Sow the Goodness you Long to Harvest

TranscriptioN

Well, good morning again. I'm Father Morgan Reed. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. It is good to be with you worshiping our Lord this morning.

Nice to see new and visiting faces among us, which is one of the fun things about summer around here. Today's lectionary reading has us in the end of the Book of Galatians, this epistle that St. Paul wrote to some of the churches in that region. And I wanted to spend some time in the end of Galatians because I think there's some helpful themes for us to meditate on.

Next week we're going to be in St. Paul's letter to the Colossians, which the lectionary has us in all the way until August, so we'll get to spend a good month in the in the Book of Colossians. So the Book of Galatians gives us this glimpse into the hard work of salvation and how it relates to the family of God, this kingdom that God is building in Christ. We can read about the churches in this region if we go back to Acts 13 and 14.

And if you remember, we preached on those passages during Eastertide. So if you go back to May 11th, 18th, and 25th, you can hear some of our sermons where Paul is evangelizing some of the areas that make up this region of Galatia to which he is writing this circulatory letter that's going to be read to all the churches. And this letter, which was written fairly soon right after the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, if you remember, they had this problem arise where they were wondering, well, if somebody, if a Gentile starts to believe in Jesus, do they need to be circumcised? Which is traditionally what pagans would have to do to become Jewish.

And so this is a paradigm shift. And if you remember that council, they decide that, no, in fact, the Gentiles, the pagans, as they come to believe in Jesus, they are made one with the Jews in this family of God, all who are following Jesus as the Messiah. And then what happens after that is St. Peter, who is one of the architects and foundations of that council, seems to be slipping into a little bit of hypocrisy, as he is with very diverse congregations, and seems to favor his time with the circumcised.

So St. Paul, earlier in this letter, says, I confronted him to his face, which is very extreme. And he does the same with Barnabas, we find out, too, because of St. Peter's practice of isolating certain people at table fellowship, making certain people feel like they're second-class Christians, right? And it takes some integrity and some really deep confidence in the call and mission of the gospel to call out not only a pillar of the church, but one of the people who is the architect of this council that made the decision, and to point out his hypocrisy. Now, Peter wasn't the only one doing this.

We find out that actually this was happening in lots of churches, and so St. Peter was actually endemic of a larger problem in these churches in the region of Galatia that Paul had originally evangelized. So he's encouraging these churches to do what he himself does, which is to consider himself something of a spiritual farmer, there to join him in spiritual farming, sowing seeds of the kingdom of God, and then not losing heart. Not losing heart, because it would have been easy to lose heart if the thing in front of you is confronting one of the pillars of the church.

Sometimes things are really hard to do, and it's easy to lose heart. I'm indebted to the late Anglican theologian John Stott for my outline today. The way that he helpfully put all this passage under the theme of spiritual farming and framed this passage in light of sowing and reaping.

And you heard a little bit of the sowing and reaping language again in the gospel today, with the harvest is plenty, but the laborers are few. There is a harvest that we join in with the Apostles as spiritual farmers. So St. Paul says in verse 8 that our thoughts and deeds are the seeds that are to be sown into the field of either the spirit or the flesh.

 Sow thoughts in the Spirit

Verse 8 says, if you sow to the flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh, but if you sow to the spirit, you will reap eternal life from the spirit. And he also says that God won't be mocked. So if you can't sow contempt, corruption, and violence, and then expect to harvest things that are going to please God and to make you more like Jesus, you have to pay attention to what you're sowing, is this point.

Reaping eternal life is not about some future destiny about going to heaven when you die. Reaping eternal life is something qualitative that happens now in the kingdom. It's like when Jesus talks about that I have come and may have life and have it to the full.

He's not talking about some future thing only. He's talking about right now, if you follow Jesus, it might be hard, but there is something qualitatively different about the eternal life that is found in him. And so this is what he's calling them to harvest.

A harvest of eternal life comes when you sow the seeds of goodness, of righteousness in the gospel. It's not a life of ease, but it is a life of goodness and the presence of God. And what does it look like to be spiritual farmers who are sowing in order to reap eternal life? In this context, it means no longer sowing or no longer giving voice or authority to the flesh, the old broken self, the old broken parts of us that are only going to produce a harvest of corruption or violence or brokenness.

If you look back at the history of the church, the saints of old got this. One of my favorite Latin writers is a guy named Saint John Cassian. And John Cassian, he's writing in the late fourth and the early fifth centuries.

He brings the eight thoughts tradition into Latin from Greek, which becomes what we all know as the seven deadly sins tradition. Yes, they're originally eight, and he brings them into Latin into the West. And he says this, it's really important, he says, the pains of disturbances are not always caused in us by other people's faults, but rather by our own.

As we have stored up in ourselves the causes of offense and the seeds of faults, which as soon as a shower of temptation waters our souls, at once burst forth out into shoots and fruits. And so cultivation, harvesting, farming imagery was really common for the early monastic figures as well. There's this beautiful expansion of the idea of farming here.

If we were to look at the wounds of how we were raised, significant deaths of friends or loved ones that we remember, curses that might have been spoken against us, things that we've started to believe, dysfunctional relationships, stories of harm that have been done to us, we begin to discover how over time we've built up a storehouse of causes of offense. And these become the seeds of faults. The showers of temptation that water the soul are things like life transition, job loss, raising a child, an anxious family system, marriage, a new roommate, a move, maybe the sound of someone's voice. 

And what we see sprouting, what we can see what's sprouting is paying attention to what's activating us, what's triggering us, what reactions do we have to what we experience. Pay attention to those things. Those are often the fruits of the ways that we've sown into the soil.

What triggers us, what activates us, notice the reactions that you have to certain external circumstances, and what is the fruit that we see telling us about what's been sown into the soil of our brokenness. For John Cassian, the answer is to name them and then to pluck them out. And that requires this life of prayer and repentance.

So if we're gonna sow well as spiritual farmers, we have to be honest about what's broken, cultivate a life of prayer and inner stillness where the spirit can heal our contempt, our envy, our desire to look so put together and can settle the disturbances of our souls. What we sow is going to grow. What we sow will grow when the waters of temptation come, the waters of testing, and so we have to sow well.

So one counselor that I enjoy listening to has said it this way. He says, “our idolatry grows in the soil of our pain. Our idolatry grows in the soil of our pain.”

What he means is that the things that are unexamined, the wounds that we've got that are unnamed, those become the places where lies start to grow. Often because we're overcompensating for something untrue that we believe about ourselves. For example, let's take a hypothetical person.

 We'll call him Timothy because I don't think anybody in here's named Timothy. So we'll call him Timothy. And Timothy, you know, he's bullied as a child and he comes home and his dad says something terrible to him and horribly dismissive, like, you know, Timothy, you're always getting beaten up.

Why don't you stand up for yourself? Sometimes he comes home and he's really upset. His dad says to him, why do you let kids do that to you? Why are you so weak? I didn't raise a weak boy. Right? Or something similar.

Super passive. You get the point. So Timothy learns that his father won't be there for him when he needs him to be with his sadness.

He's determined to overcome that weakness on his own. And he learns that it's better to rage and to hurt than to risk the embarrassment of coming to his dad and feeling a deep sense of humiliation for wanting someone to bear witness to his pain. So fast-forward 20 years now.

Timothy is married and he's sitting at the table with his wife and two kids. And as they're talking, his wife says to him, Timothy, you helped your son, our son, with his math homework. Thanks for doing that.

But he didn't do very well because you didn't show him the way to do it that his teacher wanted. Because everybody knows division has changed in the last 40 years. And so Timothy is in his feelings at the moment.

He's enraged at this criticism that his wife has given to him about not training his son to do math the correct way. And so he stands up in his rage, he slams the chair into the table, and he walks outside the door slamming it behind him in a silent rage. His rage at the criticism comes from the fact that he can't bear the shame of feeling inadequate before other people.

He hears his dad's words behind the criticism. His body was telling him to rage rather than to risk the shame of admitting that he didn't know this new way of doing math. His reaction is way out of proportion, right? But it's also the bad fruit that stems from these deep-seated lies that were allowed to germinate in the soil of his pain.

So what falsehoods are we allowing to grow in the soil of our pain? Spiritual farmers, like the monks of old, accept this task of naming brokenness accurately. Then as these little seedlings begin to grow, plucking them up through the hard work of honesty and repentance, and then sowing the seeds of the gospel, the good news and beauty of the work of Jesus and his presence back into the soil of our pain, and then watching for the spirit to bear fruit as those waters of temptation water the seed. Because the waters of testing will come, the question is just what seed is being allowed to grow in the soil.

Sow good works into the lives of the community

So the seed refers to good thoughts and deeds that are sown in the spirit. The seed also refers to good works which are sown into the lives of the community, the church community. St. Paul reminds them not to grow weary of doing good.

We can be so tempted to want to give up and to despair when there are no tangible results that we can see. He tells us to work for the good of all, especially for those of the household of faith. Some of the hardest work that is going to tempt you to despair is in the realm of human relationships.

If we make art, or if we do construction, write, build out spreadsheets, work with materials outside of ourselves, we can manipulate it, change it outside of us, you can potentially scrap it, throw it against the wall, right, if that's the material of our labor. The hard work of loving people well is much harder. I remember years ago in my ordination process, we have a group, if you're not familiar with the Anglican ordination process, there's a group called the Examining Chaplains, and once you're at a certain point, they basically walk with you on all the things that you don't know yet that you should know.

So they examine you and help you along the process. So they had asked me a question when I was, this was 2016, so nine years ago. I'm not gonna tell you how old I was, but I was younger.

And they had asked me in this Examining Chaplains meeting to give a five-minute answer to somebody who comes up to me after the service, and we're having coffee, and as they come to me they ask, why is it okay that you would baptize infants? Give me the, and their question was, give me a five-minute reply to somebody over coffee hour comes to you with that question. To love somebody well goes far beyond me handing them a bunch of proof texts from the Bible. That is not loving them well.

But I didn't know that back then, and so my answer was terrible. I don't even know what I said, but I wouldn't have answered it now the way that I answered it then. Now what I would do is if somebody came up to me and I only had five minutes, I'd probably ask a lot more questions than answer.

And I would start with the question, trying to find the question behind the question, so that I can address the thing they're really asking, which is not usually about infant baptism. Maybe they were baptized as an infant. We'll take another hypothetical.

But they never actually believed in Jesus until they were an adult, and the person who shared the gospel with them and mentored them was this godly Baptist pastor who doesn't see infant baptism as valid at all. Let's say that after this person got married and after that pastor officiated the wedding, the pastor shortly thereafter sadly passed away, and this couple, now not necessarily wanting to leave Baptist, but they want a healthy church, they found out from a friend that their friends have been going to an Anglican Church, and they wanted to try one too. And they were surprised to find out that Anglicans baptize babies. 

And knowing that, if I were to ask those kinds of questions to get a little bit of background, I would more likely understand that the question behind the question is, well, can I lose my salvation? Or what is baptism, actually, if there's no public profession of faith from the person being baptized? Approaching other people with curiosity and kindness is the hard work of doing good to one another. It's assuming the best of somebody. I might ask, well, what did you learn about Jesus from your pastor that meant so much to you in your life, and that cared for you so well? How can I honor their story while showing curiosity with a question? And after that, I could address what baptism is, and why we do that with infants, and why they can receive it.

So that's just an example, but think of your relationships, the people that are closest to you, these relationships that you hold on to and steward, your household, the people in your neighborhood. And as you look around your church family, these are people that you are connected with. It can be a struggle to bless others and to seek their good when there's no discernible change in their thoughts or behavior as you walk with them day in and day out. But the encouragement from St. Paul is, don't grow weary in doing good. Keep sowing. Don't stop.

If you're married, then that begins in your closest and most intimate relationship with your spouse. If you have kids, it's true of your kids, do not lose heart. Keep sowing good things.

You can't produce a good harvest if you give up sowing good seed. And so sow into your household, long for God's goodness to rest on each person in your household, even when they're so challenging to get along with. And do the same in the church as you love one another well.

So in the end of this letter to the churches in Galatia, St. Paul has had to address challenges that arose since he left the community. He had evangelized this community. He loves it.

He knows them by name. He has seen stories of transformation, and these people are an encouragement to him. How discouraging to work so hard and to see them start walking away from the very things that he's been teaching them.

After the Jerusalem Council had decided that in Christ Gentiles don't need to receive circumcision to be a full participant in the body of Christ, you see St. Paul working diligently to now tease out those implications for these churches that he loves. You see his struggle with Saints Peter and Barnabas and the Galatian Church itself, which is at risk of itself sowing bad seed. And so he addresses the goodness of sowing good seeds of our thoughts and actions in the realm of the Spirit, and then sowing good deeds into one another in the community of the church without giving up.

And that's all to the end that there would be a good harvest of good fruit. We want to see the harvest that's plentiful and the laborers are few that we read about in the gospel, then we need to sow good seed. We want the good fruit of the Holy Spirit individually and in the church communally.

We want to experience the eternal life of God in the midst of a really challenging life, which are the waters of testing, but we want to reap well and so we have to sow well. So let's be tireless as spiritual farmers who do the hard work of repentance and who do the hard work of blessing others as we carry on in laboring to see God's kingdom come in the fields of this earthly life. Let me pray for us.

Grant Almighty God that the words that we have heard this day with our ears may by your grace be grafted into our hearts, that they may bring forth in us the fruit of a righteous life to the honor and praise of your name, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.