Lake Edge United Church of Christ

Tim, my brother in law, farms several hundred acres of amazing Wisconsin soil just outside of Evansville. It is a family farm. Tim and his father are partners now, though his father is retiring by degrees, leaving Tim both the necessity and the authority to make the decisions that must daily be made. I am quite sure that it makes me no more than any other city slicker with a mostly romantic attachment to the idea of the family farm, but I can’t help but admire it all. Safely, and from the distance of the big city, I watch Tim farm, and wonder how he does it.
There are many mysteries on the farm: the great machines and their complex inner workings, the great beasts so large and yet so gentle and the great marketplaces to which the fruit of the farm must be brought but which never seem to fully satisfy anyone but the middle men. And of course there is the great mystery of Wisconsin weather, sometimes parched with drought, this year swimming in far more water than any farmer can use. I watch Tim work, and listen to his complaints, and wonder how he finds the strength and courage to keep doing it all. He gets up every day and works hard, knowing that hard work is not in and of itself enough to guarantee anything but that he’ll be tired at day’s end. There are just too many forces that are beyond his control. He can and does work hard, but whether there will be bread on his table and seed for next year’s planting and a few dollars to send his sons to college, well, that is all deeply influenced by weather and by markets and by the great mysteries of life and death, things over which Tim has worry, but no control. It is a hard life, I think, though he thrives in it, and laughs generously through it all.
Farming was simpler in Jesus’ day. There were no great machines, just animals and simple plows. Markets were small, and besides, most of the crop went to feed the family anyway, never making it to market. The weather, of course, was no more dependable for the farmers of first century Palestine than it is for new millennium farmers in southern Wisconsin. In many ways, it was simpler.
And yet, as Jesus’ parable reminds us, even then farming was a full body plunge into the greatest mystery of all: you put a seed, the fruit of last year’s harvest, into the ground where it dies, becomes unrecognizable as the seed it used to be, and, if all goes well and the sun shines and the rain falls in a good proportion, new life emerges, producing new seeds, 30, 60, even 100 at a time, only some of which must be saved to plant next year, the rest to be eaten and turned into human energy for life and love and all the other things that people choose to do and be about. Science has, of course, come a long way, and the fine agriculture professors at the University of Wisconsin understand more than ever before about what happens as a seed dies and gives birth to more of itself than it could have ever been, and yet I suspect that most of them still shake their heads at the great mystery of it all: life renewing itself through the process of dying and being reborn. As I said, I may be nothing more than a clueless citizen of the city, a dreamy romantic pondering my lost connections to the soil, but to me, the central act of farming, that of planting seeds, is and is likely to remain a great mystery, inspiring me to wonder, to ponder, and yes, to be grateful to the farmers who are willing to put their livelihood at the mercy of these tender mysteries.
Yet, when you think about it, it is precisely because of this deep mystery that Jesus chose the seeds and the harvest as a way of talking about how God works in human lives. You and I are engaged together in this great life-long endeavor called faith. Each of us, in ways that are both similar to all of us and unique to us as individuals, is walking through life seeking to know and to be known to the great Mystery that we call God. We come by this work honestly, of course: someone planted a seed of faith in us at one time or another. But no matter how or when that happened, within our hearts and minds there is a growing awareness of God. Just as my brother in law Tim has learned that if he does certain things it will improve the likelihood of a successful harvest, fertilize the soil, for example, or rotate his crops, so we have learned that there are things that we can do that seem to enhance the possibilities of growing faithfulness. If, for example, we engage in regular worship, or in the disciplined study of the Bible, or in something as simple as daily prayer, we have learned that we increase the chances of our faith coming to fullness when we most need it.
But just as Tim knows that his hard and disciplined work is by itself no guarantee of a successful harvest, so we know that knowing and being known by God is not something that we can make happen just by working hard. The farmer needs the gift of sunshine on her crops, and of rain in proper amounts at propitious times, and good rich soil into which to plant the seed: without these things, the farmer’s disciplined work and worry will come to naught because the truth is that what the farmer most dearly needs can only come as a gift. No one, neither a wise and experienced farmer like Tim nor even the distinguished professors of agriculture at UW can teach that hard and capable work is all that is needed. The work of the seed dying and then growing and producing is and will likely remain a great mystery.
And so it is with our faith. Seeds are planted often around here: we offer classes for all ages, and invite people to worship early, late and often. We encourage people to give generously because we believe that giving is one of the great seeds of faith. We offer opportunities to people to do acts of justice and kindness to friend and stranger alike simply because we think that good fruit grows out of loving service. We plant seeds around here all the time. But whether, and when, the seed dies and new life emerges, this we cannot guarantee. We might wish it were so. We might wish that we could say that attending worship three Sundays out of four, giving generously to the support of your congregation, acts of kindness and works of justice, and a regular turn teaching Sunday school is all that is needed. That if you simply did these things, then your faith will grow and yield a great and fulsome harvest at just the point in life when you need it most. We might wish that we could say these things, but we cannot.
We can say that these acts help. Tim fertilizes, rotates his crops, cares for the soil; and it helps. In fact, if he didn’t do these acts, he would guarantee his failure as a farmer. It helps us to worship, to give, to serve, to teach and to learn. And if we do not do these things, faith is unlikely to grow. Our lives become hard seeds cannot sprout, but become only food for the birds. The disciplined effort to worship, to pray, to serve all are essential, even if they are not in and of themselves a guarantee of anything. But the Good News for us today is not about what we can produce on our own. No.
The Good News for us today is found as we walk with Jesus into the image of the seed falling into the soil, and ponder with him the great mystery that occurs when, at God’s good pleasure, the seed, that which is old in us, dies and in the dying makes possible the birth of new life, new life which is not merely a continuation of the old, but an entirely new thing, a multiplication of joy and hope and peace and light, a harvest 30, 60, even a hundred times over what was planted. The Good News for us is to walk with Jesus into the Mystery, to scatter the seeds of faith as we are given them, to prepare the soil of our lives through spiritual discipline and then to wonder, to marvel, to ponder and to be astounded by the unfolding of the mystery of new life which comes into our hearts and minds as the great gift of God. Let us walk together in the great mystery of life, of death, and of resurrection into new life. Amen.