"Let Anyone With Ears"

Original Sermon Date: 
Sunday, July 10, 2011
The Rev. Bernard W. Nord
The 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
“Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!” There it is again. Where have we heard it before? “Let anyone with ears”--even if they’ve become sore from the sounds they’re hearing, I take it--“let anyone with ears listen!”
 
Two chapters before, in Chapter 11 of Matthew’s gospel, is where we last heard it in another story that Matthew seems also to have appropriated from Mark’s earlier gospel: “Let anyone with ears listen! To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘we played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’”
 
“Let anyone with ears listen!” It occurs a third time at the end of chapter 13 in the explanation that Matthew offers of what the next parable in the series, the parable of the weeds among the wheat, means. So it seems to be a catch phrase like the phrase “Listen up!” that we use today that was suggested to Mark and then Matthew as they read the scroll of Isaiah. “Let anyone with ears listen.” The Master is about to say something important. Today we’ve got another important thing to hear. OK? OK.
 
A few years ago when I worked for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in one of my jobs, we had our annual staff meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, one summer. And while we were there, several of us took advantage of the proximity of Vancouver Island and went over there one afternoon to see Butchart Gardens on the outskirts of Victoria. Anybody ever been there?
 
Now I have to tell you, having been raised among the spoil piles and quarry pits that surround my home town in Western Pennsylvania, I have never seen an old limestone quarry that looks like that. As I understand the story, a hundred years or so ago, when all the limestone had finally been quarried out for Mr. Butchart’s Portland cement company and all that was left was an ugly, good-for-nothing old hole in the ground, Mrs. Butchart got the idea of turning the ugly old hole in the ground into a sunken garden. Mr. Butchart was supportive; so Mrs. Butchart negotiated to buy topsoil from nearby farms on Vancouver Island, have it hauled down into the quarry and dumped at varying depths and levels all over the 55 acres that the pit covered. She then began to plant and to grow things, some of them perennials, like in the Japanese Garden section, but most of them annuals until, these days according to their website, they set out a million bedding plants each year representing more than 700 varieties of flowers and good green things.
 
A previously hostile environment where no good seed could ever sprout or grow for long, had been turned by god-given human imagination, determination, and perspicacity, into something that is almost indescribable with mere words as to its beauty. A hostile, unfriendly, ugly--as ugly as hard-scrabble dirt in the desert regions of ancient Palestine, I suppose, had been turned into a receptive and welcoming and nourishing environment for seeds (or bedding plants) to catch on and grow to their fullest, god-given potential.
 
Now why can’t we do that in the church? And why can’t the church do that for the world? This is a two-question sermon. Why can’t the church make itself into a receptive, welcoming, and nourishing environment for whatever seeds (all of them good seeds, remember; the sower in the parable had nary a bad seed in his whole bag; the story wasn’t about the seeds, it was about the soil where the seeds landed; Jesus’ listeners would have understood that, and so should we) for whatever seeds get dropped into it, and whatever people drop in through its doors? Shouldn’t the church – its preachers and its people – always be determined, as a second priority (faithfulness to God’s will and word is the first priority) to be always welcoming and nourishing of the seeds and people of creation that come its way? And I’ll take as much responsibility for that as you.
 
Then the second question: Why can’t the church have as its third and equal priority a fevered determination to make the world outside the church – all the world, proximity doesn’t matter anymore in the wonderful new age we live in; we can know about and affect change in almost everything and everybody equally in the world anymore, its such a small and intimate and precarious place – a fevered determination to make the world outside the church, all of it, into a receptive and welcoming and nourishing place for the seeds of God’s creation and its people as well? Why not? And doesn’t the church have that responsibility as well? I’m pretty sure that if we read the Bible we’ll have to say that it does. And Alice and Kristy and I will take on that responsibility, as will the new pastoral leadership that you call before long, I bet, if you will too.
 
Two questions to ponder that the Gospel for the morning suggests to us: Can the church make itself into a receptive and welcoming and nourishing place for people who, like the seed in the sowers bag, are good; so that they will grow into the potential that God built into them at creation? And can the church continue to understand that its mission is to also help make the world that way – a place where all people and all creation, both of whom have also been created as good to begin with, can be nourished and grow to be the peaceful people and peaceful place that God intends for them to be?
 
I think so on both counts. Of course we’ll have to contend with some obstacles that are like thorns that get in the way of our purposes and will choke things out unless we’re smarter than they are, or will be like the unwelcome surfaces of hard, hot ground unless we’re smarter than it is and make it otherwise, which, like Mrs. Butchart, we have the potential to do if we have the will and determination. Good heavens, yes we can! Just look around us and see what humankind has already turned the unwelcoming environs of hot, humid, hurricane-threatened southeast Texas into – a thriving and diverse metropolis of industry, commerce, economics, education, the arts, and medicine that is practically unequalled anywhere in the world.
 
The obstacles are the classic ones, of course, the sin that lies couching at our door: greed, we like to have all the world for ourselves and at our disposal and let others fend for themselves; lust, we’d like to satiate our own desires and wants first and let the devil take the hindmost; pride, we like the things that make our hearts go pitter pat, like old hymns and old patterns of patriotism that don’t necessarily work the same in a new age and for new people. How will people grow if we don’t nourish them with things that fit for them? How does the church nourish and reach and proclaim the gospel to people in an I-pod world? We’ve got to get over the idea that the ways that we knew and loved and that nourished us are the only ways.
 
Then there’s fear, and particularly for those of us who are growing older, I think, fear of insufficiency and of things running out and fear of the unknown and the stranger. We’ve got to get over these fears in order to create welcoming, receptive, and nourishing environments where seeds and people – all that God created and scattered – will be nourished and grow. We’re not just a place for a certain kind of seed – golden wheat, let’s say, rather than corn or barley – we’re the church, a place for all of the seeds to be received and be nourished and grow. If we’re not, then we’re not being what God, the sower of the seed, wants us to be. But fear, well it’s really thorny and hard and a problem. We’re constantly afraid there won’t be enough to sustain us in our particular row of the garden, and we deserve to be sustained. After all, we were here first is the way it goes.
 
But our job isn’t just to be sustained and enjoy. We’re people as well as seed, and that means we’re co-creators with the Creator, responsible for helping tend the garden well, this garden and that garden out there. And the Creator assures us that in the garden where we are all shall be well now. “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet our heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.” (Matthew, Chapter 6) Consider them. Aren’t we as precious to the Creator? You bet we are, and all shall be well. We need not fear...neither that we won’t have enough – resources, energy, or spirit – nor the alien come among us, be they of a different race or nationality or culture. We need not fear. Rather we need to receive, welcome, and love. They’re not the thorns that will choke us or the hard unwelcoming ground that will fry us, after all. Rather, it is our sins and our fear that will do that.
 
We’re people…and seed – good things, made by a good Creator, for a good purpose. And the good and kind and loving Creator’s purpose will prevail ultimately. Our task, yours and mine, as fellow gardeners in this old quarry of life is, like Mrs. Butchart’s, to rise to the occasion and the opportunity to make this old quarry into a welcoming and receptive and nourishing place for all to experience and to make Christ’s church into a prototype of that. Let anyone with ears listen! Amen.