It May Be The Lord

“9 And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, 10 he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’” (Luke 8)

Jesus tells a parable of a man sowing seed.  A story about the condition of ground in which seed grows best.  It occurs to me as we see this story told, it is a parable within a parable. 

The Son of God went out to tell a parable to a great crowd.  On some it fell on deaf ears.  Their hearts were hard and it only made them angry since the man would not speak plain and the devil came and took the words away.  Some latched onto it quickly, it tickled their fancy, but the meaning never sank in and they could not recall the story by the time they got home.  Some received the story eagerly, even understanding what it meant.  Mostly.  They could recite it for a while, even discuss what it might mean, but their own viewpoints and hot button issues colored their interpretation of it and so it did not change their lives.  Some grabbed hold of the story, turned it inside out, looked at it from every angle, loved it, loved the Son of God who told it to them.  They did not try to change it, but let it change them.  People noticed.

What kind of ground receives seed best?  What kind of ground is best for farming and producing a crop?  Broken ground.  Plowed, furrowed, all the rocks removed, soft, not growing anything else.

Ground doesn’t often, if ever, get in this condition by itself.  The farmer tears at it, drives sharp, hard, heavy steel through it, digging at it, turning it over, exposing the roots of weeds.  It’s a violent, dirty business. 

What kind of heart receives Jesus best?  What kind of heart is best for the Spirit to grow fruit?  A soft heart.  A humble heart.  One not confused with lies, already full with pride or hardened by fear, doubt and worry.  Like the rocks, like the weeds, these must be removed.  The heart must be turned over, broken, softened.  This is a violent, dirty business.  It’s done through trial and testing and discipline.  It’s exposed in prosperity and poverty, plowed in adversity and suffering.

But all these trials are preparing us for the Word!  So they are Grace!  They are Good.  They are gifts!  “2 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” (James 1)  The parable cannot be received by the indifferent listener.  It cannot be understood by the closed mind.  It cannot be understood correctly by the narrow mind.  What kind of heart receives without judgment?  Without anger?  Without preconceived notions?

“2 And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them 3 and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt 19) 

Jesus is clear.  The Word will never take root in us if we do not allow ourselves to be molded by the Potter.  Plowed by the Planter.  Weeded by the Lover of our souls.  How much is our effort and how much is Grace?  I would suggest we lack the powers of perception to answer this.  The man treading water is working very hard and feels as if no one is helping.  He is alone in this.  Yet, he did not make his body, nor give it the ability to move.  He did not create the laws of buoyancy or Newtonian physics.  Everything keeping him afloat is from God… but it’s near impossible to realize this when treading water. 

Jesus’ parable makes it clear God is the farmer, we’re but dirt.  Dirt has no power to affect change upon itself.  Yet in the same story, Jesus uses action verbs in his warnings to the disciples.  “hold it fast”, “18 Take care then how you hear,” finally summing it up with, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”  And there are no shortage of calls to action elsewhere: strive, turn, become, obey, open, enter, come, serve, labor.  From our vantage point then, it may always look like we’re doing all the work, but don’t give pride any purchase!  When we have the advantage of paradise-based points of view and heavenly hindsight, we will see clearly God was in all.  Picture the child with their plastic lawnmower out in front of dad with the real one.  When the child looks at the last row, he sees it mowed.  So he feels he is accomplishing something.  Dad however is just enjoying the scene and the time together.  Submission, the beginnings of love.  It’s not a divvying up of chores, we’ll do this and God does that.  It’s the wheel within the wheel.  We know not if we turn because we’re pushing forward, being pushed forward or the ground is moving underneath us.  We are in Him and He in us! 

Can we see this as Caleb did?  ““You know what the Lord said to Moses the man of God in Kadesh-barnea concerning you and me. …10 And now, behold, the Lord has kept me alive, just as he said, these forty-five years since the time that the Lord spoke this word to Moses, while Israel walked in the wilderness. And now, behold, I am this day eighty-five years old. 11 I am still as strong today as I was in the day that Moses sent me; my strength now is as my strength was then, for war and for going and coming. 12 So now give me this hill country of which the Lord spoke on that day, for you heard on that day how the Anakim were there, with great fortified cities. It may be that the Lord will be with me, and I shall drive them out just as the Lord said.” (Josh 14)

Or as Jonathan?  “6 Jonathan said to the young man who carried his armor, “Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised. It may be that the Lord will work for us, for nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few.”  (1Sam 14)

Notice, neither of them knew, they suspected, but only the outcome would tell the tale.  Can we this day, pray for this childlike faith then get up, go to the shed, grab our plastic rakes and hoes and go till some ground?  It may be that the Lord will work for us.

Dead Woman Walking

“11 Soon afterward he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a great crowd went with him. 12 As he drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a considerable crowd from the town was with her. 13 And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.”” (Luke 7)

Before the gecko, before you were in good hands, before the corporations were on your side, before we made a profession of caregiving, before we expected the government to take care of us there was another system in place to insure people would be provided for in adversity, illness and their elder years…

It was called a family.

You didn’t have to find one; God had set it up so you were in one at birth.  A boy would be schooled and cuddled and scolded and trained up until the age of thirteen in one and then he’s ready for the workforce.  He would be apprenticed, either to his own father in the family business or farm or possibly to another man in town who needed a helper or in whose trade the boy had shown a talent.  Perhaps he may be a scholar and continue his education with the scribes, still a form of apprenticeship.  After a time, say five to seven years, he should be established.  He would now know his trade and be ready to take the next step of adulthood: to establish a family of his own.

For the daughter it would begin very similarly.  In the home, some schooling but mostly spending time with her mother and sisters and aunts and grandmother and cousins until she too reached the age of around thirteen.  By this time, she knows her trade; she has spent the last thirteen years learning the ins and outs of the household.  Her body has now told her she is able to bear children and so her father finds for her a suitable husband if he hadn’t had the lad picked out already or he and a friend hadn’t made arrangements much earlier.  This lad is most likely, or ideally a fellow around eighteen to twenty who has recently completed his apprenticeship for you see, the main point of the family unit is to provide!  To insure that his little girl is taken care of.  The cynic, the feminist may bemoan the patriarchal, archaic, authoritarian yea even despotic system that subjugated the will of the woman (remember, she may be thirteen but her body betrays her as an adult now), but if the father loved his little girl (and what kind of real father doesn’t?) and we see in the Bible many instances of fathers who doted and loved their little girls, he would obviously be trying to find the best man he could for her.  Someone from a good family, a hard worker, a lad going places.  This is the ideal of course, towns were small and so selection was most likely limited.  Some years there may be a good crop of raven locked, ruddy rascals to pick from and some years there may just be little Moishe the meager fishmonger.  Oy vey!

To our coddling culture that has extended adolescence right up to the Mid-life Crisis, full of boomerang kids playing videogames in their mommies’ basements and producing a generation of men who not only expect women to take care of them, they are so emotionally handicapped, they need them to, this ancient system sounds strange.  Regardless of how we feel about it, it had merits and it worked much of the time.  A woman was in a system of provision initiated by her father, was handed to her husband and in her declining years would be the purview of her children, most notably an eldest son.

But what if the woman were a widow?  What if she only ever had one son and then he died too?

It doesn’t take even much of a search of the Bible to see God the Father takes a serious view of how sojourners (aliens, immigrants, homeless), the fatherless and widows are treated.  Without even going into Deuteronomy, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and those guys affectionately known as the minor prophets, we have God’s original manifesto given in Exodus….

“21 “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. 22 You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. 23 If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, 24 and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.”” (Ex 22)  Pretty straight forward, pretty cut and dried.  God may or may not help those who help themselves but He most certainly saves the helpless! 

“5 Father of the fatherless and protector of widows


    is God in his holy habitation.” (Ps 68) 

And God has come in the flesh to Nain.  A city where a widow follows the bier of her only son.  A young man on whom all her protection and provision and hopes lie dead.  She wails.  Does she wail the words of this very Psalm?  Does she wail the words of Exodus and Deuteronomy to her neighbors on whom she must now trust for aid and alms.  Can she trust them or will she have to resort to the only two trades now left open to her: begging or prostitution?  Both of which will cut her off from community and communion with God!  Her wail, whether of words or guttural howls, is not a request for aid; it is the last cry of a woman at the end of her means looking over the precipice of her doom.  She is undone.  She is a dead woman walking.

Except, God does see.  God does hear.  God is moved!  God does ACT!  In this case, He acts in a way no one could have predicted, no one could have believed, no one could have been praying for.  He stops the funeral procession.  The perfectly pure touches the unclean corpse and says to the mother, “Do not weep.” 

“3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”” (Rev 21)

twenty-one...

I'll bet when dad gets home there's an email about practice

being cancelled tonight.