First, served [Sexagesima]

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READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Isaiah 55:11-13

• 2 Corinthians 11:19-12:9

• St. Luke 8:4-15

 

 

Grace to you and peace. (1 Thess 1)

 
Jesus speaks to you on this day from His Gospel heard, saying:

“A sower went out to sow his seed.”

 
We came to the understanding, last week, that the Church is in her 70 year exile at this moment. Not 70 literal years, but until Jesus returns. One of the ways we discovered this exile to be true, was our abuse of the Sacrament. That by our own, self-imposed fast, we show that we are separating ourselves from God, in our sin. Our default tendency is to steer away from what God is doing in His Word and Sacrament.
 
Today’s parable is no different. In the over-statement of all overstatements, we believe that the Word of God cannot work in our lives unless we have receptive hearts first; soil to receive it. We believe that Jesus is trying to tell us to get busy growing and get busy sowing.
 
We are the ones who determine what kind of soil our hearts will be. We decide whether we will have a hard heart, a shallow heart, a crowded heart, or a receptive heart. We believe that this is exactly what St. James meant when he said, "Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls" (James 1:21).
 
That meekness, or humility, then, becomes your goal, instead of Jesus. I’m gonna be the meekest, humblest out there, says your heart. You come across Psalm 10:17 and are encouraged: There, our Lord says, “LORD, You have heard the desire of the humble: You will prepare their heart.”
 
But here you run across your first problem. Really its the only problem. 
God will prepare the heart. The problem is not that God will do it. That’s very comforting that He will. The problem is “when is He going to do it” and that is what is never revealed to you.
 
At this point you begin to spiral. What is taking God so long? Why hasn’t He humbled my heart yet? Is He going to call and set up an appointment? Is there a special password to get it started? Do I have to seek Him out through meditation and experimental hallucinogenics?
 
Then we hear a seemingly comforting voice, from earth, tell us to just pray, and share, and be kind, thankful and forgiving. That is when you really have made it, it says, when you feel those fruits of the spirit coursing through all your actions and thoughts. That is when you have made it. That is what it means to have God prepare your heart.
 
Yes, at that point you have made it. Made it to not being Christian anymore. Made it to the point of you having such a wonderful time with the fruits of the Spirit, that you have no room for Jesus. In this way, the fruits of the Spirit become the fruits and wages of sin, for you do not need Jesus to have those things evident in your life.
 
There, in those things, you are strong and have “made yourself” strong for God. But our Epistle does not use the word strong, today, neither does it use the word humble. It uses the word “weak”. 
 
This is not another word Holy Scripture uses to describe humility or meekness, either. It is used to describe lack of strength, illness, suffering, calamity, frailty. Not a very good starting point for someone trying to be worthy of receiving the Seed of God’s Word into their hearts.
 
"The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit", 1 Corinthians 2:14 says. And don’t forget Jesus’ words: “Out of the heart comes evil” (Mt 15:19). This means no matter where we start out, if God has not given us His Spirit first, we will never receive His Word.
 
We have forgotten that even though St. James told us to to receive the Word with meekness, a few verses before saying that he reminded us: “Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren...Of His own will He brought us forth by the word of truth” (Jas 1:16, 18).
 
This same illness or weakness is what brought Lazarus to his grave, in St. John chapter 11, and we believe we have some chips on the bargaining table with God?
 
Once again, we completely and utterly forget, in our sin, that Jesus has created all the soil, in today’s Gospel. That He has made them and not we ourselves. He has even brought His own sunlight, His own water, and His own seed. On top of that, not one thing happens with soil, rock, bird, or thorn until He acts first.
 
Jesus, God’s Sower, has come to sow His seed. But He is not an ordinary farmer who has to leave most of his fortune to chance as to whether or not his crop will be good this year. Our Old Testament has already taught us, “so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isa 55:11).
 
What is that purpose? To make us humble or meek? To set us off in the right direction and hope we make it to an appointment with Him to prepare our hearts? No. The purpose is to bring about joy and peace first, as Isaiah continues. It is to make it so that cypress and myrtle come up, instead of thorn and briar.
 
Such that, not only does God’s Creation work as He created it to, even today, but that Creation and history all work at God’s say-so. And His say-so is to convert hearts and plant them in the good soil. But His planting is not just a “plant and hope they grow”. His planting is a grafting, as in, you do not start at the starting line, but at the finish line.
 
The special work of the Holy Spirit is to sanctify you and make you holy by bringing you to faith in Christ so that you might have the blessings of redemption and lead a godly life. You need the Holy Spirit to begin and sustain this faith in you, because by nature you are spiritually blind, dead, and an enemy of God, as the Scriptures teach; therefore, you cannot by your own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, your Lord, or come to Him.
A dead man cannot decide to come alive!  A blind man cannot will himself to see!  An unbeliever does not decide to believe in Christ on his or her own power.
The Christian faith is totally the gift of God.
 
Grafted into the true vine, God has already brought you to the completion of His greatest work: uniting Himself to humanity and redeeming them from decay and death. Because you are not the one God plants. You are not the seed. His Word is. His Word, Jesus Christ, is the seed that is scattered to the wind, encountering the entire world and its hostility towards Him, yet producing wherever He goes.
 
He is the hundred-fold harvest. He grows into the good tree, the good wheat, and the true vine. He is the only man Who produces. You must be grafted into His production of Good.
 
The Bible also describes being adopted. “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father’, says Romans 8:15. Just as the vine must be there first, before grafting takes place, so must an adoptive agent be in place before an adoption takes place.
 
Jesus does not become man, suffer, die and rise again in a quest for clean and meek hearts. He suffers and dies on behalf of stony hearts that hate Him. Romans 8:7 explicitly says that “the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God” and we are always set on the flesh.
 
But His death and resurrection is not so stony, hostile hearts remain stony and hostile, but that they be turned into hearts of flesh, His flesh. “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” in Ezekiel 36:26, and Jeremiah 23:29 “Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock.”
 
Christ faces devil birds, rock hard hearts, and crowns of thorns all in order to win those who will hear and believe. The Word of God, Jesus Christ, goes to all men and offers His Body and Blood for their redemption. He wins their redemption and secures it for all time. 
 
In this way, He prepares for us His clean heart, because He has cleansed it of all our sin such that, instead of finding the devil, sin, or death, we find the fruitful and boundless harvest of heaven freely given in full. In Christ, we start off in the Good soil each and every time we return from our sin, repent, and receive forgiveness.
 
It is called conversion (being turned) or  regeneration (new birth), this work of the Holy Ghost, and He uses the written and spoken Word of the Gospel and the Sacraments as His means to accomplish it.
 
Therefore, never be mistaken, dear Christian. If anyone tries to fool you into thinking you are this or that type pf soil, do not believe them. If you are ever confronted with the idea that you can make your heart ready for God, do not believe. 
 
For first and foremost, Christ has accomplished His work of breaking hard hearts with His Gospel. Second, Jesus sends His Holy Spirit to you to plant, graft, and adopt you into the Good Soil in Christ. You are and forever will be united with the True Vine that does not whither or choke even when confronting death. Such that you can eat and drink His deathless Body and Blood for the forgiveness of your sins.