It’s my guess that a lot of us in this room are pretty used to thinking about the fruit of our work. The fruitfulness of it. The consequences of our decisions, the way it bears out in the world, and how it’s going to look over time.
That’s all very real. But the thing is, for those of us who love God, or who seek God, or who hope against hope for God, which sometimes is the best a human can do – the fruitfulness of our work can get ramped up to a whole other level. How is God working through us, how is God bearing out in the world through us, how is God working God’s new thing into the pieces we move around on the table.
It’s a major question, how God is working through us. And it’s pretty much what the two Scripture passages you just heard are about. Sometimes we may feel we have the strength to raise our heads to ask this question that is both huge and delicate at the same time, a question that might seem overwhelming in its mystery. Sometimes we may feel too afraid of the answer.
But whether we feel we can ask the question of how God works through us – I want to say that as important as that is, it’s only part of the picture, and it’s probably not even the most essential part.
As important as it is to think about how God’s purposes – the desires of God’s loving heart – are worked out through us, maybe there’s an even more fundamental question at work here. Maybe even before we get to how God is working through our decisions and actions and struggles, maybe the most basic thing is just that God working in us – not just through us but in us. In us toward all the good things we do, yes, but even more toward the goodness of just being fully who we are as we stand before God, as beloved children.
You see, when you look at it that way, it becomes about the being rather than the doing. And that’s important because it’s so easy to forget that in a world that’s so very caught up in the doing.
That doesn’t take away from the tremendous import of what you have been doing and what you will go right back out into the world this morning to keep on doing. Just as it didn’t take away from the greatness of the Congress who worshiped in this very space in a broiling summer in 1776 over decisions that were going to have a huge impact one way or the other – and still bigger than any of them knew.
George Washington knelt in that pew, Francis Hopkinson knelt in that one, Ben Franklin in that one, Robert Morris in that one, and so many others, before trudging back through the grassy field that then lay between here and Independence Hall to bring the fruit of their prayer to what might have been agonizing decisions with a huge public impact.
But here’s the thing. The fruit of that prayer, it’s my guess, was not a clear instructional as to what to go write or say at a particular moment. Treason in the hands of such intelligent men is surely not without some uncertainty. Rather, my guess, my hope, is that the fruit of prayer for these men who knew they faced possible death for their decisions, as the Rev. Jacob Duche, the minister here, faced possible hanging for having struck the king’s name from the prayer book on July 4, 1776 – I hope the fruit of their prayer, before they said or did anything, was first and foremost their own integrity before God; I hope the fruit of their prayer was that they felt that they were worth enough, loved enough, that it fueled them to go back out into really uncertain territory.
You are with them, maybe in uncertain and public decisions, but even more, in being beloved.
And in being so loved, you are all worth the same inner integrity that I hope they had, one that originates far away from the crowds and in the silence before God. And that will let you come to the crowds knowing a little better who you are, because your definition came from God rather than from the voices around you.
Maybe that’s part of the Gospel reading we heard. Jesus uses this story of the seeds falling onto the earth to wake us up to the idea of the fruitfulness of God in our lives. It’s great for this time of year, because everything of the earth is so fruitful around us. And maybe that parable can sound like it’s about God’s instructions to us, and we’re supposed figure out if we’re better or worse at following them. And maybe that’s so. But I think there may be something even more basic at work here.
Remember – the most important lesson that the Bible gives us, from the first word to the last, is that we are loved and wanted by God. And this picture of the sower of seeds is just perfect for that. The sower is God, right? – or maybe Jesus, but at any rate, the divine. And the story isn’t that the sower went out to find the perfect soil first and put the one seed right where it would work best. No, he was wild and sort of reckless, tossing that seed wherever it might fall. Just imagine God as the reckless sower, tossing out seeds joyously and freely, letting love fly out of the divine hand and land here, there, and everywhere.
That’s not a picture of selective love. It’s a picture of wild, indiscriminate love, loving those who deserve it and those who don’t, the good hearts and the thorny hearts, and do we really always know the difference?
And maybe that’s the most fruitful seed that can possibly fall into the soil deep inside of you.
Because what can bear more fruit than the joy of feeling truly loved? – what can help us flourish more than believing that we are worth it? And above all, that we’re loved by someone who sees us more clearly and more compassionately than any human can – as much as a fan as I am of human love – and who wishes the greater good not only for the work done through us but for each of us just as a child of God? That understanding that you are beloved is the deepest soil in you, and it is what underlies all that you go out and do. Because at that deepest level, it doesn’t yet have to do with doing. It just has to do with who you are, right now.
It is like the Isaiah reading, a reading of great fruitfulness. It’s special to me because, as I followed my own sense of call to ministry, from early on someone put that reading in front of me, and it stayed there through my own struggle to become a priest. And what I came to understand that while I do believe, and my church believed, that my sense of call was about a call to the priesthood, still on the deepest level, the call from God was about my inner integrity and about being wildly loved in my wholeness that God first dreamed up for me in the divine imagination. The kind of integrity God envisioned for me before the things of the world that started pulling away at it, before the things that posed hard questions about it.
Those questions of integrity are hard, when they happen to us. But what those questions come down to is the bounty and beauty of each of you as God’s beloved child. Period. Not beloved because you’ve achieved x or y, though I believe God celebrates that with you, and not less beloved because you didn’t achieve x or y, though I believe God is sad with you in that. But you are beloved simply because you are God’s, and that’s the beginning and the end of everything.
As you went into the work you felt led to by your own sense of vocation – the work you do in the world – there may have been thorns and briers, like Isaiah says, and there will be more. But God working through you can transform what looks for all the world like a brier patch into a garden. The things God wants for you, the wild seeds of love that fly up into the air and then down into your heart: this stuff is what God will keep working out through you in some unfolding way, so that, even if sometimes it doesn’t look like it, that love will bear fruit. What God puts into motion, God will not abandon. But it bears fruit most simply through the wholeness of who you are before God.
You are all doing extraordinary work, and I thank you, for your work and for this moment in this holy space. And I give you with all my heart the blessing that it is God who weaves the integrity in you today and tomorrow and the next day, that it is God who helps you bear the pain and the challenges, and that it is God who will turn you around and around to always see new possibilities.
God the World-Maker, God the Pain-Bearer, God the Life-Giver.
In other words – God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.