Ordinary 15 Year A

Sermon Based on:
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our Strength and our Redeemer.

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We arrive this morning carrying whole ecosystems within us.

We bring the weather of the week just passed: conversations still circling in our minds, work left unfinished, people we are worried about, decisions waiting to be made, and the many demands competing for our attention.
Some of us arrive tired. Some distracted. Some carrying grief, anxiety or uncertainty. Some carry a quiet sense of failure: the things we intended to do, the habits we hoped to change, the relationships we wanted to mend, the progress we thought we would have made by now.
We also live within larger ecosystems of stress.
Financial pressure, ecological anxiety, war, political hostility, loneliness, personal trauma and collective trauma. News and notifications reach continually towards us.
We are encouraged to care about everything, respond to everything and keep producing as though our minds, bodies and spirits have no limits.
We measure our’s and other’s success by numbers, achievement, productivity, influence, attendance, income, recognition, certainty.
yet very real risk is we may no longer recognise or value gift and growth based on our expectations or markers of success.

We gather beneath the southern skies during the season of Matariki.
We look towards the past and remember those who have died and those whose lives have helped shape our own.
We attend to the present with gratitude for the gifts and relationships sustaining us now.
We look towards the future, preparing the ground and holding hope for the year to come.
Past, present and future are gathered beneath the stars.
For those of us who are Pākehā, Matariki and mātauranga Māori offer a profound gift and invitation. An invitation to remember we are here now by the gift of our ancestors, by the gifts of creation and community which sustains us today as we work towards the future.
Much of the Christian tradition inherited by Pākehā churches came to Aotearoa shaped by northern-hemisphere landscapes, seasons and cultural imagination.
And we practise our faith here: beneath southern stars, beside the Pacific Ocean, within the seasons, histories and relationships of Aotearoa interconnected with the stories of our own lives.
Matariki locates us.
We look to the sky above us, the earth beneath us, the waters around us, those who came before us, those with whom we share life now and those who will follow.

I am learning Mātauranga Māori emerges from deep relationships among people, whenua, moana, whakapapa, seasons, food, memory and responsibility.
Knowledge nurtured through connection and careful attention to the living world.
Because we do not live as detached individuals moving through an abstract landscape. We inhabit particular places. We inherit particular histories.
Our lives depend upon ecosystems of relationship, knowledge, care and creation that we did not make for ourselves. And here in Aotearoa, a new beginning, a new year comes to us in our darkest winter.
The light is brief. The earth may appear quiet. Trees stand bare.
Seeds lie hidden beneath the soil.
Yet winter is alive.
Roots continue their work out of sight. Fallen leaves become nourishment.
Water enters the ground.
Seeds wait in darkness, carrying futures that cannot yet be seen. Winter holds the promise of new life.
Today we heard the beginning of the parable of the sower, verses one to nine. Then we jumped directly to verse eighteen, where Jesus explains the parable.
So I want to reclaim those missing verses for us today.
After Jesus says, “If you have ears, hear,” Matthew continues: Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?”
He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given…“But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Notice Jesus response “To you it has been given to know.” Until this week, I’ve paid just about zero attention to the universe within this little sentence. The word is “Given” – Jesus is saying something has been provided to them.
The disciples are not being congratulated for their superior intelligence or their spiritual competence.
They have received something.
And this lead me to realise that, even, before the giving of the gift, their very capacity to receive is provided, is given. Providence! And even then, they will miss the point, ask the wrong questions, compete with one another, fall asleep when Jesus needs them, run away when he is arrested.
By no means is this the gift of the permanent mastery of the mystery.
Traditionally, I’ve found this parable has leant itself to sermons which focus on a spiritual assessment of the soil. The soil of course, meaning us.
Are you hard ground? Are you shallow? Are you full of thorns? Are you good enough soil?
But soil does not create itself –the soil alone cannot be our focus. Or the sower. Or the seed.
This parable is about an ecosystem.

First, there’s an intention in the sower to indeed sow.
Then the sower’s actions.
This sower sows like a crazy person, seeds landing on the path, onto rocky ground, amidst the thorns. And still the sower sows…

Then the tiny seeds, holding endless future within itself.
There is the soil. There is sun and rain.
Microorganisms breaking down what has died to nourish the earth.
The complex and oft-forgotten worm.
Then seasons of warmth, seasons of cold, seasons when growth is visible, and seasons of hidden gestation.
There is absolutely zero expectation of this seed to grow up independently and autonomous to become the best seed ever trying its hardest by self-exertion or self-will.

I want to share with you Bereshit Rabbah 10:6, a Jewish midrash on Genesis.
“There is not a single blade of grass that does not have a constellation in the firmament— a heavenly force or angel appointed over it that bends over it and whispers, ‘Grow, grow, grow’ Our lives are infinitely accompanied.
Even the smallest blade of grass exists within a relationship between earth and heaven.
You know that the word humility is connected to humus: earth, ground, soil. Humility remembers that we are earth creatures.
We are embedded within the processes of life.
We depend upon one another and upon systems we cannot fully see.
We participate in growth, though we do not control all its conditions.
Here is a vision of growth and success not based on endless striving, clambering over others to get to the next step on the ladder, or comparing our insides with their shiny curated outsides.
A vision of success grounded in intrinsic collaboration, in relationality…
This year, the gift of Matariki for me, is this realisation.
Nothing was, or is now, or will be, outside of the abundant divine ecosystem.

Amen.