Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Elise Feyerherm, July 16th, 2023

In 1933, during the Great Depression, a young Catholic convert named Dorothy Day created the Catholic Worker movement, a group founded on the principles of common life and worship, serving the poorest of the poor, and working toward a more just society. From the beginning they ran bread lines and soup kitchens and shared their communal houses with the homeless. In the 1940s and 50s they were serving close to half a million meals every year at just one of their houses of hospitality. Others soon followed their lead.

Dorothy Day tells of receiving a letter from someone trying to live out the principles of love: “I took a gentleman seemingly in need of spiritual and temporal guidance into my home on a Sunday afternoon. Let him have a nap on my bed, went through the want ads with him, made coffee and sandwiches for him, and when he left, I found my wallet had gone also.”

So much of what we do in this world for the sake of love and justice seems not to make much difference. Food distributed at the food pantry, and people just keep coming back, because the system just makes it too hard for them to make it on their own. A kind word to a stranger can’t heal that person’s wounded soul. Loose change for someone begging on the street might end up being used for drugs or cheap whiskey. My decision to buy my peanut butter and mayonnaise in glass jars instead of plastic may have very little impact, when fossil fuel corporations and politicians continue to stonewall the transition to renewable energy. We never know what happens to most of the seeds we sow in the world.

Dorothy Day reflected on that letter she received about the man who stole from the person trying to help him: “We are sowing the seed of love, and we are not living in the harvest time. We must love to the point of folly, and we are indeed fools, as Our Lord Himself was who died for such a one as this. We lay down our lives, too, when we have performed so painfully thankless an act.”

I imagine that this is how God feels much of the time. So much love, so much abundance scattered and sown in the world, and so much of it falling on rocky soil or thorny soil. The Word of life, which is Jesus, incarnate in the world and spread over every nook and cranny, and still so many words of love seem to fall on deaf ears.

This is the heart of the parable we heard today from Matthew’s gospel. It is not the soil but the seed and the Sower that is at the center of this strange story. Jesus tells this parable in the midst of a longer teaching about mission, about what it means to go out as a disciple to proclaim and serve the Reign of God.

The soil is what it is - we can’t control it, and we can’t fix it. In our day, farmers have all sorts of means at their disposal to enrich the soil and make it bear good fruit. In ancient Palestine, this wasn’t the case at all – if you wanted seed to grow, you had to find the best soil and focus your sowing there. The Sower in Jesus’ parable is actually a rather foolish farmer, wasting seed on all sorts of bad ground.

But this is the point. God the Sower is, in a sense, foolish, showering seed abundantly all over the place, whether or not the ground is ready to receive it. God’s love and care do not distinguish between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” – remember Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, when he says that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Mt 5:45).

We’re so used to measuring our work in terms of effectiveness. That’s how the world generally works. Job performance reviews, curriculum assessment plans, manufacturing efficiency measurements – the world wants to make sure the seed is falling on good soil. Church is much the same. We parcel out our money and our efforts according to who we think is most “deserving” or to projects we believe will be most effective. God, however, works differently.

The seed of the logos/Word has already been sown all over the world – some places it flourishes, some places it gets taken away or dies. But it’s already been done. Disciples of this crazy, generous God are called not to parcel out their love according to how much they think they will get back, but to sow their seed as the Divine Sower does – with abandon, and with joy.

When we cast our seeds of love, we are often afraid that we are not doing enough. We see only the vast chasm between what we are doing and what we think ought to be done. We see the rejection, the families that still can’t feed themselves, the one we tried to help who turned and hurt us, and we see our failure. Dorothy Day wrote, “It is agony to go through such bitter experiences, because we all want to love, we desire with a great longing to love our fellows, and our hearts are often crushed at such rejections.” The seed is eaten by the birds, or shrivels and dies, and we wonder if God judges our failure.

We wonder if God judges our failure, but God, we are told, sees things differently. The apostle Paul understood this, when he wrote to the Romans, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Romans 8:1-2). Can we really believe this? Can we take into our hearts the assurance that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus?

It is not that we always do it right, or that we ever do enough. Dorothy Day reflected,

“What we do is very little. But it is like the little boy with a few loaves and fishes. Christ took that little and increased it. He will do the rest. What we do is so little we may seem to be constantly failing. But so did He fail. He met with apparent failure on the Cross. But unless the seed fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest.”

God is sowing us in this world, with great love and abandon on rocky and fertile soil alike. The harvest is in God’s hands, and we have but to give ourselves to it. Let us pray:

Divine sower, scattering seed, never hoarding, wasting life – or so the world thinks: give us the depth to receive the gift so freely given and the maturity to revel in love’s abundant, reckless growth;

through Jesus Christ, the grain of life. Amen.

• Steven Shakespeare, Prayers for an Inclusive Church. New York: Church Publishing, 2009, p.30.