Can there ever be soil that is completely good? The parable from Luke’s gospel that we heard tonight suggests that if the seed fell in good soil, all will be well. But is there soil that is always good? The good soil referred to here is a symbol for those who exhibit the qualities that the Gentile Luke can appreciate. But I ask again, can there ever be soil that is always good? Farmers need to rotate their crops, otherwise the soil will lose its capacity to sustain crops and nothing will be produced.
It seems to be a feature of biblical interpretation in some quarters that parables, indeed the bible itself, is interpreted in such a way that suggests there is one absolute meaning for everything in the scriptures. This parable tends to get interpreted as meaning if a person just made sure their life was good soil then the seed of God planted by Christ would flourish and all would be well. Indeed, they go on to suggest that the reason the soil is not good is because of some deficiency in the person.
But I wonder if this parable might suggest a more organic approach. That is, I wonder if we experience many of the soil states described during our lifetime. Sometimes the seed is planted in good soil, then the soil goes off, then it is renewed and maybe it wanes again and so on. Most of us would probably agree that the process of growing the life of Christ in each person is just that–a process–rather than an absolute event once for all.
In any case, it is an endless struggle–the struggle of faith. I don’t think the struggle is necessarily to have faith but to keep nourishing it, to remain open to the movements of the Holy Spirit and to believe that we are beloved of God just as we are. But then, that is easy for me to say. I have always been exposed to God in one form or another all of my life.
As a child that God was a more fundamentalist God. I rejected this image of God, but never rejected God. The seed of God, of Christ, was planted early in me and it has remained. There have been struggles with the image of what kind of God it is I believe in, which church community I am most comfortable in and, for the past eight years, how am I to serve this God as a priest.
Sometimes I wish it was easier; that the struggle wasn’t so difficult. When I was in my first curacy in Somerset one of the young women in the parish who herself was in the process of training to be ordained priest gave me a copy of a poem written by one of her friends at theological college (whose name, by the way, is Briony Martin. She is now a priest in Guildford diocese). It seems to sum up much of what the life of faith is about–of the struggle to keep the seed of Christ within nourished. The poem is actually about change and is addressed to God. But it reflects a little of what our spiritual lives can be about for is it not–even if we don’t want to admit it–about change too? This is what she wrote:
“Why does change have to take so long and be so difficult? Why can’t we just arrive, find the answer,
feel at peace for longer than a moment,
stop struggling?
Why do we have to learn to let go of all those comfortable insecurities –at least we know they work
how to doubt you,
how to fear the future,
how to despise myself
how to hide what I really think
how to question my call
how not to hope for a too-good-to-be-true heaven.
So hard to be changed,
to sing a new song when the words are in another language, to say the word “hope.”
But I want this, to be changed to feel my family connection to the homeless man I saw on the street
changed to believe that the love of friends is not something I have to earn, changed to trust that the aims of God are beyond any death, even my own, changed to be able to be alone and accept that it hurts, changed to become a priest and to know
that it doesn’t matter if I don’t yet know what that word means. Changed to trust you and to laugh.
at every corner I see you slipping round the next one
but the fact that you’ve been there,
and the scent of your presence still on the wind,
means I know I could never give up.”
Amen.
Terrance Bell