Church of the Redeemer | Iglesia del Redentor

God sucks at math

Sunday closest to July 13
Proper 10
Year A
RCL For the readings click here

Genesis 25:19-34
Psalm 119:105-112
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Today I met Ariel from La Leche International, she holds a workshop here once a month to teach the importance of breast feeding. A small group of mothers come with their babies in tow, some breast feeding while they ask questions about this ancient art of rasing healthy children. Although breast has been in my mind as my wife prepares for a mastectomy on Wednesday, the topic of conversation was precisely because Ariel and myself are both care givers to our spouses. Ariels’s husband is recovering from brain cancer surgery and my wife will have hers on Wednesday. We were talking about the how often we feel the need to finish a box of cookies without any apparent reason and how sometimes we skip lunch. How our seemingly erratic behavior mirrors the monkey wrench thrown into our lives. How all of the sudden anger seems to overpower us and how sometimes we could border on neglect.

Reading and praying before my sermon writing session, I asked myself honestly how I have felt this past three weeks and the response came loud and clear, I felt like every kind of soil, path soil, packed, dry, exposed. Rocky ground, rootless and vanquished. Thorny, filled with secret anxieties, with choking feelings I do not have the luxury to express. Then I have felt very productive, so much that I felt betrayed by my own enthusiasm.

Today’s gospel reading is very familiar – the parable of the four soils. Many of us learned it in Sunday school. Easy to remember because of the vivid description, we readily envision an ancient farmer striding through a rough field with a bag hanging on one side as he casts handfuls of seed on the other. We can also imagine a wider-angle view around the field - with birds flying over a hard-packed path, rocks among shallow earth, and thorny weeds growing menacingly.

But we may have to immediately say, that similarly like the parable of the prodigal son is not about right parenting, the parable of the sower is not about farming. Rather the opposite, I am even tempted to say that God sucks at Math. Is kind of repetitive in gospel stories told by Jesus. Luke talks about a Shepherd that leave ninety-nine sheep abandoned in the darkness and goes after one lost sheep. In John a woman takes a pint worth a year’s wages of exotic perfumes and splashes it over Jesus feet and rather than taking his disciples scandalized attitude he affirms the extravagance in the deed. In Mark a widow drops two puny coins and Jesus belittles a more considerable contribution to the Temple treasury. In Matthews, a boss goes and hires workers at different times during the work day and at the end of the day he pays the same to all.

God The Sower throws seeds in unlikely places, at least not where a smart farmer would. God The Sower is wasteful and by our standards He will not be successful, since he loses considerable amount of seed, however He says that the farmer yield was astronomical. When I told this parable in Bolondron, my farming community in Cuba the local farmers reaction went from respectful disbelief to hilarious joking.

The whole purpose of the story is too be outrageous, and by scandalizing with the impossible and the unfair, to remind the audience that God’s math is not ours, that He is a wasteful God and throws his seed where he pleases since it is His seed in the first place. That the harvest success -metaphor for the work for the Kingdom- does not depend on the disciples , but solely on God. Reminds the disciples that we stand as recipients of God’s grace of which we have no control.

One has to be careful not pushing the metaphor beyond its borders and I think that would be the case if we were to enter “ways into changing our soil from rocky or weedy or hard packed to fertile, lush ground”. Jesus himself, explains the parable in the reading today and basically he is stating a fact, explaining the disciples why some were gone or will be gone like Judas after some difficulties, why some who looked very enthusiastic at first seemed to have disappear after they took some heat for following Jesus and why others were too preoccupied with perhaps legitimate worries that have become absent present. He is also anticipating to his disciples how they themselves will react when the time comes. I an supposed that this speech had some prophylactic value to the inner circle.

The disciples have joined Jesus’s movement for a variety of reasons, always mixed. Some of their own motivation they could not explain it themselves and perhaps they choose “suffering now for success later” as a way to explain rationally to their families their abandonment of familial duties and responsibilities, sacred in Palestine of the first century, to follow an unstable rabbi, living in the open, without food or money. Hence, the mother who ask Jesus to place her children to his right and left side in the Kingdom of which he was going to be King.

Jesus knew better, he knew his disciples well, he was not enthraled with their apparent enthusiasm, or taken by their decisiveness and commitment for the day. The looming cross of Calvary will cast a heavy shadow in his emerging movement. He knew that eventually we all go through the four kinds of soil. Vulnerable to temptation, superficial and constantly worried. He also knew that we could be the best soil that God has given him, and to our four soils he threw his seed and trusting in God, he hoped for the miracle.

Is it the Church a reflection of that miracle? How many times in our history we have faced really dire circumstances? How many times we have being, together or in sequence, stuff for the birds, rootless and choked with the concerns of the world? Glorious Canterbury Cathedral in England, the site of tomorrow’s Lambeth Conference, saw King Henry II doing public penance for Thomas Becket’s murder to a few hundred years later have it turned into a horse stable by the Cromwell Ironsides. The Church of the Inquisition was also all throughout the Middles Ages the only source of help for the poor and the sick. So in these four soils, God has cast his seed and waited for the miracle of the unfathomable yield.

Is not different with each one of us, we driven away easily, rootless, unmoored, shallow, choking with worries and yet fertile. We the four soils is what Jesus got and in the miracle he waits and hopes, as he did with his disciples.

We are facing serious challenges in the Anglican Communion today, critique of the American Church actions in consecrating Bishop Robinson of New Hampshire, an openly gay man, threatens to split the communion and the demon of polarization has already come into our being. In times like these it is important to remember that the harvest does not depend on us, that the seeds were scattered by God and that he waits, like a farmer would, for the miracle of plenty to happen.

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