Sermon: God the Cultivator

What a roller coaster week this has been. Since we were here last Sunday we have had Live8, the Gleneagles summit which has focused us both on the tragedy of world debt, of AIDS, of trade injustice and on the potential and will to do something about them. We have celebrated London 2012 and seen the delight on the faces of Londoners from Trafalgar Square to Stratford, and we have grieved the violence and tragedy of the London bombs. And, locally, Durham has been filled with brass bands. Roger Federer’s victory at Wimbledon last Sunday seems a lifetime away. It is a week when politicians, pop stars, ordinary people concerned to make this a better world, sports stars, terrorists and emergency services have all held centre stage at some point or another. How do we make sense of a week like this? We cannot put it into a neat box and say that it has been a good week for human kind, or that all hope for the world and a better future is lost. We have hoped and we have cried, we have rejoiced and we have been angry at injustice and innocent suffering, we have marvelled at the calm efficiency and compassion of the emergency services in London and we have asked how anyone can willingly cause such ghastly suffering.

And today we gather in this cathedral and we bring the whole lot to God. And, of course, we are all setting these big national and international events alongside our own personal and family events. So in some ways the experience and the emotions we bring today are no different from those on any other Sunday, when within the congregation there is enormous and exhilarating joy and there is deep pain, grief and anger. It is just that this week we have experienced these emotions collectively and so are more aware of just what a mixed offering our lives make to God.

And then there’s the parable of the sower.

We hear quite a lot about God and cultivation, even God as a gardener, in the biblical story: from Genesis 2 where God is getting his fingernails dirty creating and planting a garden in Eden, into the Promised Land which was crammed full of mouth-watering crops, through various prophets like Elijah who railed against Ahab’s murder of Naboth in order to take over his family vineyard to grow luxury vegetables, to Isaiah who sang about a vineyard and God’s deep disappointment that, despite his care for the people they were like wild grapes in the cultivated vineyard. The story keeps going back to gardening and farming as a way to express something important about God and the people. As farming was so central to the people’s survival, it is natural for faming to be central to their understanding of God since God is always to be known in the midst of ordinary life.

And the picture is one of God’s good world there for the people to enjoy and care for responsibly. It is a story of God’s generosity and desire for life to flourish: an important principle as we consider responsibility for, and the implications of, climate change. And so we should not be surprised when Jesus tells a story of a farmer scattering seed with rather wild abandon, giving it the opportunity to grow whether it falls on a path, stones, among thorns or in good soil, knowing that the harvest will vary but sowing it nonetheless. Not for this sower the assurance that the crop will grow and yield well, but rather a generous lashing of opportunity as the seed and the soil are given the chance to produce a harvest. The example is of risk taken to offer the chance for life, rather than absolute guarantee of success sought before there is action. Perhaps, as we respond to G8 and to the bombing, that is an example we need to take into account: can we risk creating the opportunity for life, even if there is failure?

As I reread the parable I was struck by the incredible ordinariness of the story as Jesus told it. We hear it followed by Jesus’ explanation of it to his disciples, and we miss out – as our reading missed out – the intervening verses which indicate there was a gap between the parable being told to the crowds and the explanation which was given later only to the disciples in response to their question about parables. So if we put ourselves in the shoes of the crowd, what they heard was a story about a farmer doing something they would be very familiar with – sowing seed in his field, scattering it over all the soil regardless of its quality so that some seed ended up on the path, among thistles or on rocky ground. It was all remarkably ordinary, the people would have seen it happen for themselves so in a sense there is no punch line to the story as he told it. It was just an account of everyday farming life that ended with a variable harvest and some patches of land that yielded nothing.

So what? They might well ask. It’s hardly worthy of an episode of the first century equivalent of the Archers. And the disciples clearly did ask because they got an explanation which related this account of everyday life to the kingdom of God. Not an obvious connection to make, but one that Jesus taught them to make as they listened to him. And it’s one that we need to learn to make because if we do not encounter God in the midst of daily life, where will we encounter him? And if we are not used to making connections between our everyday life and the kingdom of God, how can we do that when events such as those we’ve lived through this week happen? How can we begin to answer the question, ‘where is God in the London situation?’ if we have not asked that same question day by day in Durham or wherever we happen to live.

Our closing hymn is a prayer that we can do just this, ‘teach me, my God and king, in all things thee to see, and what I do in everything to do it as for thee.’ George Herbert, who wrote this in the seventeenth century knew the need to be aware of making every simple task – sweeping a room is one example he gives – an opportunity to serve and be aware of God. Theological insight is often born in the midst of daily routine done faithfully. If the parable of the sower is about nothing else – and actually it is about other things too, as Jesus explained – it is about the need for disciples to probe for what God is saying in the midst of the ordinary tasks of life. So no one can escape, we all have ordinary life to live, and we can all be theologians in the midst of daily life if we are attentive and begin, prayerfully, to ask questions of ourselves and God. Then, when triumph or tragedy strike – the excitement of the Olympics or the horror of the bombs – we need not be like seed that is choked by weeds, eaten by birds or shrivels for lack of roots, but can produce a crop that befits the kingdom of God.

That is our task. But we do it in the context I spoke of earlier – the sheer generosity of God towards this world which he created, loves and sustains. At the end of the recent meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council when thorny and hard discussions were held, the Archbishop of Canterbury said, ‘our security lies not in signs of our virtue or achievement, but in God’s generosity’. The same idea was expressed far more colourfully by an elderly Italian electrician called to the house of an Anglican Chaplain in Rome; I quote from last week’s Church Times, ‘faced by one of my modest fuse boxes into which had been crammed with what seemed like thousands of electrical cables, he came out with “Just look at that! The Almighty makes the world so big and we go and put on tight shoes.”’

We have seen people trying to put on tight shoes this week, tight shoes of terror, tight shoes of self-interest, understandable tight shoes of fear. The issues are complex and I do not suggest that there are easy answers. But the great contribution that we as Christians can make is to insist that we do not lose sight of the goodness of God and of God’s world, and God’s passion – as a farmer is passionate for his or her seed to grow – for the world to flourish and produce good harvests. God’s goodness and generosity is where our security lies.