Licensing of Caroline Sackley at West Meon, Thursday 18th September at 7.30 p.m.

Licensing of Caroline Sackley at West Meon, Thursday 18^th September at 7.30 p.m.

Readings: I Cor 15:1-11/Lk 8:4-15

One of my father’s crazier ideas was that we should sell up our home, move to another village, live in a small farm cottage for a year or so, while he with some help from the family and friends built a new house. And that’s exactly what happened. The plot of land which he’d bought was part of an old orchard, which was in very run down condition, near a river. The local farmer, already a family friend, had it ploughed for us. But the soil was rough and tired, and unlikely to help grow a new garden. So potatoes had first to be sown everywhere, after a great deal of harrowing, rolling, and then ridging. I can still remember the wooden implement that made holes at the top of each ridge, and the potatoes going in. There was a precision that expressed our control over both the soil and the crop.

Nothing could be further from the scene depicted by Jesus of the sower and his seed, where there doesn’t appear to be much precision, or control either. It’s perhaps one of the best known of the gospel parables – not just recounted by Luke (as tonight), but also by Matthew and Mark. The clear message is that Jesus is the sower, for he describes the seed as ‘the word of God’, incidentally, the only time this expression is on his lips in all the gospels. That rather points the finger at us, as the soil. But there is no modern technology in the process whatever. The seed that fell by the way was by the side of the road, but still on the field, where the soil was harder. The seed that fell on rocky ground was in the field, but on stones that old-style manual ploughing had been unable to remove, and so wouldn’t grow much because the layer of earth on the stones was too thin (no rock gardens here!). The seed that fell among thorns grew up with them – which implies that they were young thorns, perhaps not very visible. But the seed that fell on good ground yielded a very large harvest indeed.

Jesus is describing a process that would have been immediately familiar to his hearers. This is exactly what happens, they would think. All our fields are like that. And the point he is trying to make is that all these different responses to the ‘word of God’ are inevitable. There are times when we lack conviction, we get distracted, we find the gospel inadequate to what life brings us. Yet he is also making another point: it’s the long game that he’s after, not the immediate results. He’s prepared to put up with the imprecision of the exercise, because that’s what human beings are like.

It’s hard to take in the impact of this simple, often-told story. There is something reassuring about the farmer of old, scattering his seed to right and left from a basket suspended from his neck by a string cord. And yet what is probably the most difficult truth to take in is not the different fortunes of the various seeds – which are challenging enough – but the lack of control in the whole exercise. It goes right against the grain of the way we live our lives today, with monitoring, goals, careful management, and risk-assessments. We bring all that to whatever area of life we are involved in, whether it’s education, health, local government – or the Church. Bishops suffer from it! I’ve no doubt that Caroline recognises it in herself, and has encountered it in rural Lincolnshire, just as she will meet it here at West Meon and Warnford, and in the Petersfield Deanery in her work as Parish and Deanery Development Adviser, a welcome arrival as we embark on a ministry strategy for the whole diocese. There is always a build-up of expectations in the arrival of a new ‘sower’. But because she is handling spiritual things, albeit concealed (as in a parable) in the cultural receptacles of time-schedules, budgets, and human motivation, there is neither total control, because that is impossible, nor immediate results, because the ‘secrets of the Kingdom of God’ to which Jesus refers are about a long game. It is, if you like, a more subtle form of leadership and management. The great figures in Christianity may have had their heads in the clouds, but their feet were firmly on the ground: they keep teaching us about ‘patience with unfinishedness.’

The great truth about a parable is that its meaning is not always obvious, and it’s sometimes even veiled from us. Jesus often spoke in parables, which are based on simple, powerful images (like the mustard seed and the vineyard) in order to embed them in our memories. We are not to expected to take them all in at once, we need to be ready to let them speak to us again and again in different ways. When we suddenly see some hidden truth that makes us remember them whether we are at prayer at home, or worship at church, or in a school assembly, or in a parish or deanery study group, any of those occasions may find us out on a limb, by the wayside, or in a shallow , barren frame of mind, or among enticing ideas all too ready to choke us out of hearing him. We’re not machines, however much we may treat ourselves and each other as if we are! We’re human beings, called repeatedly into that curious field ; the mysterious work of the word of God. For all its frustrations, and its counter cultural characteristics that are alien to any age, it really is about the heavenly ‘long game’, what Rowan Williams calls ‘the deep breath of the long haul’.

+ Kenneth Portsmouth