Nurturing Good Soil in the Season of Creation

You can listen to a sermon around this here

This week we take time to celebrate Matariki. (You can find our more about this here)  Traditionally this followed the festivities around the harvesting of crops. With the re-emergence of the star cluster in the morning sky, Matariki was the time to remember the previous year and to begin making preparations for sowing the seeds for the new crop. Today Matariki is an opportunity to reflect on our shared history in Aotearoa and to look to the future. It is also a time of revitalisation and resurgence of te reo Māori and mātauranga (knowledge) Māori.

This year we are joining, early, many others around the world, who during the month of September, celebrate the Season of Creation, adding our little trickle to this worldwide river praying and working for God’s justice and peace for all people and all creation. Central to this is the invitation to pay attention to the voice of indigenous people around the world who offer us different ways of seeing and living with creation. How does Matariki help us to listen?

The themes of reaping and sowing that are part of Matariki are also themes in our gospel reading from Matthew 13 – a story of a wasteful and extravagant farmer sowing the seeds of life in all kinds of soil – something any peasant farmer of Jesus’ time and now would have found outrageous. These are words of hope for a struggling church, that also invite us to reflect on what kind of soil we might be, and what we might need to do to cultivate both our soil, and the soil of our world so that it receives these seeds of life. At times we are good soil, and other times shallow. Like Rebekah and her whanau in the Genesis reading we can 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.

As I read Paul I wonder if sin is when the soil has not been cultivated and the seed cannot take root. As we face climate change and biodiversity loss, I wonder if we see this in the ways we live that bring death to ourselves, to others and to this gift of creation, our common home. In the face of that we are invited to set our minds of the way of the Spirit that brings life and peace. “The calling of the community of faith is to have two good ears, and to be constantly open to having our worn down places ploughed up, turned over, loosened up; to having our rocky places named and removed, and our shallowness deepened and enriched; to having our thickets of cares and anxieties plucked out and space clear for new growth. Who knows, maybe instead of eking out the bare minimum to stay alive, we might be showered with God's extravagant wastefulness.” (David Ewart, www.holytextures.com)

You are invited to watch the video  "Prophetic Indigenous Voices on the Planetary Crisis- Aotearoa & Polynesia" presented at the Lambeth Bishops conference last year.