Scripture: Isaiah 55:10-13, Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Given on 8/19/18
On top of a mountain in Tennessee called Iron Mountain on about 100 acres of land sits a house that my grandmother purchased about 30 years ago. My grandmother, preparing to retire from the marketing research firm that she had founded, wanted a place to go where she could both entertain guests and also get away from the hustle and bustle of the business world. Though a savvy entrepreneur who comfortable in the boardrooms of Phillip Morris, Pepsi, Burger King, and others, she was, at the end of the day, a small town lady, with limited needs and the desire to, for the most part, disappear for large swaths of time. And so her preferred destination for a hermitage, of sorts, was on top of a mountain the looked down into the Roan Valley at its base and the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina at its top. That house and that land soon became a place of retreat for my whole family, as well. It served as the host for many high holy days in the Christian calendar, from Easter in the Spring to Christmas in the Winter and always, always, Thanksgiving in between the two. With many a meal being shared between kith and kin. It was an interesting looking house from the outside. It was built into the side of the mountain, hewn into the iron ore from whence the mountain had gotten its name with a rock facade made up of larger stones collected from the mountain with a huge back deck that rose about 20 feet off the ground, accessed through the back door in the open kitchen/living room/dining room that made up the majority of the second floor. One needed only to walk out onto that deck and take a huge gulp of mountain air to know that you were simultaneously home and a million miles from anything. The property itself was drawn out in the shape of a wedge, think like a really wide slice of pizza, with the house sitting at the tip, the whole of everything you saw below you being part of the land, and being surrounded and enveloped on both sides by national forest. Thus, the land, and everything you saw around it was and would remain completely undeveloped, rustic, and pristine.
The house itself sat about 500 feet or so from the very top of Iron Mountain, a climb that was tough but ultimately doable. Growing up my brothers and I would make the trek upwards catch our collective breaths at the top and then race back down to the bottom as fast as our legs would carry us. One need only look to us for proof that there are in fact guardian angels in this life because the worst any of us ever did was a few cuts and bruises. At the top of the mountain and just to the other side of the pinnacle was the national forest and sitting some 20 feet below the peak was an old section of the Appalachian Trail, the 2,200 mile hiking trail that runs from Maine to Georgia. And while that hikers had been diverted off that part of the trail for some time by the time that we got there, it was still a great hike. For shorter hikes one need only tie a bandana around a tree and point in either direction and head out with the understanding that it was necessary to return for lunch or dinner or whatever meal was to come next in the day. But it also meant that one could do a day hike with a quick trip down the mountain to leave a vehicle for a return trip. So it was that on one such day my father decided that we would take an extended 15 mile hike from the top of the mountain down to a small town—more the intersection of two state highways where someone had placed a texaco called Shady Valley. We woke up that morning and following breakfast drove my dad’s truck and my grandmother’s truck down to the mountain and leaving one down at the texaco, as headed back up, packed a small lunch and began the hike down to the town. Now, if you ever done much hiking in the woods, especially on the ridge of a mountain, you know that there is a tendency to develop a bit of tunnel vision. This isn’t to say that it’s not breathtakingly beautiful, it is, just that lines of trees on both side of a trail begin to look all the same after you’ve been hiking for a couple of hours and so it’s possible that I had mentally checked out a little bit when we saw an opening in the trail up ahead and as we reached it, we realized that we were hiking across a plateau and on that plateau was a field with every color of wildflower imaginable. And they were brilliant, and alive, and for a few moments that day none of us could even get words out to describe the sight that we were not just seeing but walking through the middle of. It was one of those moments in time in which everything else in the world, in all of creation melts away, and all you can see, all you can smell, all you can touch, all you can perceive is the wonder of a God who had crafted the world with holy hands, who had breathe life into existence with holy breath, who had after it was all said and done, looked over creation and declared it to be “very good.” And I have no problem imagining that it was this field that God looked down upon before deciding that this creation that had been created was going to work out, was perfect, was awe-inspiring, was good. That was probably twenty years ago and I can still bring it up at family gatherings and everyone knows exactly what I’m talking about, and the experience of holiness that we stumbled into while out on a hike in the mountains of Tennessee.
The author of the passage in the book of Proverbs read for this morning speaks about wisdom being hewn out of the rock—of the call to come eat the bread she had prepared, the cup of wine in celebration and to lay aside the immaturity that comes with the years of our youth and to live and walk in the ways of insight. Much like a psalmist who sometime before this passage spoke of God setting a table for us upon which we might find some degree of comfort in the hardest times of our lives, so, too does wisdom call all her children to a table of peace and insight. This table, set before each of us, is both right before our eyes each moment of everyday and completely obscured from vision if we don’t take the time to look for it, to see it, to perceive it, to rest at it. And the quest for It is made all the more difficult as we live in our world of constant distraction, constant buzz, constant and instant gratification. Difficult to hear the voice of wisdom crying out above all the arguments, the accusations, the accosting of one person against another that too often makes up what we see on television and read in the news. Difficult to smell if you don’t have time to take in the scents of the falling rain early in the morning, of sticky salt in the air by the ocean, of the wind blowing through a forest of pine trees. Difficult to taste if every meal feels like a race to the finish line of sustenance so that we can continue on, on our day. Difficult to touch if you don’t take the time to feel a newborn’s skin, or hundred year old bark, or fresh fallen snow, or the softness of a generation’s old quilt. And I guess if you have grown up in the city, never seen more than a handful of trees all together. Or flowers not in the window of a florist. Or have never breathed in air that doesn’t smell like industry and smog. Or touched water in a stream. Or looked out on top of a ridge and seen for 100 miles no sign of another human being. Maybe if you never seen fields that stretch out as far as you can see in every direction bringing forth plant and flower or looked out onto a meadow and heard crickets and cicadas and seen waves of thousands lightening bugs lighting up in unison. If you aren’t able to grant yourself time to just sense and see and be present, wholly separated from all that distracts in this life. Maybe if all of this seems completely foreign to your existence, then you aren’t able to fully grasp what the writer of Proverbs means when he talks about Wisdom making her home hewn from the rocks and calling all of us to the highest place in town that we might be seated at the table of mercy where we can set aside all the things of the past and grow in wisdom in the future. But, for us, whose lives are patchwork, a tapestry of those moments, that allow us to go back in our minds 1,000 times over and over again to those brief moments when we experienced the beauty of creation, the markings of the hands of the creator in each stitch within the fabric of creation, the peace of Christ that is all around us, that gives us a faith to carry on, a vision of a new heaven and new earth, a sense, ever so briefly that it all makes sense.
And though we experience these things as individuals occupying singular places in space and time, they are, like the rest of creation, not to be hoarded, not to be kept inside ourselves, not to be our possessions, but rather gifts of God for the people of God. To be shared with one another both in this place, but also with everyone you meet. Jesus explained it like this. One day a sower went out into field and began to sew seeds and some seeds fell among the rocks and were soon turned to dust in the heat of the noonday sun. Others hit the roads and were consumed by hungry birds just looking for the next meal, still others fell into brambles and were soon choked out, but every now and then, some of the seeds fell into the dirt just right. Some of the seeds were properly fed and watered and hit by the sun and Jesus says that from those seeds came forth such a haul of grain as to be unbelievable. 30, 60, a hundredfold. And the world was forever changed because of those seeds that hit just right, that grew just right, that flowered and bloomed and brought forth grain after grain after grain.
Sisters and brother, it’s often too easy to simply hear this story from Jesus as being from two thousand years ago. As being told by and about Jesus. As being the child of God talking about God. It’s easy to assume that Jesus is talking about himself or, at the very least, someone else other than us. It’s easy to think of all the ways in which we are ill-equipped to spread the gospel of Christ into a world that clearly needs to hear it again and anew. It’s easy to think that we lack the capacity, the ability, the voice to be the bearer of the message of God for the people of God but that, friends, is just not biblical. Go back, re-read the scriptures, re-read those beloved stories of God’s call on people that had no business being called. Consider Moses, a guy who had killed someone, being called by God out of a burning bush and all Moses could stammer out was, “You must be talking about someone else other than me. I’m not a public speaker. I can’t bring your words to the Pharaoh.” And yet, Moses became one of the central figures in all of Judaism. Throughout his ministry Jesus selected hardscrabble, bawdy working-class stiffs, cheating tax collectors, sinners of every stripe to eat with him, walk with him, to form his inner circle. Paul was a murderer who had seen to the executions of countless Christians before he encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus. Look at the history of the faith, each of the great thinkers who developed what we call Christianity from Augustine to John Calvin to Martin Luther to Martin Luther King each possessed less than savory character flaws that made them less than perfect vessels for the word of God for the people of God and yet it is the spirit of God, it is the wisdom of God, that takes the imperfect and makes it perfect. It is the spirit of God, it is the wisdom of God that gave the words to Moses to stand before the Pharaoh and say “Let me people go.” It is the spirit of God, it is the wisdom of God that gave the words to Paul to stand in his brokenness and sin and declare that nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of God.” It was in sin that Augustine concluded that all of creation is restless until it finds rest in God. Each of us can think of hundreds of reasons why someone else ought to be tasked with the job of planting the seeds of the gospel and yet, God calls us all the more forcefully. And no, not every seed that we scatter will find fertile ground the first time. To hear Jesus tell it, most don’t the first time. Most get baked by the sun or consumed by birds or choked out by thorns but still we are called to plant. Because you just can’t know. You can’t know whether a seed that you scatter today won’t have profound impact on the world 500 years from now. There’s simply no was to discern that.
A few months ago, I was researching my McLeod family line and an interesting name popped up—the Rev. Donald McLeod. It seems that the church in Scotland had been swept up in the spirit of the Reformation arising from the city of Geneva in Switzerland and tired of being told what to do by the Catholic Church and the Anglican church decided to strike out on their own and do a new thing. So it was that the Kirk was born and soon thereafter, a young, strapping, and no doubt handsome man in a town called Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye decided he was called to the ministry and was ordained into a small group of churches that would later become known as the Kirk of Scotland or the Presbyterian Church. Now, am I standing in a pulpit today because my great, great, great, great, great, great, great uncle decided he was going to be a pastor? I have no idea, but it was a seed that was planted almost half a millennia ago into my ancestral line. Am I the perfect vessel to scatter the seeds of the gospel, myself? I can assure you that I am not. Everyday is a struggle for me to not feel like all those folks who said to God, “surely you don’t mean me.” But that’s ok. That's how all of us feel when we think of the enormity of the task of spreading the gospel, of being the conduit for the love of God in the world, for being a reflector of the light of God into the darkness. And that’s why we all keep struggling together, in this place, in this church, in the faith, to keep planting seeds believing that we can never know in the immediate moment what seed might fall in fertile ground. God can use even the most minute act of kindness, the smallest word offered honestly and graciously, the gentle glance at another that comes at just the right time and God’s not finished with any of us yet. Thanks be to God for each of our unfinished selves and glory be to God in the highest and on earth, peace amongst all God’s children. Alleluia, amen.