Reckless

A link to a YouTube video version follows the text

I’ve got bad news
for the Anglican Communion: God is not tidy.

As a rule,
highly educated
and intellectually sophisticated people
prefer to imagine the universe
as operating in a nice orderly process.
We seek out the “Laws of Nature”
so that we can predict
the risks and outcomes
of actions and reactions.
We’re safer that way, or so we imagine.

The God our Church’s imagine
is a rational mind operating the universe
with an eerily human sense of order.
But in fact, God is the Creator of chaos,
and the source of creativity,
and the epitome of mystery.
And, according to Jesus, God is reckless —
utterly reckless with love.

By the way, when Jesus told a parable
he did it in such a way as to provoke crisis.
A parable in the hands of Jesus
was a nut cracker
used to shatter an assumption
so the hearers could suddenly
see something about life or God
they never saw before.
But like God’s love,
Jesus’ parables were reckless, too.
Suddenly, without warning,
he would say something that
broke open the hearts and minds of his audience.
If he succeeded,
then they got a glimpse of something
they had never perceived before.
They would have an “Ah ha!” experience
or an “Oh!” or “Wow.”

But…but if it didn’t work,
if his little tricks
didn’t do their job,
the opposite reaction ensued:
slam,
bang,
shutdown and rejection.
There was a “No way!”
or a “BS,” or “What are you talking about Jesus?”

So while Jesus’ parables
could suddenly open the minds of his listeners
to receive a new insight
his parables could also ignite
anger,
and indignation,
frustration
and hostility.

But before we dig into this juicy parable
we need to contrast the two paragraphs
in Mathew’s gospel story
so that we can understand the weapon
parables were when wielded by 1^st Century rabbis.

You see, parables were a short-live and
unique rhetorical device
of the Semitic culture of Jesus’ day.
But parables underwent a dramatic,
and fatal disfiguration
when they were translated into the Greek language
and Roman Mediterranean culture.
In other words,

when the parable went from Jesus’ mouth
and an audience of Galilean peasants
and traveled across time and space
to land on the written pages of the gospels,
the meaning and message of the parables
were changed radically.

So think of this as an archaeological dig
we are performing on the text we just read.

First, a parable makes a single point
apart from which the details may be meaningless.
This is very important: the details may be meaningless.
Greeks used allegory and so do we,
and that leads us away
from the gem of Jesus’ wisdom
hidden in the parable.
Just like Matthew did in the second paragraph
of today’s reading,
we get caught up in asking
WHAT the rocky ground symbolizes
or WHO the thorns are supposed to represent
and WHO was it that had no depth anyway?
In other words, we turn the parable into an allegory.

But the wisdom in a parable
is held in the tweezers of a simple contrast.
Remember, it has only one point —
like a sharp spear.

Think of these famous parables
or parabolic sayings:
“The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.”
“The Kingdom of God is like the Father with two Sons.”
“The Kingdom of God is like a good Samaritan.”

God is like…
God is like…
God is like…

Each of those parables
held an outrageous contrasts
such that the people of Jesus’ day, who were
hearing them for the first time,
would have been shocked.
That a Samaritan could be good
or that God’s goodness
could be compared to him
was an oxymoron.
That the Kingdom of God
could be like a mustard seed
was absurd.
That the Kingdom of God
could be like a Father who embraced the wrong son,
the bad one instead of the obedient one
and the younger one instead of the heir,
was repulsive.

But to fully understand
why these are outlandish contrasts
we would have to explore the prejudices,
assumptions,
and beliefs
of 1^st Century Jewish culture.

That would allow us to notice
how Jesus was violating respected norms.
But it is enough for our purposes
to know that a parable pivots
on a single contrast
in order to produce a single point.
The formula is:
The Kingdom of God,
which is unknown,
is contrasted
to something ordinary
that is so well known
we take it for granted.

Today, in Matthew’s parable,
the Kingdom of God
is held in contrast to
the sower who went out to sow.

God is like a farmer —
a peasant working a little piece of hardscrabble land
in a hostile, arid, rocky environment.
The focus is on the sower
not the seed
and not the ground.

Here is the parable stripped naked
as it may have been told
in its simple, non-allegorized and oral form,
with thank yous to the Gospel of Thomas
and Robert Funk:

“The Kingdom of God
is like a sower
who went out to sow.
And as he sowed
some seeds fell on the path,
some seeds fell on rocky ground,
other seeds fell among thorns,
and some seeds even fell on good soil.
The seeds produced grain:
thirty, sixty, even a hundredfold.”

Did you hear it?
God is like the sower
who recklessly scattered seeds — everywhere,
and everywhere life
grew, even
in barrenness.

The simple, single point:
God scatters life recklessly — everywhere,
and everywhere life
grows, even
in barrenness.

Now in that second paragraph in Matthew,
the parable is turned into an allegory.
The focus is on the different kinds of ground:
rocky, hostile and fertile.
Why would Matthew change it like that?
Well, remember, he received Jesus’ parable
orally or among a few leaves of parchment.
And he receives it some fifty years
after Jesus is dead.

In fact, he receives it
after the Jewish-Roman war
which, among other things, may have
wiped out the use of parables forever.
Matthew may not know what a parable is.
But even if he did, Matthew
uses it as an allegory
to point a finger at different religious groups.
His purpose is combative
while Jesus’ parable was expansive.
Jesus used his parable
for an entirely different reason
than Matthew who allegorized it.

And we have to believe that Jesus
was not just preaching off the top of his head
when he offered that parable
to whomever his audience was.
Those images of seed-to-the-sower
and bread-to-eater,
and a cypress that sprouts
instead of the thorn,
would have evoked for Jesus’ audience
a 600-year-old vision
we also heard today in Isaiah 55.

Again, Jesus isn’t just making up a parable
without roots that run deep
in the Hebrew Scripture and Jewish memory.
Jesus’ audience
wouldn’t have known what to do
with something that wasn’t connected
to Biblical imagery.

So the parable of the sower,
like the prophecy of Isaiah 55,
reminds his listeners of something
they had forgotten:

God does not require
a powerful nation of followers
in order to accomplish the divine purpose!

But also, God’s seed
does not need to be planted
in neat little rows in order to grow!
And, if that wasn’t enough,
God does not require fertile farmland
in order to bring forth the harvest of Life!

In fact, God can plant
a prodigious seed
in a small,
ragged remnant of followers…
living out their faith
in confusion
and wandering around in the desert
for 40 years without the least idea
of where they are going.

But don’t take the word of a long dead rabbi for it.
If you have ever hiked in the Adirondacks
then you know that trees can grow
and live to be ancient
by spreading their roots out
across the rocks
when they cannot sink them
into deep soil.
And far above the tree line,
where soil is thin or even nonexistent,
spectacular wild flowers
peek out of cracks in the rock
where just enough granules of earth
have collected.

Or think of this, one of my favorites.
From star dust spread by cosmic wind
across galaxies, comes life on earth.
Truly, seeds of life scattered across time and space
and abundant forms of life on Earth grew.

Jesus, and Isaiah before him,
aren’t blowing smoke.
This is how the creation works for crying out loud.
Why would we ever doubt it
when we can see it happening all around us?

Good soil is not required for good life!
Where God is present
Life with a capital “L” is always possible.
Living in the dryness of the desert,
among thistles or barren rock
is no reason
in and of itself
to despair or lose hope.
Out of the scorched earth of genocide
come survivors who have learned to bloom.

Up from the desolate barrenness of racism
emerge people that have learned not to hate in return.
Out of the darkness of childhood nightmares
can grow some people
who have learned to dream and love again.

Back from the brutal inhumanity of war
come soldiers, many of whom
learn how to find peace and safety again.

The parable’s message for us is clear:
If God’s love is reckless
then poor soil or dangerous surroundings
do not condemn us to a life without hope.

If God’s love is reckless
then the madness our wars in Ukraine and Sudan,
and the madness of environmental degradation everywhere,
and the madness of genocide,
and the madness of gluttonous consumerism,
and all this madness…can change.

If God is truely reckless with love,
then any of this madness
that is our madness — even yours
and mine —
can be transformed.

So this is true: God can be present
and powerful in our lives
so we must not resign ourselves
to the way it is.

This is true: God can be present
and powerful in our midst
so we cannot assume
that we even know
the best outcome to hope for.

This is true: God can be present
and powerful — reckless even
with love —
so we can be reckless with our love,
reckless with our gifts,
reckless with our faith,
relentless with our hope.

God is not tidy and fastidious,
rather, recklessly generous and expansive
with life and love.