A Homily for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
A sermon preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark by the Reverend Holly Huff on July 12, 2026.
---
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today we hear the first of Jesus’s parables of the kingdom. The parable of the Sower gets top billing in Matthew 13, starting off a chapter full of parables that each tell us what the kingdom of heaven is like. The kingdom of heaven is like the sower scattering seed through the whole world on all kinds of soil, it is like wheat and weeds growing together, it’s like a mustard seed, like leaven in dough, like a dragnet bringing in all kinds of fish. It is like a great pearl for which one would give absolutely everything.
Jesus liked to teach with parables. A parable sets things next to each other to makes a comparison. Jesus’s wisdom stories set ordinary things together to show us Good News, to show us something of how the kingdom of heaven has come near and is breaking into our shared life. Listen, Jesus says, pay attention! Let anyone with ear listen! Parables reward our rereading; they can’t be simply decoded into a 1-to-1 allegory where this equals that; they permit and encourage multiple interpretations. Sometimes they are hard to understand: in Godly Play, the lovely children’s formation curriculum we use here, all of the materials for the parable stories come in golden boxes. And when the storyteller goes to the shelf with the golden boxes they bring it back to the circle of children and hold it up and look over and under and around the box, and knock on its golden lid, hoping that today it might open for us. A parable is a gift, and one that is sometimes hard to receive. Jesus’s disciples were mystified by his tendency to talk in riddles, and sometimes they would later privately drag explanations out of him, though he often left just as many questions as answers as he “explained.” Our parable for today is usually called the parable of the Sower, but sometimes the parable of the Soils, and sometimes the parable of the Miraculous Yield. These different titles hint at some of the different way we might hold up and knock upon this treasure.
“A sower went out to sow.” And you have to wonder if it is this sower’s very first time in a field, because the sower seems to be throwing seeds around left and right without regard to where they will land. Forget Johnny Appleseed, this sower is a little like a child helping hide Easter eggs: not all of them end up in very good spots. Some seeds land on a hardened path and are eaten up by birds, some land in gravel and start to grow but wither in the sun, some land where other things are already growing and are choked out by weeds. You’d think a savvy agriculturist would look for the good ground and just sow seeds there, where the soil is soft and ready and receptive. Isn’t it foolish to waste good seed on bad ground? Not very good business practices. But the sower has gone out to sow and sow they will. There is a divine determination and wholeness here. God’s sun shines on the good and evil alike, God sends rain for the just and for the unjust, and so God scatters the good seed through all creation onto every kind of ground. This generous distribution is profligate and prodigal, with no discrimination for types of soil or types of persons. It is God’s nature and God’s joy to give to us, to be merciful and gracious, no matter how we respond. It brings God pleasure to seed the whole creation with his gracious Word.
Christ is the Word that has come into the world, that lightens and leavens everything that was made. That Word is present in all creation, in each of us, in every condition. Good seed is sown through the whole world. Christ’s indwelling presence is our inheritance forever, a birthright that cannot be bought or sold. It grows up in us alongside all the weeds, everything we struggle with. We don’t have to go find Jesus, he is with us already, delighted to dwell in our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us. When we find him we find he has been seeking us out long before we ever looked for him. The Good News is true and present and active everywhere! All of us are in Christ Jesus and set free for life and love! So why do we still see so much pain, so much petty infighting and casual violence? Why are there so many corners of our world where it seems the seed doesn’t quite take? This is I think is the question Jesus is addressing with this parable, which comes just after his ministry is rejected by religious authorities and right before the people in his hometown of Nazareth write him off.
These different soils—the hardened and worn path, the gravel under the sun, and the briarpatch—say something about our human ability to cooperate with or refuse to cooperate with grace, and they dramatize the eventual flourishing of the good seed. This isn’t some kind of new Myers-Briggs personality test—“What kind of soil are you? Find out in just 10 questions!” These are the trials and travails of the Word of God in a creation that groans with labor pains, still waiting for the revelation of the children of God. A sower goes out to sow, and the dramatic tension builds as the good seed encounters obstacles, first birds then rocks and thorns, before finally bringing forth a miraculous yield, bearing fruit a hundredfold and sixtyfold and thirtyfold! Grain at last, and a bumper crop! Sevenfold would be a good year, so this is quite the harvest, and a sign to trust and have hope in the good word which is not chained, which moves through the world calling into existence things which are not, and which will finally have its gracious way with all of us.
Seeds grow best in good open ground, of course, and yet God coaxes life out of all kinds of less-than-ideal circumstances. Birds eat up seeds on bare ground then fly off and poop them out to grow in better places. In the desert the hardened crust of ground is itself alive and harbors water for strange and hardy plants under unrelenting heat. In the mountains I’ve seen trees growing on bare rock, on top of huge boulders, with long roots snaking down and around to find nourishment. From the window of a train I’ve seen an abandoned parking lot where ferns and trash trees are coming up through cracks in the asphalt as the forest reclaims it own, rusted streetlamps and all.
The invitation in this parable is not so much to assess the state of our own dirt but to open to God’s work already taking root in us. Robert Farrar Capon writing about this parable says that it calls for a response from us “but that response is to be one that is appropriate not to the accomplishing of a work but to the bearing of fruit. The goal it sets for us is not the amassing of deeds, good or bad, but simply the unimpeded experiencing of our own life as the Word abundantly bestows it upon us. And that … is entirely fitting; because the parables is told to us by none other than the Word himself, whose final concern is nothing less than the reconciled you and me that he longs to offer his heavenly Father. He did not become flesh to display his own virtuosity; he did so to bring us home to his Father’s house and sit us down as his [beloved] at the supper of the Lamb. He wills us whole and happy, you see; and the parable of the Sower says he will unfailingly have us so, if only we don’t get in the way.” (Kingdom, Grace, Judgement, 74).
And even when we do, I’d add. The word is seeded in all the world, doing its work. New life is hidden through all creation: an Easter egg waiting for our discovery in all the hardest rockiest and most choked places. God seems to prefer to work with hopeless cases and bring new life to the dead. Where we are struggling, closed off, grieving, alone, or fearful, God the Word is calling us and tending us, to flourish as ourselves, and to flourish as a community where we belong to each other and care for each other, where we seek and serving Christ in all persons, where nothing finally can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Let anyone with ears listen!
Amen.