From Hard-Scrabble Hearts
Proper 10A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
For three Sundays, we are camped out here in Matthew 13 which contains seven parables about the kingdom of heaven or “realm of God.” Each offers an answer to the question: What happens when the kingdom of heaven is proclaimed? Our scriptures give witness. Some will hear it. Some resist it. Some misunderstand it. Some bear astonishing fruit while the natural world, the surrounding spiritual animacy of the web of life will have just one response. It will give God praise.
“A Sower went out to sow,” Jesus said. He flung seeds everywhere—on the path, on the rocks, among the thorns, and finally some land on good soil. “That is what the kingdom of heaven looks like. “God refuses to ration grace. The Word of the kingdom is proclaimed to saints and skeptics alike. To disciples and doubters. To those eager to hear and to those who have grown cynical. To people whose lives seem well cultivated and to those whose lives feel overrun with rocks, weeds, and hard-packed paths. The Sower just keeps sowing…most of us have experienced all four soils.” (Micah Krey, Writings on Recovery and Preaching, “7th Sunday After Pentecost,” July 12, 2026) God pours out grace without considering the worthiness of the recipient. This parable should uproot our faulty assumptions about who is deserving. Let anyone with ears to hear rejoice!
Here in Matthew 13, after repeated rejection and controversy, Jesus makes a strategic choice to begin speaking in parables. Matthew uses the conjunction hoti, which can be translated as “because.” Jesus does not speak in parables in order to keep people from understanding. Jesus speaks in parables because they have already become people who “look but do not perceive” and “hear but do not listen.” Parables stick with us. They work on our imagination. Until finally, when we are ready, they explode false understandings and make room for grace to grow again bearing new fruit some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
But this chapter filled with parables doesn’t begin with a parable. Matthew begins with movement. “That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea.” (Matthew 13:1) That same day. Everywhere Jesus turns, someone questions who he is and by what authority he speaks. And so, he walks to the sea and because the crowds are so large, he gets into a boat and sits down while everyone remains standing on the shore. Many commentators note that the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee forms a natural amphitheater. Water carries sound well. And so, Jesus’ boat becomes an ideal place from which to address a large crowd.
Scholars suggest something more is happening as well. Look where Jesus is teaching. Not from the synagogue. Not from the Temple. Not from the home where chapter 12 ended. He’s teaching from a fishing boat. “Throughout Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus continually relocates where God’s authority is encountered. The Sermon on the Mount happens on a hillside, not in Jerusalem. Fishermen become the first disciples rather than religious scholars. Children understand what the wise often miss. Tax collectors find mercy while the righteous argue over technicalities. Now the kingdom is proclaimed from the water. Away from the formal institutions that have dismissed his authority.” (Krey)
Matthew tells us that Jesus sat down, the traditional posture for authoritative teaching, but the classroom has changed. “Instead of walls, there is shoreline. Instead of benches, there is sand. Instead of institutional architecture, creation itself becomes the sanctuary.” (Krey)
This resonates with a major theme in our bible. The natural world participates in giving witness to God. Isaiah describes a God who pours rain and snow down from heaven without measure, watering everything on earth in the full confidence that what needs to grow will grow (Isaiah 55:10). Isaiah promises God’s people, “For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12). The psalmist echoes, “The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy, the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain, and they shout and sing together for joy.” (Psalm 65:9-13)
For centuries, Christians have dismissed these words are mere poetic flourish. But contemporary science, philosophers and theologians bring us back where our ancestors in faith started. “At the heart of matter, is the heart of God.” Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) is one of these thinkers who ask us to reexamine our assumptions about how the world works. Teilhard wrote “Let us leave the surface, and, without leaving the world, plunge into God.” When we experience the beat of this sacredness deep within us or encounter it in the body of the earth or the body of another, we have a sense of being addressed by name, said Teilhard. In other words, the life at the heart of all life is not just energy; it is presence. The universe is radically relational. In and through matter we are born for relationship, and at the heart of our relationship with the earth and one another is relationship with the divine. (John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul. P. 171-172 // quoting Chardin, The Heart of Matter, p. 15)
Around the age of thirty, Teilhard had an epiphany in which he experienced himself being addressed by the Light that shines in matter. What he heard within himself were words from Matthew’s gospel, in Latin ‘Ego sum, noli timere’ (It is I; do not be afraid, Matthew 14:27). He heard these words not from afar, as it were, or from above the physical, but from deep within the matter of the universe. The assurance that came to him in that moment was: “Do not be afraid to see matter as sacred; do not be afraid to adore this Light that is deep in all things. It is I.”
“The universe,” as Teilhard later wrote, now became “something that loved and could be loved.” This was a way of saying that God can be found in all things. The Sower has been sowing for 13.8 billion years. The stars, the periodic table of elements, a myriad of life forms, all arranged in symbiotic communities, tending toward ever greater complexity, the harmony of contrasts, and beauty. In one of this last writings, Teilhard said, Christianity “is reaching the end of one of the natural cycles of its existence…After what will soon be two thousand years, Christ must be born again. (Xnity and Evolution, 94-95) In that born-again Christianity, he said, Christ will no longer be seen as a deserter of the earth. He will be seen as a lover of the earth, at one with the earth. (Newel)
Teilhard saw that evolution is not opposed to the story of creation, rather evolution is the story of how God creates. The Divine Sower pours out seeds of grace upon all people, all things, from within the heart of all matter, at the heart of each moment, across the cosmos, across time.
“This does not mean that evolution always moves toward love in a straightforward way. Indeed, the process of evolution also involves destruction, tragedy, and loss. The creative advance into novelty includes not only harmonious cooperation but also intense struggle. The emergence of beauty is inseparable from the presence of suffering. The cosmos is shaped by moments of tragic beauty—where love and loss, order and chaos, emerge together in a grand improvisational unfolding.” (The Cosmic Lure of Love: Teilhard, Whitehead, and the Evolution of Sympathy, Open Horizons)
Recently retired ELCA Bishop Tim Smith of the North Carolina Synod has said “you can count the number of seeds in an apple, but you cannot count the number of apples in a seed.” Most apples contain five seeds. Many apple tree varieties produce up to five hundred apples each season and can produce fruit for eight or more years. What is slowly coming into being in you, is that you can look on the face of anyone, any creature, stand on any horizon and see that it is your sister or brother or sibling. Then you will know the day has come that you are blossoming into a new creation in Christ. May the wasteful abundance of God’s grace transform our hard-scrabble hearts and fuel our growth with joy. May God be praised.
