Finding the sweet spot

No sermon from me today but a beautiful reflection from our friends at the Center of Action and Contemplation. I have read it several times, each time finding something jarring, beautiful, and different.

Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan describes how Jesus’ parables invited listeners to find wisdom in their daily agricultural circumstances . . . Nabhan helps us hear Jesus’ lively, earthy storytelling in his retelling of the parable of the Sower and the Seed: 

    Hey! Listen up, those of you who think you have ears!…

    A farmer went out to sow,  

    and from his hand he would throw… 

[Jesus] gestured with his hand, as if flinging seeds out toward them in every which way.  

    …a broadcasting of the seeds,  

               but most of them landed 

    far from the sower and too close to the barren road….  

               Some of the seed they cast out 

    fell where bedrock reached the surface. 

He knelt upon the stony ground before them, knocking his knuckles against the hardened earth to demonstrate its impermeability. They heard a low thud. They knew all too well that seeds cannot penetrate very far into compacted earth….

    Others of the seeds he sowed 

               landed among some thorny brush….  

He grabbed a branch of spiny, tangled crucifixion thorn and forced his fist up through its barbs until the skin on his hand dripped with blood. The people themselves had felt their own arms and legs scratched and bloodied by the piercing of these thorns…. 

    At last, the sower came to a place 

    where the earth felt welcoming, full of tilth,  

    where he could gently fling some seeds into sweet spots 

    where they made their way to deeper, richer soil. 

He knelt down again and used his bloody hand as a trowel, but this time, he brought up fragrant, richly textured, glistening humus from beneath the stones on the surface. He raised it up, then he bowed to the fellaheen [food producers] who had gathered to hear him. He stretched out his other arm out toward them and opened his hand in deference, as if to remind them that they themselves were essential elements for sustaining the fecundity and generative energy of this earth.  

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