4 Lent C

It's just not fair!

4 Lent C - 2010

Transcribed from a sermon given by

Rev. Valerie Hart 

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Arroyo Grande, CA

It’s not fair!! It’s just not fair!! 

You giggle? 

Sounds like you’ve heard that before, or perhaps you can remember times in which you have said that.

We as children have all had moments where we said “It’s not fair” “I’m the eldest that has to do all the work around here and my younger brothers don’t have to do anything.” Or “It’s not fair, I’m the youngest and I have to go to bed earlier then everyone else does.” Or “It’s not fair, I’m an only child and I don’t have any brothers or sisters to play with.” It doesn’t really matter what the situation was, when I was growing up there was always some way in which it wasn’t “fair.” And of course if you are a parent or a grandparent or a teacher you have heard children say this to you. 

One of the darker days as a parent is when the children learn to say “It’s not fair.” Because it’s always not fair, one kid says that the other got a larger slice of cake. Another says you spent more time with one child than the other. . 

It’s not fair. We know what it feels like to have that feeling inside that it’s not fair. And even as adults, even though we don’t say it out loud, we think it, “It’s just not fair.”

When we look at this Gospel reading, it’s all about fairness. It begins with the Pharisees critiquing Jesus because he is speaking with and eating with prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners of all types. And that’s not fair! Because while they’ve been out having a good time the Pharisees have been following all these rules and laws. And it’s not fair that they get all the attention. They should be being punished in some way and the ones who have been following all the laws should be getting some goodies for it, some acknowledgement for how hard they have worked. 

So Jesus responds to them by telling this wonderful story of the father with two sons. And if we didn’t have anything else from the gospels except this story it would teach us of Jesus’ understanding of the nature of God. 

Now you can understand the older son’s perspective. The younger son has said basically to his father “I’m going to treat you like you are dead, give me my inheritance.” And back in those days inheritance was not split 50/50, the eldest got a large chunk and the younger ones didn’t get as much. So, for a younger brother to be asking for his share before the father even is dead is an incredible insult to his father. And then he goes off, leaves his father, basically abandoning him. You can imagine how angry the older brother was right from the beginning that his younger brother would do this and leave him having to take care of the farm. We can all kind of understand why the older brother was so angry when “that son of yours” returns.

(I love the little nuances in this story, they are so great. The older brother refers to his brother as “that son of yours.” He has pushed him out of the family. “I have no relationship with that one any more.” And the father responds “Your brother.”)

He represents the Pharisees. They were talking about fairness and justice, while what Jesus was talking about was mercy and love. If you have been a parent or a teacher or in other ways work with children you know that you love them all. They are each unique and your relationship is unique with each one, but you love them all. When you pick up a little baby and you feel that overwhelming sense of love you don’t love that baby because it is being so good. That baby is screaming and throwing up and going in its diaper. It’s being a baby. But you love it because that is it’s nature and your nature is to love. And that is the way God is. God doesn’t love us because we’re so good. 

Most of us spend much of our lives trying to make ourselves loveable. You know. if I get one more degree, if I work a little harder, if I lose some weight, if I go to church ever Sunday. Something that we do that we think will make us more loveable. That’s not the way love works. Love is.

It is just like the father in the story who loves both of his sons. There was nothing that the younger son could do that would destroy his father’s love and there was nothing that the elder son could do, being good, that would make the father love him any more. The love was complete. Unconditional, and that’s the love we have from God that Christ is trying to tell us about, to show us, to demonstrate. It’s not about fairness, but about mercy. That we are all loved by God, and God wants to be in relationship with each of us. 

We call it reconciliation, healing of the relationship. God wants each one of his children to come home. And God will run outside to meet us when we decide to come home. And that makes all the difference

This wonderful little passage from 2 Corinthians is just beautiful because it says we regard no one from a human point of view. Think about a family. How the brothers and sisters perceive each other and how the parent perceives them. The parent perceives them with love. The brothers and sisters are in competition. 

What if we were to see everybody else the way God sees them. With the sense of mercy and love and acceptance that God has for them. If we could see the person that’s hurt us and instead of seeing them as an enemy we could see them as a child of God, loved by God, regardless of what they have done. That would change things, wouldn’t it? If we could see one another the way God sees us. That’s what Paul says here, “We regard no one from a human point of view.” Not seeing what’s fair, but seeing with the eyes of love. 

He goes on to say “So if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation, everything old has passed away. See everything has become new.” This new creation comes when we realize that we are dependent upon the mercy and love of God and when we are reconciled to God. When we know that love, that totally underserved love of God that fills us and heals us, we become a new person. We see things in a new way. It becomes much harder to hold on to our resentments of other people when we know how much we have been forgiven by God. 

Paul goes on to say, “All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” Has given usthe ministry of reconciliation. Once we are reconciled to God, God empowers us to be instruments of God’s love in the world - the ministry of reconciliation. Our jobs once we know that we are forgiven and loved is to help others to know that they are forgiven and loved by God. To help others to be reconciled to God. And to help others to be reconciled to each other. 

It all begins with us. It all begins with us acknowledging the fact that we have not lived a perfect life. We do not deserve God’s love, no one deserves love, love is given as a gift. And when we acknowledge that and accept God’s mercy and forgiveness, we then do the hard work of acknowledging how we have hurt other people –  working to forgive others and be forgiven. Those who have gone through the 12 steps know that process very well. We become a new creation – instruments of reconciliation. That’s our job, or ministry. 

Our job is not to make the world fair, our job is to bring people together and to bring people to God through Christ.

Paul continues and says, “so we are ambassadors for Christ because God is making his appeal through us, we entreat you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” First step is to be reconciled to God. That is why in almost all of our services we have a confession, we have a way in which we acknowledge we need to be healed and reconciled to God. That is the foundation upon which we are sent out to be ambassadors for Christ and to bring reconciliation, love and mercy to the world.

Amen

Easter 6 B

On the Sixth Sunday of Easter in 2015 I was providing supply at a church that had scheduled for that Sunday to have an informal children’s sermon followed by a sermon for the adults. Here is how I spoke about friendship and love to both the children and the adults. 

Easter 6 B

May 10, 2015

The Rev. Valerie Hart

Children's sermon 

Any of you have a best friend? Raise your hands.

Tell me, what makes a good friend?

See how they respond. Bring up

Fun

Trust

Honesty

They are there no matter what

Someone we can tell our secrets to

Won't judge us

Jesus tells us that we are his friends. Jesus is like that. He will care about us no matter what. We can trust him. We can tell him our secrets. We can even have fun with him. He says that he wants us to have the joy that he has and for our joy to be complete. 

Say a prayer telling Jesus we want to be his friend. 

Adult sermon

During the children's sermon we talked about what a friend is like. (Refer back to some of the things the children said.) 

I'd like you to bring to mind one of your really good friends, either current or in the past. Think about what made that relationship so special?

Really good friends are always there for you, no matter what. If at three o'clock in the morning you are stalled by the side of a lonely highway you can call them on the phone and they'll get up out of bed and come to get you. They may be cussing you out the whole way there, but they will pick you up. 

A good friend is one that you can ask them if a pair of pants make you look fat, and they'll tell you the truth. 

Such friendships are built over time. They usually have to do with going through stuff together. It might be a coworker or someone you volunteer with or a neighbor, but a good friendship is built on being tested together. Soldiers who have been on the battlefield say that the one thing they remember positively about that time was the friendships that they developed. Successful soldiers in battle form a cohesive whole where each of them is willing to sacrifice themselves for the others. The same is true of firefighters. They are people who are willing to risk and even lose their lives to save one another. 

Given that it is Mother's Day I have to include that mothers are like that too. They are willing to do whatever it takes to keep their children safe and healthy. 

In the Gospel today, Jesus says, "I have called you friends." What we have been talking about is the type of friendship that that Christ offers us. We are offered a deep and abiding friendship with God. 

There is a tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures of friendship with God. Abraham is the best known friend of God. In fact, that is the term that is most often used to describe him. He was a friend of God because he totally trusted God. He trusted enough to leave his homeland and wander without knowing where he was going, trusting God’s promise of a home. Now if you read Genesis you will see that Abraham was not always courageous, that he sometimes did not live up to what we might have expected of a hero of the Bible, but he was always God’s friend. He was willing to argue with God and to sometimes doubt God, but he was always God's friend. 

Jesus says that we are his friends and abide in his love if we do what he commands. 

And what does Jesus command? That we love one another as he has loved us.

We are to love. 

Now in Greek there are several words that all get translated into English as love. The Greeks had a more nuanced understand of the concept of love than we do. 

The first is Eros. It has to do with emotion. It is the romantic, sexual kind of love. It is about feeling good. 

The second word is Philio. This has to do with affection and positive regard, as in a friendship. We find the word Philio in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. Philio is that brotherly love. 

And then there is agape. Agape love is not about emotions. It is not about feeling warm and fuzzy inside. Agape love is not about how one feels, but what one does. It is about action not about warm feelings. 

It is a love that is unconditional 

It is a love that is sacrificial

It is a love that sees beyond the surface of things. 

In agape love there is no self benefit. It is not concerned with what is in it for me

Agape love is offered whether it is returned or not

C.S. Lewis describes agape love as "gift love."

It is not a feeling - it is a choice. It is a choice to care. A choice to give. 

Thomas Aquinas describes agape love as "to will the good of another." 

And it is the Greek word Agape that is used each of the many times love is used in these passages. 

When Christ says that we are to love one another as he loves us it is this is the kind of love he is talking about. It is a universal, unconditional, sacrificial love that he is talking about. 

Christ wants us to obey his command to love, not out of fear, not out of concern for punishment, but out of friendship and love. 

It is like how hard we worked to obey a teacher that we really respected; that we knew had our best interest at heart. Not out of fear of punishment but out of a desire to do what he or she wanted us to do. 

Christ invites us to be his friends, not his servants. He wants us to obey not out of fear, but out of friendship. 

He wants us to love one another in the sacrificial way that he loves us. He wants us to choose to love. He wants us to choose to will good for another. 

He wants us to do this not for his sake, but for our sake. He wants us to do this so that his joy may be in us and that our joy and be complete. 

There is no greater joy than this, to abide in his love - to be Gods friend. 

Amen

Proper 10 A

Have you ever cared about someone who appeared to be unable to receive your love? If so, than you know how God must feel as that foolish farmer sows love on everyone.

Proper 10 A

Sermon given on

July 13, 1996

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Alban’s Episcopal Church

Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

As I was contemplating the readings for this week I began 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. He made sure she went to the doctors and took her medicine, etc. He even took her to Hawaii, where years ago they had experienced so much love and joy, in the hopes 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. No matter that her baby grandchild adored her, she felt unloved and useless. Nothing that any of us said or did mattered. 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 deeply 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 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 child 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 is so severe that their pain keeps 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 felt dead and dry inside, and unable to feel the love that we intellectually knew was 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 is no hope of them taking root. They are sown on rocky ground that has no depth. They are sown among thorns where there is no chance of growth, as well as being sown on good ground. What kind of farmer is so wasteful? Doesn’t a 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 as being 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 for many of the great mystics they 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 to 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. Our worship is an expression of love. We sing songs of love for God. We pray in thanksgiving of God’s love. Even our time of confession is an acknowledgement 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 what our worship is all about - Love.

God still keeps sowing those seeds, 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 of love 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. 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. Such an extravagant farmer would never give up on an opportunity for love.

I trust that God continues to sow the seeds of love, and will continue to sow them. Just as we are called to continue to sow love in the hope and confidence that eventually it will fall on fertile ground.

Sermon Proper 21A

The readings for this week are all about community and relationship. The bottom line question is what does it mean to love one another.

Proper 21

Transcribed from a sermon given

September 25, 2011

Rev. Valerie A. Hart

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Arroyo Grande CA

Philippians 2:1-13

Exodus 17:1-7

Matthew 21:23-32

There’s an old story from India about two monks that went up into the Himalayas as hermits to find God and purify themselves. They found two caves that were next to each other and each one went into their cave, taking with them nothing but some straw for a bed. They didn’t see each other for many months as each one worked on their own meditation and their own purity. Of course when the winter came they couldn’t see each other. When spring came and with the spring the sunshine each of the monks took their pile of straw and put it out in the sun because after a winter in the cave it needed to be freshened up a bit. They saw each other there, and the older monk greeted the younger monk, “How are you?” Not too many words, but acknowledging him. The younger monk said, “It was a good winter, I have now conquered my anger.” The old monk said, “That’s wonderful. That’s fantastic, that you are now free from anger.” And then the older monk went over and walked over the straw of the younger monk. At which point the younger monk yelled, “How could you do that! Don’t do that to my straw!” And the older monk said, “Ah, I see that you have conquered your anger.

It is very easy to conquer one’s anger if you are living alone. However, if you have to interact with other human beings it is much more difficult. It is fine to think about one’s spiritual journey when you are alone, but when you are in community, when you are interacting with others, ah, that’s where the real growth happens. That’s when you are confronted by your own stuff. That’s when you begin to have the grist for the mill to smooth things out.

Today we have three readings about community. In the Old Testament we have those delightful people of God that God has freed them from slavery in Egypt. He has taken them away from all of the oppression of the Egyptians. He brings them to the edge of the Red Sea at which point they go, “What? You brought us out here to die? What are you going to do about it Moses?” To which Moses says, “It’s not me, it’s God and God will find away.” Then he parts the sea, and they go across the sea, that great miracle. They get on the other side of the sea and they are free, free to have a new life.

Last week, we heard about how after they had been wandering around for a while, suddenly they were hungry. “Back in Egypt we had plenty of food, and you brought us out here to starve,” they complain to Moses. Once again Moses says, “Don’t complain to me, it’s God who is doing this.” And God provides with them meat, of birds that drop from the sky, and manna they can collect from the ground. Once more God does great wonderful things for them.

A week later in our lectionary, they are someplace with no water and they are thirsty and once again they are complaining. Like most human beings they are looking for someone to blame. So they go to Moses, “It’s your fault, you are the one that brought us out of Egypt. It’s your fault that we are thirsty - do something about it.”

Isn’t it amazing how important it is to have someone to blame. If you have ever been home and your spouse is gone and your children are gone and you are there by yourself and you can’t find your keys you discover that you don’t have anybody to blame for the fact that they are missing. So they blame Moses and Moses says, “Don’t blame me. It’s God.” And of course once again God provides for them. They had forgotten, they had so quickly forgotten about God’s provision, about God’s love, about God’s caring for them.

In the Gospel reading we have a different kind of community. It’s a family, and here we have the father that says there is some work to be done. He goes to the first son and says, “Go do it” and the first son says, “I don’t have time. I’m sorry I can’t do it.” He goes to the second son who says, “Sure Dad, no problem.” If you have raised teenagers you have probably experienced this. You go to one and say, “Go clean your room.” “Dad, I can’t possibly clean my room today, I’ve got all this homework to do and then a friend is coming over and we’ve got this video game we have to play and I haven’t checked my Facebook page for days and….” And then you go to the second son, “Clean your room.” “Oh sure Dad, no problem.” Well the sure Dad no problem, whether working in the vineyard or cleaning their room, they are out there and they see their friends. “Oh, hi, let’s go get a cup of coffee. They go to Starbucks. The friend has a new video game. He goes over and to play the video game, by the time he gets home there is no time to clean his room. He meant to clean his room; there were just other more important things that came up. While the one who had said no goes into his room, sits down to do his homework, looks around and goes, “Yeah this room is kind of a mess, I guess I should pick it up.” And cleans it up.

And Jesus asks the question, “Which one was doing the will of the father?” And of course when Jesus talks about the Father he is talking about God. We’ve all had times in our lives when we have said we are going to do something and then for one reason or another we don’t do it. And we’ve all had times in our lives when we said no I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that and then we change our minds and we realize we really should. It is a very human situation. And what Jesus is saying is that when we are talking to God it is not about our words, and what we say, it is not about whether we can say it all correctly, it is about whether we do it. Or as one might say it is not about talking the talk, it’s about walking the walk. Of living it.

And then we have this wonderful passage about community from Paul in his second letter to the Philippians. If you read Paul’s letters you realize that he had a kind of consistent experience. He would go to some town, he would set up a church, he would then go on to another town and then he would hear about how the first church he had set up was quarreling and arguing or changing the theology or doing something inappropriate. And then he would write to them and say come on guys remember what I said to you - we all have to get along, etc. This particular letter to the Philippians was probably written while he was in jail. So imagine, he’s in jail and trying to encourage his flock. And the challenges that that church had are greater then even the churches today.

We’ve all had at one time or another an experience of a church that had some disagreement. Somewhere, at some time. Imagine the Philippians. Back then there is only one church in town, so if you disagree and you have a fight there is no other church to go to. If you don’t like your minister you can’t go to the other one. If you don’t like the music you can’t go and find a better musicians. You are stuck. If you are going to stay Christian you are stuck with this community. And this community is made up of people who would never encounter each other on a day-to-day basis. They didn’t shop in the same stores, they didn’t walk down the same streets, because you had people who were Jewish, and you had people who had been Pagans - worshippers of pagan gods. You had people who spoke Greek, and people who spoke Latin, and people who spoke Hebrew. You had people who were wealthy and people who were slaves. And you had men and you had women. None of these groups would normally interact with each other. Here they are put together into a community because they have all felt called by Christ. Here Paul is writing to them, and I can’t say it any better than he did. “If there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.” In other word, please, if you care about me, if you care about Christ, if your life has been touched, get along, get along. He goes on to say, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” To me that’s what it means to love one another as Christ loved us.

I had a lot of time to think about love when I was asked to be the officiant at my son’s wedding. I wondered what I was going to say to my son and my daughter-in-law about love, about marriage? What little hopeful pearl of wisdom that they might remember could I say? As I reflected on in I concluded that love has to do with caring about the welfare of the other person.

We have a problem in English because we use the word love for so many different things. In Greek, which the New Testament was written in, there are four different words that are translated as love. But we only have one word for love and we use that same word to say I love my car, I love my spouse, I love my child, I love my dog, I love chocolate. We use the same word even thought they are very different meanings. I love chocolate but not the same way I love my children. And so it is a little hard for us sometimes to talk about love. The kind of love that a spouse has, the kind of love that a parent has, is a love in which you care about that other person’s welfare. That means that you desire for that person to be whole. You want that person to be physically whole, spiritually whole, emotionally whole. You want them to take their gifts and thrive. If you are a parent you know what it feels like when you see your child blossom, when all of a sudden you see them being generous. Or you see them discovering their gifts and finding a new thing that they can do that they are good at. You see the joy in their face. Nothing feels better than that. When you see someone you love growing into the fullness of who they can be as a human being. To me that is what love is about. It is wanting that for the other person.

So in a married couple it is a matter of wanting the partner to be whole. It doesn’t mean always giving them what they want, because sometimes giving them what they want is not good for them, but it means wanting them to be whole and to thrive. It means wanting to give up what you may want in order to have what that other one wants and needs, that will make them whole. And if in the couple both partners are that way then each one can be selfless because they know the other is not going to take advantage of their desire to give. It also means don’t let your partner be abusive or use you because it hurts the person who is the abuser as much as it does the person who is abused. It means that you set limits because that helps that person develop limits.

It is caring about the other. Or the way Paul puts it in regard to community, “Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.” That is a Christian loving community where each person focuses less on their own interests and more on the interests of others. And that is what, I believe, Jesus meant when he said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Love one another as I have loved you. How Christ loved us, loves us, is he wants each one of us to be whole. He wants each one of us to know love and to know God. He wants each one of us to thrive. He wants each one of us to have all our gifts be manifested. He wants each one of us to know how much we are loved. And the way he demonstrated that love was by his willingness to die on the cross. So when he was on the cross, even with the pain and the suffering and the humiliation, there was him a sense of joy because he knew that was the best way for all of us to come to know God’s love and to be the people he yearned for us to be. That was his gift to us. And he invites us to love one another as he has loved us.

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.