Being deeply rooted in God’s love and hope.

All three of today’s readings speak about the theme, being deeply rooted in God’s love and hope.

The parable of the sower is a well-known and loved parable. But I wonder how well known. I wonder how often we pause to think about how normal the method of seed distribution used was, and what that might have conveyed to those original listeners about the nature of the sower. We too often quickly follow Jesus’ lead and focus on the soils, thanking God that we are good soil and the seed has grown in us. But here’s a question. Who decides who is good soil?

The story of Rebekah, Isaac and their two sons is also well known. None of them come out well in this story. Esau seems too interested in food and does not take God’s promise or his birth right at all seriously. Jacob is jealous and desperate to swindle Esau. Rebekah seems most unmotherly and sides with the younger son. Isaac seems to play little role. And within all this deceit, division, strife and complex relationships God’s promise continues to be fulfilled. Not despite it, but within it.

All that brings us back to the soils and Paul. We are complex. At times we will be good soil, and at other times shallow. Like Rebekah and her family we can be and will be deceitful, dishonest, conniving – all the stuff Paul likes to talk about. That’s what it means to be human. And yet God is at work in all that soil. Which takes us back to the sower.

While some read this as pretty typical of how sowing happened, others understand this to be an incredibly wasteful way of operating. Reckless even. That’s how God is. Generous, reckless, wasteful, abundant. Sowing hope and love even in the midst of our complex unprepared lives. Paul’s message was simple. Stop trying to achieve this life yourself through being good enough. Just trust into God’s generosity. Sink your roots into this abundance.

In churches around the world, the second Sunday in July is Sea Sunday. This is a day set aside to remember and pray for seafarers and their families and to give thanks for their lives and work. It is also a day we can pray for the work of the Mission to Seamen, which some of our parishioners are involved in. Working with God in offering an abundance of love and hope. Our city depends on the port, all those who work there, and all who work the ships that pass through there. Over the next week I invite you to pray for all those whose livelihoods are linked to the port; to all the seafarers and their families who will travel through our port; and those who seek to bring God’s love, peace and hope into all that happens there.