July 13, 2008
Rev. Rick Haverly
Compost
When we read Bible stories it is helpful sometimes to envision ourselves as different characters in a story to see what we can learn. For instance when we read a story of Jesus’ healing we might imagine ourselves as one of the disciples, or as one of the crowd, or as the one who is healed. As we imagine it from each of these perspectives we learn something new.
Today I would like us to imagine our reading of the parable of the sower from a different perspective. Sometimes we can hear this story and imagine ourselves as the sower. It reminds us that part of our work is to spread God’s word by giving witness to it with our lives and sharing it with others. This story gives us encouragement when we don’t get a good response form people to persevere because sometime it will produce abundantly. Or we may read the story and imagine ourselves to be the seed and its emerging plant and we are challenged to grow strong and produce abundantly and their may be times of our lives where we could see that we were each of these plants.
But today I really want us to look at it form one more perspective. Today I want to tell you that you are the dirt, or more properly, we are the dirt. That’s usually a message that reserved for Ash Wednesday when we are told that from dust we have come and to dust we shall return or from dirt we have come and to dirt we shall return.
But it is a message that is just as relevant for the parable of the sower. We as a church are the dirt and each of us shares responsibility as part of that soil. In light of that message, I think the seed sown on the path is the person who never quite makes it into the church. It’s scary to enter those doors and come in here to be among strangers. Adding to that fear is not knowing what goes on here and being afraid of everybody noticing that you don’t know what you are doing. Should you stand, sit, kneel? Where do you look for hymns, Bible verses or prayers? And maybe even scarier are the people. The person standing outside knows their mistakes and feels the need to be in the church but they are afraid of you. Because you have all the answers, you have your lives all together and are just waiting to judge them when they walk through those doors. So they are plucked up while they are still on the path. Our challenge is to invite people in and to find ways to bring them in through the door by speaking with friends and asking them to meet us here. Or by being a greeter who welcomes them immediately on entering the door and makes them feel at home and showing them where to go.
Also for this seed left outside on the path, I have this discussion every year with the confirmation class. Do you need to be part of the church to be a Christian? My answer is yes. In theory it might be possible to remain apart from the church and be Christian. But I find the odds are infinitesimally small. It’s hard enough to have church members reading and understanding the Bible, to expect someone is going to do that on their own is unrealistic. They might become nice people and may do some good things but unlikely that they will follow in the ways of Christ. Loving ones enemies, sacrificing oneself for others, being abundantly generous even in times of scarcity are not happening without the nurture of a faith community. It’s like a person buying a gun and practicing in their back yard, playing paintball and then saying they are a soldier. They buy their ticket to Iraq and then show up and say they can be a soldier without joining any branch of the military or becoming a part of any formal unit. They may actually shoot someone but you would be hard pressed to really call them a soldier. Like the person who stays apart form the church they won’t they will be plucked up off that path before they can grow and be productive in the faith.
Once people are in the church, what kind of dirt do they find here? Is it a rocky soil? Are we very solid, hard people? Are we very set in our ways? A person entering a church where the soil is rocky will find a cool reception. People are too busy speaking to their friends to bother with the newcomer. They are willing to let the new person come in and even join but they better find ways to fit in with the rest of us. We have been coming here a long time and we like it just the way it is. Don’t change anything. People joining a church like that may be able to start to grow, but there is just too much resistance and their roots don’t grow very deep. So in the face of the challenges of life they end up leaving because it takes so much effort to stay in the midst of that hard soil and they don’t have the energy to maintain it when they are dealing with their own the problems of their everyday lives.
Or is it a garden full of weeds that they find here. A community of people who are all looking out for themselves. Are the members all too busy looking for what they get out of the church to actually reach out to help someone else? Do they look at the newcomer as only a resource to be used by the church to make it better or easier for them? Or do they try to recruit the new member to their side in a particular argument among members.
Obviously our challenge as part of the dirt is to become the rich soil. I was talking to Mark at Lewis Farms and he was telling me about the leaves. You know, those leaves that every fall lie in piles along the road. And we hope that the town will pick them up before the first snow comes and the plow just pushes them down the road and back into our yards. He ends up with most of those leaves. He was saying that after they compost he mixes that into the soil and it is incredibly rich and is great for planting and growing. What is necessary are the nutrients from those dead leaves being added back into the soil? For us a Christians and church it is necessary that we become people who are willing to die to ourselves. We are willing to give up on our own needs in order to follow the way of Christ. We become more and more willing and able to overlook how people might offend us to see who they really are and encourage them in the midst of their own struggles. The more we are able to take up our own crosses, willing to follow Christ and offer our lives into God’s service, the more we are able to provide the kind of environment where others can grow. We compost our own nutrients back into the community, back into the soil to make it a great place for others. In a place like that new people can put down deep roots and grow strong.
But that’s only part of it. The ancient expectation was that for every bushel of seed you would get bushels of product. The growth we see here is miraculous. To see a 30 60 or 100 fold yield is incomprehensible. Even being the best soil, the best church, we still need God’s grace to produce results like that. It’s not something we do on our own or that we can force. It is an offering of ourselves to be a nurturing nourishing environment and then the grace of God that allows for the incredible production.