A sower went out to sow (you can read the full text at relationalrealities.com).

The Gospel for last Sunday gave us the parable of the sower. In the image of the sower God offers us an image of divine action that challenges our own careful and prudent way of going about things.  God as the sower and Jesus is the seed. The striking thing about God as sower is his recklessness and lack of agrarian efficiency. No farmer, modern or ancient - and here is the paradoxical confrontation at the heart of Jesus' parable - would plant crops in this indiscriminate and wasteful way. Yet, God scatters the seed of the Word far and wide heedless of the type of ground upon which it falls. God scatters the seed everywhere in the world and its fruiting is not confined to having only fallen in our supposed, good soil.

God is free of our petty moralistic judgments about what is efficient, what is effective, and what is ultimately fruitful. God seems to foresee the possibility of fruitfulness in our failures, and in the arid areas of life where we remain limited by our fearful self-protections. Unexpected and unlooked-for fruitfulness often lies in failure as much as it does in those parts of our experience where we encounter the self-satisfaction of our own success.

I am learning the contours of the St. Martin's community and for me this is, first a foremost, a listening exercise. As I listen in these first weeks, which coincide with the summer exodus of many from the regular routines of Church, something so very much needed as a time for re-creation, I hear of past initiatives judged as failures or mistakes and therefore not to be repeated. I hear of other initiatives that achieved their goal, but failed to afford those who had invested considerable time and talent with a sense of their efforts having been valued by either authority, or the community. I hear of initiatives when passion, effort, and success all came together in one place, and at one time. These are remembered with a longing to recapture or repeat those moments, even if the time has now past.

In experiences and disappointments, the dynamic of relational and community life unfolds amidst the ordinariness of our hopes and dreams if we dare to entertain them. As the contours of a new community emerge into my awareness I see the hand of God indiscriminately scattering the seed of the Word in the world so that it may bear unexpected fruit in us. Another way of speaking of God's indiscriminate scattering of the seed of the Word is to speak of God as a God of unrestrained generosity!

To those of you still in town, see you in Church on this coming Sunday!

Yours in Christ, Mark+

+++