July 10, 2005 (Jimmie Johnson)

Romans 10:5-15

Matthew 14:22-33

Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Matthew, like all the four gospels, is interested in proclaiming to us the news of a God who is out of “our” control, a God whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts. This is a God not out of control but simply out of “our” control.

An elder in this church gave me a copy of a recent Dallas Morning News commentary which compared the Evangelicals who go to the mega churches with the Mainliners like us. The article called for us Mainliners to become more passionate. I thought this week about what I am passionate about. It wasn’t difficult. What makes my blood stir and warm? Sherry, the girls, their families, and you. That will do the trick.

Well, you say, what about God? Aren’t you supposed to say God first in your list of most passionate things if you are a good Christian? Well, you say God first if you are interested in making a good impression, but I don’t know how to love God or be passionate about God without thinking of the people that God uses as seeds of God’s presence in my life. Sherry, the girls, their husbands, the grandbabies, and you are how I love God. God’s presence is always mediated through humanity to me. The only way I know how to pay attention to God, get excited about God, love God is to respond to the graceful presence of God in my life through the people in my life, those God uses to seed my life with the holy.

Now, how many people does it take for God to plant a seed in your life? Thank God, it does not take as many as we might think. In the parable it is about one in four. If you change it to a sports metaphor and if you know how to compute a batting average in baseball, then you can see in the parable that God is a .250 hitter. You wouldn’t get a major league contract with that average, and you wouldn’t make the all star team in any select league. God goes to the plate four times in this parable and makes an out the first three times before managing to get on base.

Now, let’s get back to the farming images of the parable: it is a hard path, rocky ground, and thorns before God gets it right and plants the seeds of new life into the right kind of soil. God seems to waste so much good seed. How many people has God placed into your life across the years? Hundreds, thousands?

It comes down to three or four making the big difference. Just a few people are responsible for the good and gracious and lovely that are in your life. God’s grace takes root in your heart and mind through a handful of the hundreds or thousands of seeds that God placed into your life. Set back after set back occurs before God finally is able to start reaching us. Failure after failure, frustration after frustration, wasted effort after wasted effort occur before God gets to grin over the grace penetrating our hearts and bringing us actively into the mission and ministry of being Christians together in a congregation.

So what if we at First Pres are a goofy, imperfect, flawed congregation? Aren’t we that way individually, too? Or do you prefer pretending to be more than you are? Isn’t every relationship you have risky and filled with potential to fail? Life is pretty messy, full of wasted opportunities and fresh starts, isn’t it? Yet, the crazy Lord Jesus, who is crazy like a fox, says
God cannot be discouraged. God keeps tossing mercy and hope.

Throw the seed, throw the seed, and don’t give up. Don’t give up. God won’t. God is committed for the long haul of your life and this congregation’s life. Any number of us will come and go, be enthusiastic, and then so easily disappear. But God will continue to be involved here. God will keep lavishly tossing the seeds of God’s faith, hope and love all around.

Clearly, God is not controllable. Clearly, God is not uptight. God is wasteful with God’s love. God is not cautious with God’s forgiveness. God is not tight with God’s resources. I have a friend I call “Mossy Wallet.” I swear he so rarely opens his wallet that moss grows inside. But God is an extravagant lover and spender. God is not measuring effectiveness, or cost, batting averages, or risk/reward potentialities when it comes to loving God’s creation and you and me. God keeps tossing seed and throwing love our way even if we respond with the soul of concrete, rock or thorn. Still God keeps seeding.

Look, right now the world looks full of hard paths, rocks and thorns. God’s seeds of hope don’t seem to bring about much in the way of results--the London bombing, the grinding war in Iraq, our best societal institutions often discredited by hypocrisy and greed. But with this parable Jesus is calling us to be the congregation of imagination, to be the people who imagine an alternative world, a world free of tyranny, poverty, loneliness, and greed. Imagine it loosed of the unholy trinity of ignorance, arrogance and indifference that conspire to shrivel and destroy
all seeds of hope. Imagine the hungry fed and the just vindicated, the poor satisfied and the pure sanctified. Imagine a world governed by an urge for compassion rather than a will to power.* Imagine all of this Jesus says because God keeps tossing seed.

The trick is to be a congregation that lives this alternative, imaginative world into being in the little fields of our influence. Sow the seed, sow the seed, sow the seed. And as urgently, be thankful for the seed that was tossed so providentially into your life when so often it looked as if life was turning into a field of hopelessness, failure, and self pity, only to have God’s love
continue to lavish seeds upon you.

There was a cartoon in a magazine showing a house filled with plants. There were philodendron around the curtain rods, ivy on all the walls; there were buckets, pots, and planters filled with plants, everywhere. The place looked like a jungle. In the middle of the room a little lady was explaining to a neighbor, “Would you believe, it all began with one African violet!”** This is our hope.

God is zany enough to take our flawed, foolish seeding of the gospel and turn it into a miracle when it looked like nothing but more failure. Don’t look at the hardness, the thorniness, and shallowness of the world and your heart. Look at the beautiful, crazy God continuing to toss seed your way, never ceasing because of failure or waste, not even thinking in such categories.

That’s a God to be passionate about.

*Erik Kolbell, What Jesus Meant, 2003
**David Buttrick, Speaking Parables, p. 67