.  When they look like that it is easy for me to slip into the idea that they are completely different than us.  That thank goodness we are not like them.  But, what will get me is that often the news stations will flash a different picture up.  They will follow with a picture of Zarqawi, or bin Laden cleaned up.  They have their beards shaved and are in a business suite.  I suppose they do this in case they try to change how they look in order to avoid recognition.  These pictures always startle me because they look so much like middle class business men.  They look like Americans.   Instead of terrorists they look like they could just as easily be the manager of the Seven Eleven down the street, or an accountant at UNUM.  This then gets me wondering if the guy running the Seven Eleven is just as capable of mass murder only for different circumstances.  This then makes me wonder if I am capable of mass murder. 

Then there is the civil wars in the Congo.  How about those genocides going on there?  2.5 million killed I heard.  It makes the Tsunami look like a walk in the park.  Each of the eight tribes are at war with the other seven.  The people perpetrating these atrocities don’t look that different from us, if you put them in business suites and take the guns out of their hands.  Are we capable of genocide as well as they? 

My question is, is forgiveness of sins enough to change the human race to get us to quit our nasty habit of periodic mass murder and genocide?  We may be grateful for the forgiveness for a while, but then we revert back to our old habits?  I think there is more.  Forgiveness of sins, and our gratitude for that forgiveness, is perhaps the soil, well tilled soil that then makes us ready for something more.  This is the seed.  The seed of God’s Word that become implanted, and embedded in us, that starts growing in a God-like form.  Newness of life starts happening.  This is so even if we have been entombed for 3,000 years.  It is that thing that stirs to life inside of Nadine, that awakened her, and made her receptive and wanting to receive Christ.  That is the seed.  The theologian, Thomas Keating says, “The Holy Spirit inspired those who wrote the scripture.  The Holy Spirit is also in our hearts inspiring us and teaching us how to read and listen.  When these two inspirations fuse, we really understand what scripture is saying or at least for what God is saying to us at that moment.”    

Is the seed already in us but dormant until we hear the word of Christ?  Or is Christ the seed?  Probably in some mysterious way it is both.  Christ outside of us awakens the Christ within us.  Whichever, it is a seed inspired by the Word of God, it is the Spirit of Christ that grows in the soil of forgiveness.  Paul writes in his letter to the Romans,  For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.  (Rom 8:1)  As such we are slowly transformed.  We grow Christ roots and Christ trunks and Christ branches and Christ leaves.

The early Christian preacher St. Chrysostom, 4^th century A.D., had faith in seeds.  Even when tragic, inexplicable events happen, he had faith in the harvest that will eventually come insured by Divine Providence.  He says that for someone who does not farm and knew nothing about farming would watch the farmer carefully collect grain and shut it into a barn to protect it from damp.  Then he sees the same farmer take the grain and cast it to the winds, spearing the ground, maybe even in the mud, without worrying about the dampness.  Surely he would think the grain was completely ruined.  But, Chrysostom continues, the reproof comes only from ignorance and impatience.  At the end of the summer he would see the farmer harvest that same grain and be astonished at how it not only lived, but multiplied.  So we await our transformation by the seeds of the Word of God, remembering Christ who ploughs the earth of our souls.