Growing in Faith by Rev. Gabrielle Martone at Pearl River United Methodist Church on Sunday 12 January 2020
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Luke 8:1-15 NRSV
Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.
When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: “A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew, it produced a hundredfold.” As he said this, he called out, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” Then his disciples asked him what this parable meant. He said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that ‘looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand.’ “Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away. As for what fell among the thorns, these are the ones who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.
So some of you know, I took six years of Latin when I was in high school and middle school. I was not in high school for six years. I realized that as they came out of my mouth, that was going to sound odd. So when I... Because I was a nerd and I still am a nerd, but when I was in sixth grade we had to do a world language class that was part of our curriculum. And so you took a semester of French, a semester of Spanish, a semester of reading and a semester of Latin.
Now when I was in sixth grade, I was so excited that we were going to have a semester of reading because that is my favorite thing to do in the whole wide world. And I thought, "Oh, I could just spend an entire semester just reading." Then I found out reading class was like phonics and reading comprehension and all of those things that I didn't just get to sit in the corner curled up with a book, but Spanish was... To everyone else was going to take Spanish, it was too normal and everybody else was going to take French because they thought it was going to be easy.
And I had to be the weird kid who took Latin. So I legitimately spent six years of my life studying this ancient dead language in a class of three kids. Only the really interesting kids took Latin. I was a weirdo. I fully embrace my weirdness, it's fine. But my teacher, I had the same teacher five out of those six years and she taught me so much, not just about Latin, not just about Roman culture. So much about life and what it means to be a good person. When our superintendent of schools tried to get rid of the Latin program, because there were three kids in Latin, she taught us what it was like to have to advocate for ourselves, to continue to be able to take Latin.
And I swear the most disappointed though this woman, we called her Magister because that means teacher in Latin. The most disappointed I ever made this poor woman was when I told her as I was getting ready to graduate, that I was never going to take another dead language. And she kind of looked at me with that sad, disappointed mom look in her eye until four years later when I graduated with a minor in ancient Greek. And she looked at me, I saw her after I graduated from college and she said, "I knew it, I knew it."
But see, here's the thing, I took six years of Latin and was an okay student. I worked really hard in it, but I wasn't the best Latin student. My senior year I did early decision and I knew Smith didn't take AP credit. So even though I was taking AP Latin, I didn't take the AP test. So I kind of slacked off, because I could. But when I was in seminary, I missed language. And so I picked back up the Vulgate, which is the Latin translation of the Bible. And I sat down and I began to read it. And it had been a really long time since I had taken Latin, but I could still read a fair amount of the Vulgate and not because I know the stories, but because somewhere deep inside of me, what McGeester Higley taught me was still very much a part of my subconscious. And I think sometimes faith is like that for us, right?
Those of us who grew up in the faith are often brought to church by our parents. And so we go to Sunday school, right? And we learn the songs and the stories of Sunday school. And we have great relationships with our teachers. And we do kids' choir and we do bell choir and we get up and we do all the pageants and we do vacation Bible school and we help. And we are a part of the congregation and we go through our confirmation journey and it is a powerful and moving experience for us.
Then sometimes we walk away, right? We kind of go, "Oh, mom's not making me go to church anymore so I have something else to do this morning," or "I'm back from college but I've gotten really used to this whole, I sleep till noon and I'm up till three or four o'clock in the morning. So a church really isn't on my radar," Or we grow up and we become a little more disillusioned with the world and the institution. So we kind of walk away from what we've been taught.
Then something happens in our lives, whether it's our own desire to have our children be raised in the church or a life crisis happens to us, or mom's dragging me back to church again and something in the depths of who we are feels familiar and you can read and understand better because it is at the core of who you are.
Or perhaps you didn't grow up in the church or perhaps you didn't really learn whole lot in Sunday school, not from our Sunday school program clearly, but there's something deep within you that echoes, echoes of familiarity, echoes of this feels right. There's something about this that I have done before. There is a part of us deep with in the very makeup of who we are, who yearn and desire to learn about God, but it is our choice, how we nurture and water it. We can say, "Oh, it's fine."
I come to church on Sunday mornings and our pastor is mildly entertaining and she doesn't grate my nerves that much, so I can just sit there and listen to her and occasionally she does something stupid, so at least I have a good laugh by the time I leave, but that's it. The hollow echoing in our soul or remains unfilled, or we can begin to grow and to nurture that seed that exists within all of us.
A sower went out to sow, right? It's a familiar parable. It's one that is so often used in... This past May when the church that I was working with their youth, we joined up together with two of my friends from seminary who are also youth pastors and we took them, we took 29 middle school and high school students away on a weekend retreats. And the only parable we studied this entire weekend was this sowing passage.
So the amount of times that pastor Skitch and pastor Wes and I said, and so a sower went out to sow because we did it all the time. But there's something beautiful in this passage about who we are and how we grow, right? If you are a sower, if you've done any kind of farming before or gardening, you'll know that most smart farmers don't just throw seed Willy nilly, right? You don't just walk around with your priceless wheat seed and go, "Oh this looks like a great place to plant. There's concrete, there's carpet, there's all kinds of other junk. Well, I'm just going to put it here." Right?
If I were to tell you all that I wanted to grow a field and I sowed some seed right here, what would happen? Absolutely nothing, right? You'd all pick it up and be like, she's really lost her marbles. It may happen at some you never know. A sower went out to sow and he does sow recklessly and without abandon. And everywhere that he goes, he goes to leave something that might grow and the seeds that yields a hundred fold are the ones that are cultivated, breathed life into and cared for.
The seeds that are inside of us have been given to us recklessly and without abandon because Jesus loves us, but they can't become anything unless we are willing to do the things that it takes for it to grow. Now, some people grow up in the faith and they have these profound experiences and their whole lives change and they say, "Yes, I have accepted Jesus and now because Jesus is my savior, my life is going to be a plus for ever. Yay." And then the first big crisis of life happens and that belief that because you love God, life will be perfect. Squelches the growth of that seed because you don't have the strength or the roots to get you through.
Then there are others who never even really get a chance to cultivate the word within them, the seed within them because we get choked out by all of the other things. We get choked out by all of our responsibilities and our excuses that we just don't have time. Or something else becomes more important than that cultivation, right?
We live a life where we all have the same 24 hours in one day. The things that we care most about, we make happen. And so sometimes birds of other priorities pick out our seed and we don't really get anywhere, but there's that seed that's always growing and trying to do something within us that when we give it the space and the cultivation that it needs, when we give it the attention and the love that it deserves, all of a sudden it blossoms and grows and we have experiences that we never imagined we could, but it takes time and energy and effort.
It means that sometimes more often than not, you pick this up and you just don't just pick it up to like prop the door open with it or, "Oh no, the pastor's coming. Let's make sure this is on our coffee table." Oh, no, I'm just saying. This, this book, this word has everything you need in it. It is every story of everyone's failure and mess ups and doubts and wrestling. This is not a book that is filled with stories of people who had it figured out and therefore their lives were perfect. This book is filled with brokenness and anger and doubt and anxiety and fear and the stuff that you and I go through every single day, and so often we believe that the people that are written about in this book have never experienced these things before.
These people have to be perfect, right? Because God chose them. Let's just really briefly talk about Abraham, okay. Those of you who will be joining in our God's messy family Bible study, we'll get to know Abraham even more. Abraham is a disaster. God promises him something and he becomes impatient, so he seeks to have children from another way. Then he gets afraid that the Pharaoh will want to steal his wife, so he just says, "Oh, that's my sister," twice. Abraham, who is held up as the perfecter of our faith, of the father of our journey is messed up just like you and I.
Or the story of Moses. Moses, who is the great leader who brings the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, does not get to go to the promised land. Moses who endured exile and hatred and dealing with the complaining Israelites. Moses who got up on the mountain and literally sat down and talked to God, doesn't make it to the promised land because he too is impatient and gets caught up in his own power.
About Peter, Peter who is the rock upon which the church will be built and Peter can't get his act together enough to understand where is actually calling him to be and he is so good at being an overachiever that he's on one end of the football field and Jesus is on the other going, Peter, we're over here and still denies Jesus three times and yeah, Peter is the rock upon which our church is built. This is not a collection of perfection or all of the ways that you don't measure up because you continue to sin and you have darkness and brokenness inside of you. This is the stories of people who say to you throughout the ages, you are not alone.
Have you ever wrestled and cried out to God, why me? I have done everything right in my life. I show up and I do the things that you have told me to do and still my life is falling apart. What did I ever do to you, God? Can I point you to Job? Okay, that's a whole book. This, this is a reminder that we are all human and God loves us anyway. When was the last time you cracked it open? This is all about how we grow and change and deepen our relationship. Not a rule book for how we follow all of these things and become perfect little angels, but how even in our struggles and our fears and our doubts and our anxieties still God says, "You are good. Come home."
One of the core principles of who we are as the Pearl River United Methodist Church is that we are growing in our faith and growing in our faith means that we are nurturing that seed inside of us. We are watering and cultivating and educating ourselves on everything that is contained in this thing and in all of the literature around us. How are you growing in your faith? Is it active or have you grown stagnant? Are you actively talking with the people in your life about the way that God is moving through you or are we still so afraid to talk about God even to our church members and our church family because God forbid we're seeing like one of those people and you all know who I'm talking about, right?
Growing in faith requires work and priority shifting and understanding that this thing, this book is not something to be afraid of, but it's something to fall back on, to mature and to rest and to be pickled in. My former district superintendent used to spend 20 minutes a day pickling in Jesus, which was an odd phrase, but as he used to say, "It takes a long time to make pickles," and so 20 minutes a day he would just sit in the juices of the Bible and pickle himself in Jesus. It's kind of a weird phraseology, but it makes sense.
It is not enough to just show up on Sunday mornings. It'll do a little bit for you. It'll draw you deeper into connection, but it's not enough. There is more in here for you, for me, for the church. You're currently living in a thousand different ways. A time of great discord, in a time of deep uncertainty, in a time of doubt and fear and anxiety and it can be really easy to isolate, but what does it look like to draw yourself in here?
There are a bunch of ways that you can do this, there are a bunch of ways that you grow in your faith. You join a small group or you come to Bible study or you pick up. If you're not ready to commit to being around other people yet, find a really good devotional. I can help you find those. It's part of my gem or a really good book. If you're a big reader, there are great books that can introduce you into understanding and thinking about the text and what we do as a church differently, but just like the reality is if you are in an English class or a math class, you can't learn more than what your teacher teaches you if you're not doing homework, right?
All of my educators in the room or you can't if you take a semester of reading and that's the only time you're ever taught reading and you don't read when you go home and your parents don't read to you when your child becomes very difficult to learn to love reading in your life, right? You have to practice the things that have been given to you. It means leaving our lecture hall if we're going to use a college metaphor and going into our precept groups or our small groups or home to our study carols and doing the work that helps it to make sense.
I promise you that while there are really hard names in here, right Deb. And there are weird Hebrew pronunciations and the transliteration is really awkward sometimes and there are difficult passages in here. Your story is written on these pages, what you are going through right now, no matter what it is is written in these pages. This should not be a fear tactic or something that we are so totally afraid of that we keep it on the shelf collecting dust until the pastor comes over and we put it nicely on the coffee table and I go, yeah, it definitely is. It does not go there. Or you could at least wipe the dust off.
Literally it happened to me once. I went for a home visit and I understood, look, we know, I may seem stupid sometimes, but I am not. We can tell when he goes, oh, let me pull this off the shelf and just put it right here so the pastor thinks we study this every day. Yeah, we know. Believe me. I will never forget the guilt that I felt on behalf of my entire colleagues from the very beginning of the church as when my first appointment, multitudes of people walked up to me and said, "We've never been to Bible study because we are afraid."
What if I'm too stupid to understand? I'm not smart like those people. How will I ever be able to read that Bible? And that broke me deeply because this isn't for people who have an MDiv. Let me tell you something. I understand this book less with an MDiv than I did before I started seminary, okay? That's what the Bible will do to you. This is for you and I guarantee that as you begin to open yourself up to it, that echoing seed that is longing to be nourished and fed, will speak to you in the same way that the Vulgate spoke back to me and recalled all of my Latin from six years of studying and will begin to feel familiar.
Begin to remind you as we grow in our faith, we begin to nourish and to feed and to cultivate. Their whole lives are changed and it will challenge you. This will make you think. It may even cause you to change your opinion. Who would’ve thunk it. This may cause you to be a different person, but the person you will bloom into because you are growing in the word and in your faith will be the person that God has called you to be. Pure, true, and strong, and you will produce a hundred fold. And then you too can become like the sower and cultivate for others, today and every day. Amen.
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