5 Lent B - Meditation on a popcorn seed

Hold a hard, smooth corn seed in your hand. It is beautiful, secure, and inedible. Drop it in a very hot pan and suddenly in bursts open into a delicious piece of popcorn.
Sometimes we have to die to who we think we are to become what God intends for us to be.

Fifth Sunday of Lent B

Transcribed from a sermon given

March 25, 2012

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

John 12:20-33

I love when I have an opportunity to do “show and tell,” so we have something to hand out to everyone. The story today was about seeds. I am going to give each one of you a seed. Will help out from the back and I’ll start of here and we’ll give everybody and seed.

(Seeds are distributed.)

You may recognize these. They are corn seeds. In fact they are popcorn. It is what I had in my house.

You will notice as you hold onto this how incredibly hard it is. It is like a rock. It has this hard outer shell. If you think about the life of a seed, it starts out with a plant that is growing and makes a flower. Then the flower gets fertilized and a seed begins. All the energy of that plant, all the nutrients that it gets from the soil, all the energy that it changes from the sun, all of that work of the plant goes into building up the seed, of providing it everything it needs to become strong and healthy. Then once the seed is established, once it has developed and is healthy it makes this casing around itself, this hard shell, to protect itself. This keeps it from being easily hurt, and it keeps it from growing any bigger. It has that dual nature.

This popcorn with this hard shell around it will stay like that forever. After all, this popcorn has probably been in my cabinet for years. I have no idea. Don’t check the expiration date. It is said that in some of the graves in Egypt they found grain that was still okay and viable. The seed survives because it is strong and contained.

It is kind of like when we are growing up. We start out as a major investment of our family. They feed us, clothe us, and care for all our physical needs. They teach us, educate us, and help us hopefully to grow spiritually and to develop a sense of who we are, a sense of what’s important, and a sense of what the meaning of the world is. If we have had a really good healthy childhood we develop into an adult that is strong and self sufficient, and we develop what is called a healthy ego. The ego is designed to protect us. That ego keeps us from being hurt by the outside world. It protects that sense of self that we have developed. It serves like that hard outer shell on the seed. And that is important, and that is necessary, the seed has to get to that point, just as humans beings have to get to the point where they have a really good sense of who they are and what is important. But, that shell, that ego, that keeps us safe also limits us. It is hard and rigid and keeps us from continuing to grow. And as it keeps us safe from things that are hurtful outside, it also can keep us from experiencing love and letting good things come inside. And our egos can get in the way of our union with God.

So just as the seed is perfect in what it is, it is not done. Just as when we become healthy whole adults we are not done. You see, if you take this seed, this popcorn seed, and you put it in a pan that is really really hot it is going to feel like it is going to die. Because that heat could kill it, destroy it. But if it isn’t too old, the moisture, the little bit of moisture inside will expand in that heat and all of a sudden it goes “POP” and it turns from this hard thing that you couldn’t possibly eat into one of my favorite foods.

It bursts forth and that shell becomes just a little bit around the bottom because the essence of it has expanded in a way that one never would have imagined if you didn’t know the secret of popcorn. This wonderful white fluffy thing, much more than that seed could have imagined. But it took heat; it took dying as a seed in order to become that which it was intended to be.

And so it is with human beings. We become healthy adult human beings with a good established self-concept and a nice strong ego and that’s not the end. God wants more than that. God offers more than that. But in order to transcend this ego, it has to die. It has to be ripped apart. And that is uncomfortable, to say the least. Most of us have known times in our lives where we felt like we were dying. Times when perhaps we were confronted with illness, or the death of a friend or family member, or the loss of a relationship, or divorce or losing a job where suddenly your self identity as this employee is gone. Or perhaps that happened at retirement. When what you had been doing all your life to feel good about yourself is suddenly no longer there. There are lots of different ways in which we have what one writer calls “necessary suffering.” Times when we are confronted with pain and lose and it hurts and we feel like we are dying, because a part of us is.

During those times, those times of struggle, which the psalmist calls “going through the valley of the shadow of death,” we are promised that Christ walks with us, that we are not alone in those dark times. But sometimes, when we are about to experience that death of our egos, we feel like Christ felt on the cross. We may feel abandoned by God, alone. And yet it is those moments of deepest despair and lose that can be the times that burst us open so that we are able to love in a way that we never loved before and we are able to receive love in a way we haven’t before and our relationship with God takes one step closer to union.

Christ says that we must die to be reborn. And here you are at a church, a Christian church that follows a leader who was crucified and died. And who calls all of us to take up our cross and follow him. Christianity is not easy. Christianity is about a willingness to die to who we think we are in order that we can discover who we really are - beloved children of God. But as long as we hold on to that hard rigid ego self-identification we can’t realize just how much we are loved. So like the seed it is only through dying that we come to fullness of life.

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.