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[Sermon] What Do You Make of This?

Pastor Hector Garfias-Toledo



Jesus doesn't hand his disciples an answer to the parable of the sower, he asks them a question. Pastor Hector sits in that question, turning the story away from our own shortcomings and toward the wild, unstinting generosity of the God who keeps sowing regardless of the soil. Being church for six days a week, he suggests, isn't a task to complete but a readiness to receive what God is already doing in and through us. Even birds eating scattered seed, he notes, serve a purpose in this larger story.



Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.


Grace to you and peace from God Abba Father, Mother, Creator, and the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Lord, who tells us the stories and tells us to make sense of them, but who is with us always. And we say amen.

 

How were you church for the past six days? Oh, you didn't expect that, huh? Take a minute out and talk to people around you. Just share and listen to what the other person says, and I will ask two or three people after to share what you heard from others, how they were church. So take a moment, go around and talk. How were you church during the past six days? Move around, talk to others. Don't change your mind. Don't be like me.

 

For those of you participating online, you can type it. If you have access to type in, you can share how you were church during the past six days.

 

Okay, let's try to wrap up our starting conversation. You can continue later during coffee time.

 

Anyone who would like to share what you heard from others about how this person, your sibling in Christ, was church?

 

Meeting the needs of others. One more.

 

Say again. Smile to others.

 

For those of you who participated online, I don't know if the tech team can see if anyone typed anything on the YouTube. Well, type it if you can, and we can watch later. The reason I ask you this question is because last Wednesday, when we were studying these passages in the Bible study, there was a very important comment that I believe is a reminder connected with the passages that we read today here. And that was that every time we are here on Sundays, and we are reminded, and I remind myself too, that we are going to be church for the next six days until the Spirit gathers the church and brings the church here to this building, we are not called to go and knock on doors, or to bring the Bible and smack people with the Bible to tell them that they need to know the Bible, or to try to bring the organ with us to somebody else's house to have a worship service and be church. It is about how we live our lives and how we talk to one another. How we are receptive to the work that God is doing already in us and through us for others, and what God is doing in and through the lives of others for us as individuals.

 

It is about our lives, and it is a matter of the posture that you and I take when we leave this place every time the gospel is brought up. That's why, in today's gospel, I love the beginning: I would love to see the faces, and my own face, if I was with Jesus when he says, "I'm going to tell you something," and then suddenly Jesus says, "What do you make of this?" Oh, Jesus, I thought you were going to tell me the answer. But Jesus is always asking people to open their minds and their hearts, and to let the Holy Spirit, through the words of the gospel and the stories that he's reading, transform, change, challenge, and bring a new perspective of what it means to be a child of God in the life of this world. What did you make of this? This question is important to me, because the traditional interpretation of this story is that you and I need to identify with the soil in the story of the sower. Most of the time, you and I start worrying so much about being too hard, too rocky, too thorny, or that there are too many birds around eating the seeds.

 

But is it about us?

 

What do you make of this?

 

You see the power of this question? What do you make of this? What if it is about the sower? Not our successes, our failures, the birds, the rocks, the thorns, but about the extravagance of a sower who does not seem to be disconcerted by all these concerns. He's not a sower like me, who wants to go to the playground, who goes to the kitchen or out of the church and then says, "No, I think I changed my mind. I don't want to do it. Too many challenges, too hot, too bright, too many people, too dangerous." With a scooter out there, I would go hiking with a scooter, see what happens. No.

 

If it is about ourselves, if we take this story as being about ourselves, we will fall into this idea that we need to be productive and successful. And the vocation and the call that we have from God becomes more of something that needs to be done, something that needs to get done. It becomes a routine. And that's why our jobs, our studies, our families, our relationships, and even the ministry in the church become one more chore that we need to do, instead of being a life-giving experience. We turn it into a life-sucking, daily experience, and all of this leads us to discouragement, and then you and I find ourselves surviving day by day, or worse, just existing.

 

Maybe Jesus is evoking in us a new awareness, a new way in which God's reign is interacting, interconnected, and abundantly producing fruit in the life and through the life of each one of us, of the Lord Jesus's church. The sower scattered all the seeds, and even though it seems like wasted seeds, some of the seeds eaten by the birds serve a purpose. They feed the bird, and we know the rest of what comes out from the bird. We find trees and plants in places that, well, how did the seeds get here? Birds have a function. This reminds me of the words of the Apostle St. Paul: "All things work for good, all things work together for good, for those who love the Lord," Romans chapter 8, verse 28. The focus is not so much on us or our shortfalls, but on the generosity of our Creator, Abba: the prolific sower who is not obsessed about the conditions of the fields, nor stingy with the seeds, but casts the seeds everywhere, on good and bad soil. Abba, who keeps reaching into the seed bag for eternity, covering the whole creation with the fertile seed of God's truth, of healing, of life. And that's why I believe the psalmist, in Psalm 65, which was read this morning, I can see the dawn and the dusk calling for worship. The earth is called to dance. This image gives you the energy, the attitude, that the sower is about bringing life, and the valleys are shouting the stories that lead to readiness, to willingness to say, "I am in," because God's reign is unstoppable and you and I are already in it. We are part of it, and the reign is right here in this place right now.

 

So, as I was telling our young worshippers, when we are telling stories every day in our lives, through our words and through our actions, it is not about how virtuous we are, but about how the unforced rhythms of grace that we talked about last Sunday become a tangible extension of the reign of God that is reaching out further and further, deeper and deeper into our lives, to bring life despite everything this world may tell us to discourage us, or anything that may feel discouraging. Now, I'm not saying that we need to live in this kumbaya type of life where everything is falling apart and we just need a big smile, pretending, because I don't think that's good. I don't think that's actually damaging for us, and it's not real and honest to others. What I am saying is that the life-giving seeds that God continues to plant every day are inside us, and give us the opportunity to walk through and be able to see how God is present. Not so much about asking why this happens to me, but how God is present in the midst of my challenges, that allows me to stand up. In the midst of my tears, in the midst of my sorrow, in the midst of my anger, in the midst of my life, when I'm raising my fist against God, I am able to say, "And yet I join creation in the joy and the praise, because our sower never stops." Never stops. Even when I feel this way, I'm sure that the seed of life will fall to bring life in my heart.

 

To conclude, I want to share a few words from a poem by Mario Benedetti, whom I have talked about in the past, a Uruguayan poet who was one of the revolutionaries in Latin America during the time of Pinochet, when the CIA and other powers were overthrowing governments and installing dictators in every country they could in Latin America. He was put into prison, and he wrote this poem to remind us why the people can keep on singing.

 

I would like to invite... I'm going to read it in Spanish, and it's already on the screen.

 

[Reading the poem in Spanish]


 

You may be asking why we keep on singing. While the heaviest burdens, love, compassion, and responsibility may crush us and weigh us down, they are precisely what give our life its depth, its beauty, its purpose.

 

If this is really the parable of the soil, and not the parable of the different kinds of ground, then it begins to sound quite new, quite fresh, quite reviving. So what does it mean to be a scattered church for six days, living our lives in a way that shows what we make of this story that Jesus brings to us today? What do you make of this? Are you listening? Really listening, says Jesus. And I think this is not an indictment, but a call to be amazed, and to embrace the reckless love of the sower.

 

And the good news, my siblings in Christ, is this: a sower went out and planted seeds. A sower is still out there planting seeds. And for that reason, we sing. We keep on singing. And that, to me, is good news. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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