Becoming Loam

Becoming Loam

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 16, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

My mother, may she rest in peace, loved to grow flowers. About the only vegetable I remember her growing was tomatoes, but she always grew flowers. I remember roses, dahlias, daphne, sweet peas, zinnias, and many others. I remember that at least once and maybe more than once she had a load of loam delivered to the house. She worked it into her flower beds to create better soil for the flowers to grow in. That was many decades ago now, but I still remember the loam. I remember its rich, dark brown color, its smooth, dense feel, and its rich, earthy, organic aroma. It has an air of fertility about it even as it sat in a pile in our driveway. That wonderful smell is what I remember best. It is a fond memory that evokes find memories of a happy childhood now long past. Loam is a type of soil that produces abundant plant growth when used with skill and care. It is wonderful stuff.

As I contemplated Jesus’ parable of the sower that we just heard that wonderful memory of dense, rich, aromatic loam came to my mind. So did the way Mom would work it into her flower beds to foster the growth of her beloved blooms. That parable is, after all, about different kinds of soil. The parable’s farmer sows seed, presumably working to produce some kind of crop to feed his family or to sell in the marketplace in town. Now, I’m no farmer, although when I was about four years old I thought I wanted to be one when I grew up. I of course had no idea of what hard and risky work farming is. No, I’m no farmer, but it seems to me that the farmer of Jesus’ parable was being somewhat careless about where he sowed his precious seed. Did he really think some of it would grow in the path that got walked all over every day? Or in rocky ground? Or among thorn bushes? Yet I suppose that is how it is with God and God’s word. God sows it everywhere, hoping that in at least some of the places where it lands it will sprout and produce a good harvest. And of course we’re dealing here with a parable, not a handbook on good farming practices. And some of the farmer’s seed falls on what the parable calls “good soil.” This seed sprouted, grew, and produced the abundant harvest the farmer was hoping for.

This is a parable, a little story that Jesus told to make some point. So what is this parable’s point? It is, I think, that we are called to be good soil for the word of God. We are not to be the barren path, nor the rocky soil, nor the soil infested with thorns that will choke out the word. We are to be the good soil. In other words, we are to be loam for the word of God.

OK, we are called to loam for the word of God; but that statement raises as many questions as it answers, or maybe more questions than it answers. To me the two most obvious questions it raises are: what does it mean to be loam, and if we aren’t loam already how do we become loam for the word of God? So let me tackle those question one at a time in that order.

What does it mean for us to be loam for the word of God? Our parable actually suggests an answer to that question. It says that the good soil produces abundant crops in the person who hears the word of God and “understands” it. All parables have their limitations, and one of the limitations I see in this parable is that it makes “understand it” sound like something that either happens right away all at once or doesn’t happen at all. Well, that’s not how I experience the faith, and I doubt that it’s how many of you experience the faith either. Understanding the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a lifelong undertaking. I have worked with it professionally for years, and I don’t claim to understand it fully. I doubt that I will ever understand it fully. It’s too grand a subject for us fully to understand. It’s too mysterious. I will always remain a bit of mystery that we are called not to understand but to live into.

When we think of “understand” the word about the kingdom this way, then understanding as something that fosters the flourishing of the kingdom makes sense. After all, the kingdom of God isn’t something that comes about magically. It comes about when we humans cooperate with God in creating it. And we can hardly cooperate with God in creating it is we don’t know what it is. If we don’t understand it.

Yet with all due respect for Matthew and the explanation of this parable that he puts in Jesus’ mouth, it seems to me that surely there is more to the kingdom of God thriving and producing an abundant harvest than our understanding. Understanding it seems to me is mostly a head thing. When I at least hear the verb understand I think first of all of cognitive processes. But surely there is more involved in being rich soil for the kingdom of God than just thinking the right things. Thinking correctly is a necessary starting place, for having wrong ideas about something blocks proper understandings and gets in the way of the right things prospering and producing abundantly. But we humans are more than our thoughts. It seems to be that there are a couple of other things involved if we are to be loam, to be rich soil for God’s kingdom.

In addition to our heads we must accept the word of the kingdom in our hearts. In the Bible the heart is a symbol of the wholeness of a person, of the person’s entire being. In this sense heart is about more than thoughts. It is about feelings, emotions, urges, drives, desires. Our heads think, but our hearts motivate. If we are to be rich soil for the kingdom we must enter into the kingdom not only with our heads but with our hearts, with our whole being. Only if we do that will the kingdom flourish in us so that we be agents of its flourishing in the world. There’s a saying in theological circles that means a lot to me. We say the heart cannot love what the head cannot accept, and I certainly believe that that is true. I’ve spent a lot of my time as a professional Christian working out the head stuff, coming up with theological understandings that my head accepts so that my heart can love the Christian faith, Christian ministry, Jesus Christ, and God. The head stuff matters, but growing the kingdom of God takes more than our heads. It takes our hearts too.

Here’s another way of putting this point. I can understand a lot of things in my head and do nothing to make those things real in the world. If I am to be loam for the kingdom of God I must feel passion for the kingdom. I must love the kingdom. I must want to see the kingdoms of the world transformed into the kingdom of God. I must be willing to work to make that happen. I must be willing to risk to make that happen. Indeed, I must be ready to risk a great deal, even my life, if I am truly to be loam for the kingdom. After all, being loam for the kingdom got Jesus crucified, and it has gotten a huge number of Christians killed over the centuries as they worked to make the kingdom real in the face of the world’s very different forces and priorities. I suppose all of those other things that I must be in order to become loam for the kingdom are a kind of understanding, or perhaps they just flow from a proper understanding. Whatever. I know that my being loam for the kingdom involves a lot more than just thinking the right things.

So how do I, how do we, become loam for the kingdom. Well, first of all we have to figure out what it is. A woman at the lectionary study I do on Wednesday mornings are the retirement place in Monroe asked me this last week what the kingdom is. I told her that’s not an easy question to answer. What it comes down to is the the kingdom of God is the way the world would be if God were king of the world and the kings, or other rulers, of the world were not. The kingdom of God is the world ordered according to God’s values and desires. It is the world transformed from a place of injustice to a place of justice for all. Transformed from a place of violence to a place of nonviolent peace. From a place of material values to a place of spiritual values. From a place of prejudice and hatred to a place of acceptance and love.

Then to be loam for the kingdom we have to love Christ’s vision for what the world can be and what God wants the world to be. We have to give our hearts to it. We have to long for it, pine for it, ache for our world that is so far from it. We have to love it even it making it reality means we have to give up our privileges. Give up some of our wealth. Change the way we live. Change the things we value. Love God so much that we can’t just sit by and let the world go on its hateful, harmful ways like it always has and still does.

That, folks, is what would make loam for the kingdom of God. Being that way would make us fertile soil for the seeds of the kingdom that Jesus sowed during his life on earth and that God continues to sow among us every day. Being loam for the kingdom isn’t easy. It isn’t safe. The world resists the kingdom of God, and when people try to establish the kingdom of God the world fights back. But God is like the sower in Jesus’ parable. The farmer sowing his seed in that parable didn’t want it to fall on barren ground and never sprout, never produce a harvest. He wanted all of his seed to sprout. He wanted the plant it produced to take root, to grow, and to produce abundantly. That’s how it is with God and God’s seeds of the kingdom. God doesn’t want those seeds to fail. God wants them to thrive, and God wants us to be the ones in and among whom it thrives. God wants us to be loam. God calls us to be rich, dense, organic, aromatic loam for the seeds of the kingdom. Can we be loam? Will we be loam? May it be so. Amen.