SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: Almighty God, we thank you for planting in us the seed of your word. By your Holy Spirit help us to receive it with joy, live according to it, and grow in faith and hope and love, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“Listen!” Matthew 13:3.
I have heard and preached more sermons on Jesus’ parable of the sower and the seed than I can remember. Most of them skate dangerously close to allegory, thereby missing the parable. Jesus himself must resort to allegory for the sake of his witless disciples. For you see, a parable is like a joke. You either get the punch line and respond with laughter, surprise or perhaps outrage, or you sit scratching your head and wondering what you missed. The disciples evidently need an explanation of the parable. Jesus could have been none too happy about that. It was kind of like someone in the audience asking a stand up comedian to explain his joke. It’s a clear sign that the act is bombing. The parable, it turns out, is not an allegory describing different kinds of hearers-though I suppose one could expound it that way. It is a good deal simpler than that. In fact, it can be summed up on one word: Listen.
Listening is a rare skill these days. Perhaps it always was. That is unfortunate because without it, communication is severely compromised. I have a feeling that much of the time most of us fail to hear what others are trying to tell us or see matters from their perspective. Nowhere is that more evident than in our dialogue over race. I notice a tendency among those of us who identify as white to fill up the conversation with demonstrations of our own lack of prejudice, as though that were the issue. We have no end of stories to share about our black college buddies, coworkers and neighbors with whom we have “always gotten along just fine.” The issue, of course, is not how we are getting along but how our conversation partners are getting along-which is frequently not “just fine.” I sense a deep seated fear on the part of us white folk of learning that the schools from which we graduated with fond memories, the police whose presence gives us a sense of comfort and security, the government institutions over which we feel entitled to have a say and the workplaces we experience as opportunities for professional advancement, financial security and comradery are the same places people of color often experience and have memories of loneliness, exclusion and hostility. Intentionally or not, we are sending a clear message: We don’t hear you and we don’t want to hear you.
Sometimes listening requires one to look past the words in order to find the message. It was in the first or second year of my ministry, just about a week after Christmas, that Gene came bursting into my office in a fit of rage. “I told you I wanted to have ‘Hark the Harald Angels Sing’ in the candle light service,” he practically shouted. I pointed out that I had included more than a few of the Christmas favorites he requested and that, even on Christmas, there are only so many carols one can sing. That did not placate Gene. “Pastor, we have sung that hymn every Christmas for as long as I have been in this church. There was no reason for leaving it out this year.” I apologized and assured Gene that I would definitely work it in next Christmas. “Fine,” said Gene. “But I might not be here next Christmas.”
As it turned out, Gene had been diagnosed with an inoperable, untreatable heart ailment that was worsening with each month. This confrontation was not about Christmas, planning the candle light service, the selection of hymns or any other churchly matter. It wasn’t about me and my pastoral leadership. This was a man trying to tell me that he was dying, that his time was limited and that he was struggling to hang onto and savor every scrap of everything that brought back precious memories, that was solid and predictable, that made his life meaningful. But before I could hear Gene, I had to get past my defensiveness and insecurity, factors that almost caused me to miss an opportunity to speak a word of grace. “Seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” Matthew 13:13.
For centuries we have lacked eyes to see and ears to hear the cries of our planet, increasingly stressed by our ruthless exploitation. This summer, clouds of smoke from wildfires in Canada blocked the sun and fouled the air of our northern cities. Rising ocean temperatures generated storms ravaging the south with tornadoes, floods and lethal heat. As these disasters wreak havoc on our lives and foreshadow global upheavals for millions word wide, still, right wing leaders scoff at the very idea of humanly induced climate change and clamor for access to the few remaining wild sections of our earth for more deforestation, strip mining and “development.” “Drill baby, drill!” as the Republican conventioneers chanted a decade ago. Or, as conservative pundit, Ann Coulter is known to have said, “Take the earth and rape her.” Meanwhile, God’s good earth cries out for deliverance and warns of the consequences of our heedless consumerism. “Seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” Matthew 13:13.
As Jesus points out, there are plenty of things that get in the way of listening. The internet is bristling with posts seemingly designed more to elicit outrage than spread useful information. Nothing dims the capacity to listen more than righteous (or unrighteous anger). Like the very devil, it sweeps away one’s capacity to focus, empathize and keep an open mind. Given that much of the news we get these days comes in the form of soundbites, Facebook posts, five minutes of mainstream media discussion and tweets, it should not surprise us that much public knowledge, including knowledge of the Bible and religion, is wading pool shallow. As such, it forms a poor foundation for developing mature and enduring understanding. God knows that, in this information age, there is no shortage of distractions keeping our minds running in a thousand different directions, many of which lead nowhere. Among all of the hysteria, misinformation, distractions and hostility, Jesus invites us to be attentive to the Word that, as the prophet Isaiah reminds us, “shall not return to [God] empty, but [] shall accomplish that which [God] purpose[s], and succeed in the thing for which [God] sent it.” Isaiah 55:11.
A better way is waiting to be seen. A hopeful word is waiting to be heard. But in order to receive it, we must be schooled in the art of listening. Here is a poem by Robert King about listening. The subject here is insects, but the call to listen could as well be directed to the voices of those among us whose cries for justice and compassion fail to rise above the noise of pop culture, consumer advertising and political rhetoric. The injunction to listen could as well be aimed at the shrieking winds, roaring wild fires and crumbling ice fields of a planet being murdered by the bottomless pit of human greed. The need for listening extends to the growing cries of angry individuals who lack the language and conceptual tools needed to articulate their pain. Above all, the call to listen invites us to be attentive to the signs of God’s inbreaking reign in the midst of all this. Listen!
Listening
Now glory be to good
things singing around us
in the darkness, listen.
Listen: inside the crickets’
scalloped chirping, scrapers
trilling against dry files,
the grasshoppers rasping
from their stalks, the sticks
and thin strings of katydids,
cicadas drumming thickly
in the thick trees vanishing
into the throbbing dark,
we listen until we’re not
listening. Our ears fizz
with their electric persistence.
We do not care insects see-saw
In the hazardous guessings of sex,
Or that cicadas have churned
for years under the earth, or
that in the dark, large world
they are leagues apart, singing
to find each other, themselves.
The world is all alive
is all we know, something
thrilling the air, a murmer
reminding us of every
summer we remember,
something awake all night
which numbs, soothing us under.
Sleeping, or bodies cool.
Only the crickets insist.
Is it? Is it? they ask all night
and answer, It is. It is.
Source: Poetry, July 1988. Robert King (d. 2017), founder of the Colorado Poets Center, was born in Denver, Colorado. He received his bachelors degree in English from the State University of Iowa and returned to Colorado, where he earned a masters degree in American Literature from Colorado State University. He earned his Ph. D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. He taught for three years at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and then took a position at the University of North Dakota where he spent the bulk of his career teaching English and creative writing. In 1971 he was named Outstanding Professor at that institution and received the UND Faculty Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1996. He also lectured frequently at the University of Nebraska and the University of Northern Colorado. You can read more about Robert King and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 