July 12, 2026
Pentecost 7a
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Epiphany, Winnipeg
A week and a bit ago Val and I were in Whitehorse where we went to the Whitehorse Worship Arts Festival. There was music and art, drama, dinner church, education, inspiration, and contemplation. People from BC to Ontario and Virginia.
On Saturday morning at 7:30, about thirty of us piled on to a bus and rode 25 minutes out of Whitehorse, to a small lake named Jackson Lake, for something called Wild Church. Now Wild Church isn’t wild, like on TV wild or hand waving pew jumping faith healing church. It was just…church in the wild. We gathered around the fire on the lakeshore for some opening words and simple prayer, and then we took half an hour to disperse in silence and spend time in the wild. Some people went to a labyrinth in the forest a few hundred meters down the road; some sat quietly by the lake. A few walked into the bush and sat for awhile, and I walked alone further up into the hills on an empty gravel road. We all had some time to listen and look and ponder and pray.
And when it was all over there was hot chocolate and coffee: two of my closest friends.
Later on that day Val and I were talking about what we might have learned, or what the whole Wild Church thing had meant or what insights or inspirations we’d received, and Val said that what had suddenly struck her was that all of this land is connected. From up there on a hillside in Yukon, the land moved west over high mountains and to the Pacific. And from that lake on that hillside the land stretched east over a territorial border, through more mountains and through foothills, and then the same land stretched for a long long time over prairies, over two provincial borders and through flooding towns and cities in Western Manitoba and right here to Winnipeg, the oven of the west. It’s all the same land. And I don’t mean the same country. It’s just that the land flows on…there’s no place where you can point at your feet and say this here is mountains and this here is the foothills. And you can’t find a spot you can stand on and say, “This foot is in the foothills and this foot on the prairies, the parkland ends here and the Red River Valley begins here. It all just kind of flows together, and in some weird but simple way this place and that place are the same place. Rocky ground, thorny ground, footpaths and highways, thin soil and deep rich soil. All part of the same land.
As we were flying home a few days later the landscape out the plane window looked different. Some of you will know that in a lot of ways my heart is most at home in mountains, and when I leave those places to come back to these flat places I feel a kind of sadness. But on this flight that sadness seemed to be gone. I just saw mountains and foothills and prairie and the land right here, and I felt at home the whole way along. I didn’t see that place and this place. They were all just a piece of one place.
Jesus gets into a boat and looks over the crowds who have gathered onshore. “Listen,” he says. “A sower; a farmer; a gardener, went out to plant and they threw seed on the land. Some seed landed on the path and birds came along and ate it before it could take root, some fell on rocks and grew a bit but there wasn’t enough soil to hold enough moisture to keep them from drying out. Some fell in fields of thistle and thorn and never really stood a chance, and some fell on rich soil and grew.” Then he explains that it all has to do with hearing God’s word, and all kinds of ways of getting it, or not getting it at all. And in the end of it all, that seed grows, and the crop is full, and the promise that lives in the seeds bursts out and grows and the harvest is abundant.
Maybe the most natural way for us to hear this is to listen, and then assume that Jesus is talking about all these different kinds of people. Some people are like rocky soil, and there are those who are like thorny ground. Others are like a hard footpath, stepped on too many times, and still more are like good, rich soil. So we should try to be good soil.
But let’s leave that way behind. The last thing we need right now is another way to divide people up and say these are the right kinds of people – the good soil, rich and open to God’s word -and those are the not-right kinds of people. Thorny, weedy, hardpacked.
What if we heard it like this: I’m not one kind of soil and you’re another kind, and you’re another kind, and so one. Maybe we’re actually like that landscape that moves from the mountains of Yukon through the prairies and beyond. The lines that divide one type of soil from another are pretty blurry, and one landscape can have so many different soils.
To be realistic, our own lives are rocky soil where the soil isn’t deep enough for a seed to find room to take root. We hear Jesus speak of loving our enemies, or how much we are called to forgive, and the world could be rich with grace instead of grudges, but how could it really be like that? There’s only so much soil for that nice stuff. And the seed just can’t grow there.
To be realistic, our own lives are thorny ground. We hear about blessed are the poor, or a wedding banquet where the king invites the poor and the outsiders and the good and the bad, and we imagine a world where the ones who didn’t matter matter the most. But there’s this thorny growth that says that wealth and success are what really make us great. That makes it hard for any other seed, any other way, to take root.
To be honest, our own lives are like a hard footpath. Maybe you’ve been stepped on too many times, or maybe the constant flow of bad news packs us down so hard. And if we hear about resurrection and life that will always rise up from death, it’s hard to believe anything but that dry baked land is all there is. It’s hard for seeds of hope to grow.
And, to be quite honest, we are deep, rich, receptive soil. We hear all that news about the least being the greatest and a feast where all are called. A seed is scattered that promises that the hungry are fed and the strangers welcomed and forgiveness is given and life that will always rise up again. We take all that in, and we carry it with us into the world, and we live and we treat the world around us like it’s true, because it is. Look around, in our life and in the life of the world out there – sometimes it’s hard to see, but it’s there, and sometimes it’s plain as day. The seed takes root, and the crop does grow.
We are like that land that stretches from the mountains to the prairies. Good soil, hard soil, thin soil, troubled soil. I’m not just one thing. You aren’t either. We are all kinds of soil. Each of us. All of us together.
God scatters seed among us today, all the different soils that we are, as we sing and pray and listen and speak and eat and drink. So many good seeds are thrown around here, scattered all over us. Just cast your mind back over twenty minutes and think of where good seed has been sown; how good news has been scattered all over this patch of land…. Maybe it’s been a word about forgiveness, or rain, or new life, or about a light that shines when it’s so hard to see, or that there’s just no more condemnation. All of that is being planted here.
Good seed will be sown, with strange news about bodies resurrected, and remembering all those who need to be remembered, and we’ll give each other peace, all of us here and there. Peace will be shared. Seeds are sown. Bread and wine, grown from seeds in good soil, are scattered here over all of us, and who knows what that seed will grow into as we step out into the soil of the world?
Listen. A sower went out to sow, and good seed was scattered over us all, and scattered all over the whole land. And whatever God plants, will not return empty. When God scatters the seed, the harvest is on the way.