Have you ever given your love to someone unable to receive or acknowledge it?
Have you known times when you feel dead and dry inside, and unable to feel the love that you intellectually know is there? God sows love like a foolish farmer that casts seeds on rocks and weeds as well as good soil. 
This sermon, written 18 years ago, includes some reflections on a personal loss and the constancy of God's abundant love.

Proper 10 A

Sermon given 7/13/96

at St. Alban's Epsicopal Church, Brentwood

by the Rev. Valerie Hart

Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

         As I was contemplating these readings this week I got to thinking about my Mother-In-Law. During the last few years of her life she was extremely depressed. She was deeply loved, yet seemed incapable of knowing it. Her husband, my father-in-law, was as devoted as any man could be. He cared for her, took her wherever she wanted to go, gave her whatever she wanted, and made few demands upon her. He made sure she went to the doctors, took her medicine, etc. He even took her to Hawaii, where years ago they had experienced so much love and joy, in the hope that she would cheer up. But nothing seemed to matter; she continued to feel unloved, unlovable. No matter how much love was showered upon her by her husband, she couldn’t feel it. It didn’t matter that her baby grandchild adored her, she felt unloved and useless. Nothing that any of us said or did would matter. No seed of love could take root in the hard soil of her heart. A heart that had kept hidden the hurts of childhood, a heart that had so loved her family, a heart that could not receive, yet still longed to give. In fact, in her suicide note she said that she felt we would be better off without her. How little she understood of the deep love we felt for her and the aching we would all feel with her death. How hard it was to have loved someone so deeply and to know that they were unable to feel it.

         Have you ever given your love to someone unable to receive or acknowledge it? Perhaps there was a time when your spouse was so busy with work or other concerns that he or she didn’t notice your love. Or your children may have gone through a period of time when their need to express and be in touch with their anger made it impossible for them to acknowledge your love. Or you may have found yourself caring for a parent whose illness was so severe that their pain kept them from realizing the love behind your ministrations. Or maybe you are a teacher who has known a student who was so damaged by life that they could not respond to your sincere care. We have all had times when we have felt as if our love was being thrown into a black hole, where the one we loved just didn’t respond.

         Or perhaps we have known times when we feel dead and dry inside, and unable to feel the love that we intellectually know is there. Perhaps we have felt this way because of grief, or stress on the job, or hormonal changes, or chronic illness, or mental disturbances, or we just don’t know why. These are times when we cannot respond to the care expressed by others, when no matter what is said or done we feel unloved, unlovable. When even God’s love can’t get through.

         What does this have to do with today’s readings? God is the abundant sower, perhaps even a foolish farmer, for God sows love on all. The seeds of God’s love are sown on the hard path where there was no hope of them taking root. They were sown on rocky ground that had no depth; they were sown among thorns where there was no chance of growth, in addition to being sown on good ground. What kind of farmer is so wasteful? Doesn’t the farmer choose carefully where the seeds will be planted? Why would a farmer waste all that seed? But the nature of God is abundance. Isaiah speaks of people receiving water and food without money. He describes the word of God to be like rain and snow coming down and watering the land. The rain and snow do not discriminate as to where they will land. The rain falls on the land that has been prepared and absorbs it, it falls on the hard clay that just has it run off, it falls on the streets and towns and lakes and rivers. It is indiscriminate. So it is with God’s love. God’s love is sown upon all - worthy or unworthy, rich or poor, good or bad, happy or depressed, those ready to receive and those closed off. It doesn’t matter to God, the love is just sowed everywhere.

         I remember a time when I felt spiritually dead inside. When I saw my spiritual director I told her how I was unable to feel God’s love in the way I had before, and I grieved that loss. I said that I felt dry inside. Her response surprised me. She said that many of the great mystics trusted the dry, desert times more than the times they felt filled with love, because it was often through the dry times that God’s work of transformation was most powerful. Just as a field must lie fallow sometimes in order to continue to produce healthy crops, sometimes our hearts feel dry inside so that we can fully know our need for God. Often after a period of dryness, the gift of experiencing the fullness of God’s love again is worth the pain of the dry periods. Coming out of that dry period, once again feeling filled with God’s love, I realized how central love is to all that we do. It is really very simple. Our theology does not need be complicated - it is that God loves us, and we are Christians because the way that we came to know how much God loves us is through the incredible love expressed by Christ. And our worship is also an expression of love. We sing songs of love for God, we pray in thanksgiving of God’s love, even our times of confession is an acknowledgment that we have not loved as we could. We express our love for each other at the Peace, and we conclude our worship with the Eucharist, the Holy Communion where we remember God’s expression of love through Christ, and we partake of the loving gift of his body and blood. That’s all that it is about - Love. It is really quite simple - God Loves Us and never stops loving us, whether we can feel it or not.

         God just keeps sowing those seeds of love, whether we are receptive or not, in the confidence that at some point the soil will have been prepared, the thorns removed, the rocks cleared away, the hard ground plowed, so that the seed will take root and grow and bring forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. And what marvelous grain it is, for the fruit of God’s love is our ability to love. When we have so abundantly received we are called to equally abundantly, and selflessly give. And we are called to give our love as God gives, abundantly, without concern of how it is received, with the assurance that sometimes seeds planted in the desert are just waiting for the next rain to sprout and grow.

         So we keep loving, as God keeps loving, and we keep plowing the ground, clearing out weeds, removing the stones, and trusting in the dry times that the abundant rain will return, - trusting in a love that is often not returned from others, trusting in the love from God that we are sometimes unable to feel. And trusting that God will continue to keep sowing love.

         I don’t think that God ever gives up on us. I am sure that even though my mother-in-law was closed to God and human love in this lifetime, that God has not given up on her, but continues to sow the seeds of love into what I hope and believe is now more fertile soil.

         I trust that such an extravagant farmer would never give up on an opportunity for love, that God continues to sow the seeds of love, and will continue to sow them in the hope and confidence that eventually they will fall on fertile ground.