Trinity 5 – 12 July 2020 : Romans 8, 1-11; Matthew 13, 1-9, 18-23
Sermon preached in St. Paul’s Athens and for the congregation at Thessaloniki. Revd Canon. L Doolan.
The other day we had some water melon – karpouzi. The word it comes from karpos just means fruit generally, and karpoferos means fruitful.
As always with water melon there is the negotiation of all the juicy fruit with the ubiquitous black seeds. A Water melon is indeed fruitful in every sense. Having made on the side of my plate a little collection of the seeds I casually cast them into an unused but soil filled flower pot near me on the balcony of our apartment. I covered them with a bit of the soil and gave them a bit of water. I have to confess I then rather forgot about them, but I didn’t neglect them. Every 2 or 3 days they got a little watering. I am not green-fingered, so I had little or no expectation from my actions.
To my surprise, about a week later, there was suddenly a clump of new seedlings crowded together, with no social distancing, in the centre of the pot. As the seedlings grew and became a bit willowy looking, I gathered up several other pots, all of which had soil in from previous plants that had long since died off. The soil in each of the pots was of varying quality. Some was so dried out it broke into big clumps when I applied the trowel, but more recently filled pots had better quality of soil.
The time came for me to divide up the seedlings before they competed against each other too much for space. I can report that the progress of the seedlings is very variable. Some just didn’t survive the transplant, others look as if they are struggling, a few appear to be doing quite well.
Of course they were different heights and different levels of strength before I planted them out, but the key thing for the growth of all of them was the quality of the soil. The seedlings had an equal amount of sunshine, water and heat, but across the 4 pots the soil was not of consistent quality.
I will tell you if I ever manage to grow a full size karpouzi plant that fruits successfully. Will the karpouzi plant become karpofero?
This story is not quite identical to the parable that Jesus shares with us in the gospel, but there is enough common material to draw some worthwhile comparisons.
The Parable of the Sower must be one of the best known, and maybe most loved of all the parables – and I suspect in its familiarity we each draw different interpretations from it. This is maybe the sign of a good parable – it can be applied in many situations, with different emphases and nuances. This is a parable that is actively in the back of the mind, but which can so readily be brought forward from the biblical file and used in a fruitful way.
My favoured approach is to concentrate on the different soil qualities described. Each seed has the same potential within it, but the type of soil the seed is planted in is a vital component for the seed to grow into the seedling, the full grown plant, and ultimately to be karpoferos, fruit bearing.
My interpretation is that the varying soil qualities resemble the variability of different congregations. How does a new seed planted into the culture or soil of a church community survive or thrive in that culture. The quality of the culture is essential for Christian growth, for faith development, for formation into the type of human being God wills each of us to become. God does not do all of this alone – in and through Christ the church is called to be the culture in which our faith flourishes and bears fruit. Those of us who make up that culture have a huge responsibility to ensure that the circumstances, the environment is, one where a newly planted seedling has all the right growing conditions.
It would be easy to highlight the type of conditions that would prevent such development and growth, but instead let’s think of a list of conditions that St. Paul shares with us in his letter to the Galatians (5, 22-23).
He says this ‘The fruit of the Spirit ( o karpos tou pnefmatos) is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self -control’. A church community that has worked hard on creating these conditions will be a church community that thrives. It will be a community where those who are new to the faith, or new to the tradition, can be nurtured, tended, spiritually fed and watered, and assisted to grow into a strong member of that community – growing into the fullness of the stature of Christ. (Ephesians 4, 13).
One of the books I am reading this summer is a book of sayings of and stories about some very remarkable monks in the early 7th century. The collection was made by a monk from the Judaean desert called John Moschos, who travelled around with his friend Sofronios. His journeys are reproduced by the 20th century travel writer William Dalrymple in his book called From the Holy Mountain. John Moschos tells of the remarkable events in the lives of these holy men (mostly men, but there are exceptions) and their attempts to live disciplined and ascetic lives in obedience to Christ. To the 21st century ears some of these stories and ‘monkish antics’ are fantastic, and if we tried to copy such holy people nowadays we would probably be locked up.
But this was the season of faith, and remarkable things were interpreted as miracle, and the lives of such people were followed as examples of Godly living, whether spending a lifetime in a cave, inside a tree with a little hole for the monk’s face, or on top of a column, like the stylites. Much of this is harsh asceticism, such as ‘The Grazers’ in the Judaean desert. Their zeal was to attain a true spiritual hesychia a heightened state of oneness with Christ. This was their way of flourishing in the Spirit, and in their holy state they became sources of teaching, instruction, and advice to others. This is how they became karpoferoi, fruitful.
John Moschos recognized this and he named his collection of stories The Spiritual Meadow. ‘In my opinion, the meadows in spring present a particularly delightful prospect. They display to the beholder a rich diversity of flowers which arrests him with its charm, for it brings delight to his eyes and perfume to his nostrils. One part of the meadow blushes with roses; in another lilies predominate… in short, the diversity and variety of innumerable flowers affords delights both to nostril and eye on every side.’ (Spiritual Meadow, Moschos, trans Wortley, Cistercian Publications, p3)
As we think about the well -known and well-loved parable of the Sower and reflect on all that is needed for seed to grow to become a fruit bearer, we can also by the by, reflect on the spiritual meadow, and personalize this to our own community. What is our culture like? Is it life-giving? As we look around, what type of spiritual meadow do we represent – are we a delight both to nostril and to eye, as John Moschos might say of us? What is it that we each need to develop and allow to flourish within us so that we might blossom with a thousand blooms? How are we to live and become the fruit of the Spirit? Think on the water melon when you carve into it this summer, the karpouzi, and pray about how you and I, each of us, can become o karpos tou pnefmatos.
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