Genesis 1:9-13; Leviticus 26:3-6; Mark 4:1-9
I.
I was at a church picnic when someone sitting at the table with me started complaining bitterly about mosquitoes, directly asking why God could create such a horrible thing. It is the kind of question that ministers get from time to time. And I understand the frustration with mosquitoes; no animal has killed more humans over the millennia than the tiny mosquito. By far. Still, I looked at her and said, "Perhaps you would prefer to be on one of those planets with a methane/ammonia atmosphere with crushing gravity and extreme temperatures?" My point being that whatever is here is here as part of the balance and interaction that makes for the only planet we know of anywhere that can sustain life. You live on that planet! You're surrounded by miracle, beauty, and wonder! Mosquitoes may be part of the deal; but you're blessed to be in the best place in the universe!
Susan knows that I have this thing I say whenever nature does something we don't like. "It's a living planet!" Usually I make this quip when we face some inconvenience or disruption in our pretty easy lives. "There's mold in the basement." "It's a living planet." "The cat met a skunk." "It's a living planet." "I got stung by a yellowjacket." "It's a living planet."
Of course, I am careful not to make this response for more severe things or when it is inappropriate. For instance, you should not make a comment like this when you're in the emergency room with your spouse who just got diagnosed with Lyme disease.
But it is a living planet, almost from the beginning. I mean, in today's reading from Genesis we're in Day Three of creation, and dry land and life appear. There isn't even any sun or moon yet, but life cannot be delayed any longer. Vegetation emerges from the land almost instantly.
The Earth was never a dead rock for very long; it is embedded in the planet itself to produce life and community. The Creator never creates anything lifeless and inert. Even rocks and water and air exist to support life. Even the frigid nothingness of space itself only serves to make room for the Creator to blow life into it.
Creation is the overflowing of love from the Creator who is Trinity, an interactive community -- Source, Word, Breath -- that churns and spins like a generator producing more and more others to participate together in this eternal and everlasting mutual sharing of affection and attraction.
The Bible has several creation stories; only two of them are here in Genesis. One of my favorites is in Proverbs 8 where it talks about how the Creator's Wisdom -- in Greek it is Sophia, a feminine Presence -- permeates and flavors and shapes and imprints everything the Creator speaks into existence. She is the very Voiceprint of the Creator encoded in everything, the frequency of the Creator's love infusing everything.
The universe is therefore made of love, and in love it all has meaning, purpose, direction, power, and value. (That's what the Trinity is about, by the way; it's not just irrational doctrine to be swallowed and dutifully recited when required. The Trinity is a way of saying that God is a community bound together in love.)
The Creator creates life to participate in the widening dance of desire and fulfillment. We are made of the same elements and minerals as everything else; we even share atoms and molecules with our environment all the time. Indeed, I am reminded of the name of the band we saw the other night at Grassroots: Microbes Mostly, which also describes what we are, there being more microbes than cells in our bodies.
II.
I hope I am painting a picture here of creation as a wanton, profligate, explosive, and free act of self-giving, self-emptying, unbridled, wild, undomesticated, uncontrolled love and life on the part of the Creator. Once the Word makes Light, separating it from darkness, then blows a splendid bubble into the waters making an open space, the Creator then brings about the solidity of land and immediately the spread of greenery. It's all like a kind of chain reaction towards an as yet unrevealed destiny.
I wonder if Jesus has the Creator's wild act in mind when he tells a crowd the parable about the sower. Because the sower is also remarkably wild -- we might even say careless and irresponsible -- in the act of spreading seeds. Jesus' audience must have been somewhat puzzled about what a bad job this sower was doing. I mean, what farmer does this? Wouldn't it make more sense for the sower to take better aim so all the seed lands in the good dirt? Wouldn't they take care to avoid letting any fall into the ground that would not support plants for long enough to produce fruit? Wasn't this sower being rather wasteful?
Indeed, the sower's incompetence is borne out by the results: the seed -- that they had carefully stored all winter, even though it could have been turned into flour the previous year and made into bread -- is wasted. It does not have a chance to produce new plants. There will not be as much of a yield since this dopey sower managed to throw a percentage of the precious seed away into bad soil. There will be that much less grain coming up in the summer... whatever still manages to survive the birds, because, you know, it's a living planet.
What are we to make of this? Clearly it confuses the disciples, and the crowd was probably scratching their heads over it too. But Jesus just kind of leaves it out there for them to sit with like a Zen koan that you're supposed to reflect on until it short-circuits your brain and you attain enlightenment. Or not.
What I get out of it is that our nervousness and disgust with the sower depends on our having a certain mindset about the story. We are only confused and upset about it if we approach it from the perspective of scarcity. Only if we assume there might not be enough seed and that we have to carefully watch and manage and measure out what seed we have wisely because we might run out, do we feel uncomfortable about the sower's action. Jesus deliberately puts us in this uncomfortable place, and has us deal with it for a while.
We want nice stories with helpful morals. We want to be encouraged in how to become healthy, wealthy, and wise in this world. We want something bad to happen to the foolish sower, we want him to be compared with a wise sower who is way more careful and therefore gets rewarded. Jesus doesn't give us that. He never delivers nice stories with helpful morals. Most of his parables are designed to make us uncomfortable.
III.
But the thing about it is, in Genesis the Creator is ridiculously careless and irresponsible in just blasting love into the fluid, amorphous, disordered chaos of nothingness. There is no worry that this will not be a good environment for life, this formless void, this tohu wavohu. The creative Trinity's dynamic love will not be denied or contained, and it is going to overflow into this turbulent emptiness no matter what. It is going to make for itself a space for life. Like the sower spreading seed every which where, the Creator spews the Word and Breath out and it forms what it needs to form. And as soon as we have Earth we have life. Life comes from the Creator and the Creator has an inexhaustible supply because the Creator's love is always generating more and more.
When seen from this perspective, that of a Creator who makes the universe out of nothing simply by speaking, who has indeed made an incredibly fruitful and fecund planet that is awesomely productive so that there is more than enough for all and then some left over, it is hard to get bothered by the sower's carelessness. There is enough. The Creator ensures that there will always be enough. Think of how many apples are produced by one planted apple seed. Think of how many grains come from one planted grain of wheat. The Creator continues to churn out good things at an astonishing rate.
All we have to do is live in gratitude and generosity, and share. For if there is not enough, that is, if there are some who are deprived, that is not because the Creator did not make enough, but is due to our messed up economic system which institutionalizes waste, avarice, gluttony, violence, and greed, poisoning the Earth and generating injustice and inequality, leaving us in a rapidly worsening set of climate imbalance and mass extinction crises. In a place of astonishing and miraculous life, we are busy mowing it down and paving it over with death and ruin.
Hey, people! To the rest of the life forms on this planet, we are the mosquitoes! We are the noxious pests bringing death. We are what Robert Oppenheimer said when he made the bomb: "I am Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." We are the ones who make the rest of creation ask what the Creator could possibly have been thinking! If humans disappeared tomorrow everything would instantly start getting better. The Creator would start over with something else....
When they are liberated from slavery in Egypt, the Creator gives the people a law. The law is basically a collection of rules about how not to live like Pharaoh. Don't invent hierarchies. Don't oppress and exploit your neighbors, especially foreigners. And don't let some people take too much for themselves and others wind up with not enough. Live in justice and humility, kindness and compassion, sharing and equity, thanksgiving and generosity. In other words, the Creator says, "There will be enough! Just distribute it thankfully and fairly to all. Then, I promise, you'll never run out. Trust me on this!"
Jesus himself has nothing but criticism and warning for those who take and hoard too much, while their neighbors are starving. He will feed hillsides full of hungry people starting with almost nothing. He will recommend we live simply as sparrows, day to day, relying on the Creator's goodness embodied in a beloved community of mutual aid in an economy of sharing.
IV.
Our one job in this life on this planet is to love others. We are to reflect and express the love of the Creator for all creation, including all people, beginning with the marginalized and excluded, exploited and oppressed. It is to spread the Creator's love with wild and generous abandon... which is never a waste, but always an act of hope and trust. Who knows where that seed may grow? The Creator coaxes life out of the most unexpected and inhospitable places. The Creator can even soften your stony heart and knead you into the good soil that can receive the good news and bear fruit in justice and goodness.
It's a living planet. Life always finds a way. If we get in the way of that, life will happily use us as compost. We're here to work and play with creation, making this an even better place for everybody. There is enough for all. Let's see that happen.
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