good bad and meh

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday 15 (July 16^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 25: 19-34

Psalm 119: 105-112

Rom 8: 1-11

Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23

 

 

Back in the late 1980s Austrian-born psychologist Bruno Bettleheim published a book called A Good Enough Parent. Much of Bettleheim’s credibility has been dismantled in the years since then, and particularly after his death in 1990. Nevertheless, and I am not skilled in his claimed fields so cannot really assess his work, I do believe he deserves kudos for the title of that work. As a parent at that stage of two small children, struggling with various degrees of success alongside their mother (not Anne – or not this Anne)  to learn what parenting was all about, I purchased and pored over his book with relief.

Given the discrediting he has posthumously received, perhaps I was misled? Although since I have what one friend called “an unnecessary number of children” (and soon to be an equal number of grandchildren) and all of them have turned out to be wonderful, caring human beings, perhaps I was good enough.

Or perhaps their mothers made up for my deficiencies.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about at all.

What I wanted to extrapolate from the over-exposed Jesus teaching that we know as the Parable of the Sower, was a line that I think I have stolen from my wonderful successor-bar-two in the New South Wales parish of Casino. Because I think it was Sally – that is to say the Rev’d Sally Miller – who summarised this passage in our Gospel Conversations  for the week. She observed that our response should not be to bash ourselves up because our seeds are not growing, but simply to do the work and rest, as it were, in Christ. To rest in a state, as Sal put it, of “active hopefulness.”

What does this mean? It certainly does not mean hanging around doing nothing, giving up, throwing in the towel in the assumption that all gospel-faith is lost, irrelevant, dead.

And I know you well enough in this faith community to know that is not what you are doing. But what of the glory days, when churches were nearer to full, when off-spring attended, when … there are many whens.

I think part of Sally’s point is that in the services of God you and I are good enough. Some of us went through great revival times – I’m writing about them at the moment – when we kind of figured that the great glory days of the church were here. Except they never were. They were right days, perhaps, for the time … perhaps we can assume that. We can assume that even if they were the wrong kind of seed nevertheless in the purposes of God those past glory days had their God-breathed purpose. The church needed new energies, but it was not our task to dictate their future form.

We can too often bash ourselves up in the light of this parable. But today is not yesterday, and you are who in the mysteries of God have been placed here today.

A good enough parent? A good enough Christ-bearer? None of us are called to be what we are not. Sometimes that’s hard to believe. I remember only too well a scathing comment from a colleague, so-called, who announced to the congregation that he was sick of my incompetence. It was one of life’s crushing moments, but in the years since I have found more and  more strength in those remarkable words of Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3, as he emphasizes that some sow, others water, some even reap – but God gives the life force, the energy, the outcome.

That I think is the active hopefulness that my friend Sally was declaring in our conversations this past week.

I am encouraged when I find that Jacob, one of the most insidious and flawed characters of the Hebrew Scriptures, becomes a building block in the purposes of God. I find strength when I realize that David, whose CV was far from exemplary, becomes the proto-type of serving God. I find strength when fleeing Peter, or even grumpy Paul, become archetypal bearers of Christ and Christ-light.

I could go on but I have promised myself I will not. A good enough Christ-bearer. You, me, those we worship with each week. Flawed, struggling sometimes, but in the mysteries of God we are the people that God has scattered in this soil. In liturgy we offer ourselves as servants or living sacrifices to God. Our names won’t be in neon lights but as we offer ourselves again and again we may just be the chosen seeds of God – because we are just that.