Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity, 16th July 2023: ISAIAH 55:10 -13, ROMANS 8: 1-11, MATT.13:1-9, 18-23.

Deacon Christine Saccali – St Paul’s Athens

 

DANDELIONS

 

I SPEAK IN THE NAME OF THE Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Have you ever blown on a dandelion clock, maybe when you were a child, to tell the time? It is a game we play in UK; I have taught it to my granddaughter. We have plenty of dandelions in our small patch of lawn and they are thriving, especially this year, after the late wet spring weather and after our holiday.

Did you know that every part of the dandelion, so named after the French dents de lion teeth of lions because of the shape of the leaves, can be used, nothing goes to waste ? Radiki, the name in Greek, is a prize salad leaf boiled as horta. Chicory pikralida is its other name and its roots, which go down very deep, can be dried and ground and used as a plant based coffee.

Dandelion flowers are the beloved flower of bees and keep in the biodiversity in balance. Our Creator God made all this with His divine planning. No wonder, then that No Mow May was declared in UK to encourage the growth of wild flowers in verges and gardens to counteract the groomed and manicured look of aesthetics that ruin the natural world and original intention.

We have no idea how far and wide seeds can spread and where they will fall only to spring up in time depending on the soil where they land. They are not always planted deliberately. So it is with God’s abundance and his Word. Many things take time and the right circumstances to take root. Man is wasteful but God is plentiful and his abundance and goodness is everywhere to be seen.

 

Why is God so profligate? With the second half of today’s familiar reading the parable of the sower from Matthew, the emphasis switches from God’s action to our response; but the first half of the story is all that the listening crowds get, and their reaction must have been one of incredulity. Jesus’ audience may not all have been farmers themselves, but they would have been much closer to the food-production than most of us are. They would have known famine and shortage, and they would have known that a sensible farmer does not just fling the seeds all over the place. He prepares the ground as well as he can in advance, precisely so that the seeds don’t fall on rocky ground or among thorns. We wonder whatever this sower in the story is up to.

No wonder the disciples need an explanation, although some scholars believe this was added to the original gospel passage later. The one that they got has provided generations of Sunday school lessons, with the emphasis on how we receive the Word of God, so generously scattered abroad. But it is still an immensely puzzling story as familiar as it is. For one thing, what are those who receive the Word of God supposed to do about it. It isn’t clear that any blame own fault if they don’t understand what is being said to them?

 

But it seems the Sower holds the key. For it is the sower who starts the story, and the explanation is given to those who are, in turn, going to be sowers .  For God may be the primary sower but the disciples have accepted the commission to join Jesus in spreading the word so it is their duty to prepare the ground, that the birds are scared away, that their thorns are uprooted, and that the seed does not fall where the soil is too shallow for them to grow.

I think the words shallow and deep and rooted are significant here, hold on to them and we shall return to them later on. The disciples, we included, are also going to be sowers. They and we are key to the spreading of the Word so we must also prepare the ground and ourselves. This is not so much then a parable primarily for the seed but for the sowers. As we enter into a period of vacancy now, the first in a long time here in St Paul’s, then we all need to pull together. We may have more services of the word when no priest is available. Just think about that phrase Service of the Word non Eucharistic services, in other words. The initials spell out SOW which is just what we are called to do with the Word so please support these services and the ministers who lead them. They are there to feed you so that you in turn can go out and sow the Word of God as you go out into the community, family and your jobs.

Then if all this sounds like too terrifying a responsibility take Isaiah and Romans to heart. Although God for some inexplicable reason chooses to involve us in his mission and to give us real responsibilities – he knows what we are- he created us after all. God’s word will accomplish that which is his purpose, says God, through the prophet Isaiah, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.’  How very hard it is sometimes to believe that. We long to take over from God and bend him to our purposes. We are sure we know best. Surely we are not the kind of sower who flings the seed about without looking where it would land. We would make sure that the seed got only to people we can trust with it. How different our careful, defensive, well managed strategies are from God’s randomness.

In Northern Greece, where we have been fortunate to holiday for the last two years there are fields and fields of sunflowers planted as crops lifting their laden heads of green, then yellow and black to the sun every day, then turning away as night falls. In straight rows too. But just occasionally you could see a few growing by the roadside which had been taken by birds, dropped or thrown.

So when Paul says ‘ there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’, those of us who are trying so hard need to hear it, as much as anyone else. After all, those who do not care about the law at all are not in fear of breaking it inadvertently. It is the zealous law-abiding folk who need the freedom brought in Christ. Both groups need forgiveness, we all do. But Jesus’ ministry and the gospel narrative showed over and over again that those who are trying to be righteous find it most difficult to accept the grace of sins forgiven and wiped out. The concept is even more terrifying than being responsible for sowing the word of God.  For as Paul says, ’we can find our minds hostile to God.’  In opposition to His divine plan and purposes, in other words.

So what must wishful sowers do? Prepare the ground and our hearts as much as we can and trusting in God’s wide mercy and abundance sometimes throw caution to the wind, blow that dandelion clock and watch as God’s word accomplishes what we never could have dreamt of as we play our part of Kingdom builders.

We are grateful to Father Leonard and Lynne to the part they have played here at St Paul’s and beyond over the last six years, three of which were beset by COVID and the effects of the pandemic. We may not yet know the effects of the seeds they have sown and scattered far and wide. They remain to be seen and maybe not by us.

This is the nature of the Kingdom and the part we play.

 

Let us listen to a prayer honouring Oscar Romero from a homily written and delivered by Ken Untener in 1979, quoted by Pope Francis in 2015 and then a more personal poem as we close in reflection.

It helps every now and then to step back and take a long view.

The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete.

Which is another way of saying that the Kingdom is always beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings perfection,

No pastoral visit brings wholeness.

No programme accomplishes the Church’s mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

 

This is what we are about.

We plant seeds that one day will grow.

We water the seeds already planted knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations knowing that they will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realising this.

This enables us to do something and do it very well.

It may be incomplete but it is a beginning,

A step along the way.

An opportunity for the lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results,

But this is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

 

Deacon Frances, Bishop David’s PA, my mentor and role model, has this poem pinned above her desk:

Take Time

Take time off each day to think and pray

To care how your life is going.

Give your roots rain.

Take time with a friend to do nothing important,

But just to be together, to enjoy another person.

Give your roots rain.

Take time to write a poem or grow a flower,

To create something that is something of you.

Give your roots rain.

For in your roots you find who you are,

And there too find who God is,

For he has not forced you into his home

Rather he has made his home on you.

AMEN