Sermon: Selma And The Parable Of The Sower

2015 March 8
by First U Bklyn

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Selma and the Parable of the Sower

Ana Levy-Lyons

March 8, 2015

First U, Brooklyn

Jesus didn’t usually explain his parables. The whole point of speaking in parables was that only certain people would know what he was talking about — people with, in his words, “ears to hear.” This would be his followers and other Jews with a certain revolutionary leaning in religion and politics. It would not include Romans and those Jews who, in his way of thinking, had sold out. But in the case of the Parable of the Sower, he did offer an explanation. He was speaking to a particularly big crowd this time — so big that he had to get into a boat and speak to them from the water and they could all crowd into the beach without trampling him. If you remember from Becky’s Wisdom Story, the parable basically describes the efforts of a sower (someone who is planting seeds). Some of the seeds fall on the path and get eaten by birds. Some fall on rocks where they can’t grow roots and they get cooked by the sun. Some fall among thorns and get choked and can’t grow. And some fall on good soil and grow and bear an abundance of fruit. 

Here’s what he says to the crowd by way of explanation (this is in the Book of Matthew): “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields.”

So it seems that the “seed” in this parable represents “the word,” the spiritual message, the vision of God that Jesus is trying to relay. And while the message is the same in each scenario that he describes, it is received very differently, with very different results. Just like the seed can only grow into a big healthy plant if it falls into soil that is ready to receive it, a message can only transform our lives if it falls into a heart and a consciousness that is ready to receive it. If you’re not ready, it just withers and dies.

And so we might ask, what does it take to be ready to receive a spiritual message? In the parable the types of conditions into which the seeds fall are static, unchangeable – it’s a path or it’s rocky soil or it’s thorns or it’s good soil. It is what it is and the seed is going to grow or not, and that’s not going to change. But we people, of course, aren’t like that. We aren’t static over the years. We change, and sometimes when we’re not ready to hear a message at one point in our lives, we hear that same message later and we are ready. Then, when we have ears to hear, that message transforms us. Then, and not a day earlier.

If America had heard the message of civil rights a day earlier back in 1965, Jimmie Lee Jackson might never have been shot while protesting for black voting rights. If America had heard the message of civil rights a day earlier Bloody Sunday might never have occurred, where non-violent protesters were viciously beaten and injured as they tried to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. (Yesterday was the anniversary of that day and actually one of our members, Bob Patterson, was there, marching on that bridge.) If America had heard the message of civil rights a day earlier, the Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb might not have been beaten to death.

But a day earlier, America was not ready. Those seeds – all the sermons and speeches and activism that had taken place before those days in Selma – those seeds fell on the path and in the thorns and on rocky soil and could not grow. And the tragic paradox is that America probably could never have been ready until those traumatic events took place. It took those beatings and those deaths, particularly, as a recent New York Times Op-Ed points out, the death of a white man, to shake the consciousness and conscience of the nation. Then and only then, the soil was ready and the message was planted. And it grew and flowered in the form of the Voting Rights Act a few months later that enforced voting rights for people of color. It grew and it bore fruit.

This is often a cruel truth of our individual lives as well. We can hear something a hundred times and it doesn’t sink in. We don’t know what we don’t know. It often takes trauma, pain, and loss before our soil is ready to receive a message. And sometimes the transformation that comes from receiving that message could have prevented the very trauma, pain, or loss that precipitated it. Sometimes it takes being told by our spouse that he or she wants a divorce before we’re ready to take a hard look at our own behavior in the marriage. Sometimes it takes losing our job because of showing up drunk one too many times before we’re ready to go to our first AA meeting. Sometimes it takes our teenager getting so angry that he stops speaking to us before we realize that we haven’t really been listening to him. It takes being shaken to our core sometimes, it takes being softened by the meat tenderizer of life, so that our old way becomes completely unsustainable, before we have ears to hear.

As in the Parable of the Sower, there are so many things that get in the way of us being ready to receive the seed of a message a day earlier. It’s so hard to really enter into the momentum of personal transformation. Jesus explains that in some cases, “the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart.” The “evil one” could be the devil if you believe in the devil, or it could be destructive patterns from our childhood, inner voices of self-doubt or even self-loathing that snatch away our belief that we can change. Jesus explains that in other cases, “one hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble arises, that person immediately falls away.” I’m sure many of us have experienced this as well. We get really excited about some new fad, some new diet, some new program to “win friends and influence people,” some new type of yoga, some new guru, and then a few weeks, months, or even years later, it’s become too hard or too boring or it’s not magically working, and we drop it. And finally Jesus explains that in some cases, “one hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word.” Many of us have been there too. The appeal of material things, lifestyle, and having a “normal” social life can lure us away from hearing what we are being called to do.

So what’s a person to do, with all these hazards in the farm fields of our lives getting in the way of getting the message and making the change? Are we static after all, like the rocky ground in the parable, and either we can hear it or we can’t? Are we doomed to repeat the cycle of trauma where our inability to receive a message produces a disaster which turns out to be a prerequisite to being able to receive the message? In other words, are we helpless to avoid being pummeled by life time and again?

I don’t think so and I don’t think this is what Jesus was saying. But it is a danger, and it does sometimes seem like trauma is life’s backup plan for getting through to us if gentler means don’t work. So how can we open ourselves to the messages coming our way? This question is right in the wheelhouse of religion. Religious and spiritual practices are all about readying ourselves, preparing our hearts, growing the ears to hear, softening our souls ideally without the application of the meat tenderizer. We engage in some of these practices here – our worship services, our prayers, our music, our candle lighting. Today is Sabbath Sunday when we’re all invited to step outside of our regular lives, let go of our to do list and our self-improvement projects for the day and just float in the universe, stripped down to our bare, essential selves. Getting this little bit of space from the rat race, just a breath away, can give us a vantage point to see some of the obstacles that Jesus was talking about.

Getting a little bit of distance can help us see how the “evil one,” our negative patterns and self-doubts are influencing us. Getting a little bit of distance can help us see which of our activities have roots and depth and staying power and which do not. And getting a little bit of distance can help us see how the lure of wealth and material success might be enticing us away from a spiritually grounded life. Carving out time in our day and our week for prayer and meditation can help open our hearts and make us fertile ground, ready to receive wisdom and insight and grace.

And then, once you’ve readied the ground and grown the plant, spiritual practices can help you tend the plant and keep it healthy. Because you can’t take for granted that the transformations you’ve gone through in your life will always stick around. We in this country took for granted that the Selma transformations were permanent and inviolable. And we were so wrong. We blink and we find that the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been struck down by the Supreme Court. We see discrimination, incarceration, and police violence against people of color everywhere.

The tending of our spiritual farm fields is a lifelong, ongoing process, for us as a global community and for us as individual souls. But if we do it right, we can make our transformations the easy way, rather than the hard way. We can figure out the bad patterns in our marriage before our spouse wants to divorce us. We can deal with our substance addiction before we lose our job. We can start listening to our kids before they go silent and disappear in rage. And if we work together, looking at our communal challenges through a spiritual lens, maybe we can create a truly inclusive and fair society before the next Bloody Sunday. Maybe we can learn to live in harmony with the earth before the land is too saturated with poisons to bear fruit at all.

Through this Sabbath Sunday today and through all our spiritual practices, may we be transformed. May we all cultivate the goodness in our lives and ready ourselves so that when the next blessing come in the form of a message, a word, or a song of wisdom, we have the the ears to hear it.

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