"The Harvest" | The Rev. Heidi Thorsen | July 23, 2023

Our summer sermon series, “Tuned for Praise,” invites preachers to reflect on the relationship between faith and music, as well as the lectionary texts for the day.

Proper 11, Year A (Track 2): Isaiah 44:6-8 | Psalm 86:11-17 | Romans 8:12-25 | Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

“Let anyone with ears, listen.” In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I started taking piano lessons when I was seven years old. I remember the piano itself, vividly - an upright piano made of honey-colored wood, and I remember watching my older sister play it, before I was ready to take lessons myself. I was so excited to begin, and yet - as some people who have taken piano lessons know - it isn’t always satisfying at first to play simple songs like Hot Cross Buns and Mary Had A Little Lamb. It would be years before I could play things that I actually connected to on an emotional level. 

Nevertheless - somehow - I stuck with it. I stuck with it through Christmas piano recitals and spring piano recitals, until I was old enough to take part in a regional program, the Music Teacher Association of California piano exams. I loved these exams, and I feared these exams. They involved months of preparation, all leading up to an intense day of testing at a local college that included performance, written music theory, sight reading, and an audio exam. At a certain point, I think I stuck with piano simply because I was a competitive child. It felt important that I keep ahead of my stepsisters, who also played the piano. I also took great pride in these little plastic trophies that my piano teacher would get for us each time we completed another level.

Have you ever done the right thing for the wrong reasons? I think that’s how I was with piano, for a while. I stayed with it because I wanted to succeed. I thank God for that competitive streak that got me through the inevitable phase when children want to quit something desperately just because it’s hard. And once I did get through that phase I discovered that I liked playing piano - a lot. I liked the way I could be loud when the notations in the sheet music told me to play boldly, even though I was mostly quiet and reserved as a kid. I liked the way I could play quietly too, connecting the notes with the pedal, allowing myself to feel vulnerable in a way that the teenage version of myself would otherwise never allow. 

I stopped taking piano lessons when I went to college, but I carried the music with me - a portfolio of sheet music that felt more precious than a diary. With each passing year I play less. But the most important skill I learned wasn’t how to play a Chopin Nocturne or Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee. Instead, the most important thing was learning how to put myself into the music - how to relax my competitiveness and perfectionism, and let myself feel the notes instead. There have been times in my life when I felt so emotionally gridlocked that music was the only thing that could help. In those moments, music felt like an open window, like a release, like a prayer. 

Music taught me how to connect with my body and soul, beyond just my brain. In that way, music laid the foundations of my faith. Both music and faith started, for me, as an intellectual exercise: something I had to wrap my head around. But together they grew into something that was living, breathing, and constantly changing. In this way I would describe both music and faith as incarnational - something that lives in us and around us, in our flesh and in the rhythm of our lives. The incarnation is the most important part of my faith: the belief that God became flesh and lived among us, in the person of Jesus. Music is a reminder of that incarnational process. It is a reminder of how divinity lives in the everyday stuff of our lives. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, our scripture says in the Gospel of John. And in a similar way the notes of music become flesh and live among us - they are incarnate in the fingers of a pianist, or the vocal cords of a singer. This is a reminder of the way that God has chosen to be present to us, by entering our human lives in the person of Jesus.

Now, as much as I would like to philosophize about music and faith for the rest of this sermon, I also want to address the words of our Gospel passage today - because it’s hard to ignore a passage that ends with weeping and gnashing of teeth. In today’s parable Jesus tells the story of a sower who sows good seed in his field. But while everybody slept, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat. At first no one realizes that the weeds are there, which is why readers of the Bible  over the centuries have come to identify these weeds as “tares,” or a type of plant that looks like wheat when it is first planted, and then grows into something different. Once these weeds are discovered, the sower decides to leave them there and let them grow together. At the time of the harvest they are separated for their different purposes: the wheat is harvested and goes into the barn, while the weeds are burned.

“Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field” - Jesus’ disciples asks. The explanation is just as challenging as the parable itself, if not more. Jesus explains that the good seed are the children of God, and the weeds are the children of the evil one. At the end of the age, “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father, “ while the weeds are thrown into a furnace of fire.

This is the kind of passage that inspires fear and trembling; the kind of passage that inspires sermons with titles like “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It is also the type of passage that would have spoken to me in a particular way during certain piano exams I took as a kid, when I sat in an auditorium full of students being tested on music theory, and wondered whether I would be graded among the wheat or the weeds. 

Therein lies the problem: this idea that human beings can be divided into categories, and we are either wheat or weeds. Despite Jesus’ explanation in the Gospel of Matthew, there are lots of reasons to opt for a more generous interpretation of this passage. Theologians through centuries have identified the wheat and the weeds not as people, but rather as different influences that might grow up within a person - Origen of Alexandria, Gregory Nazianzen, and Macrina have offered this translation, among others. This interpretation is supported by the broad range of meanings of the word υἱοὶ in the original Greek. The word literally means “sons,” but it has a range of less literal meanings, including descendants in general, or even a more general sense of progeny - a category of related things. Perhaps the weeds and the wheat are not respective types of people. Instead they are descriptors of the different kinds of harvests our lives can yield, when we allow ourselves to be led by God or instead by other things.

So where does that leave us today, with the parable of the wheat and the weeds? For me, the most striking thing about this parable is how the wheat and weeds look similar - so similar, in the beginning, that the weeds go unnoticed until much closer to the harvest. This reminds me of how the difference between faithfulness and faithlessness is, at times, very subtle. Faithfulness and faithlessness might look almost exactly alike, from the outside. It might look like going to church, or speaking up for justice, or acts of service to others. And yet true faithfulness isn’t just about going through the motions. True faithfulness changes us from the inside out - so we don’t just look like wheat. Instead we become the harvest - we become a source of life and goodness for ourselves and others.

This leads me back to piano. With lots of practice I could play a piece with technical accuracy - and it might look like perfection from the outside. But I know the difference for myself between technical accuracy, and when my heart and soul is in a piece that I play. I know the difference between the wheat and the tares - when it comes to my own understanding of myself, and how I am present in different times and places. For example, I know what it’s like to let music flow through me like breath - even if it doesn’t happen all the time. And I know what it’s like to live out my faith in ways that feel all encompassing, and not prescribed - even if that doesn’t happen all the time.

That is the kind of harvest that I am longing for. A harvest of authenticity. A harvest of good actions and transformed intentions. A harvest of wheat that can be turned into bread and substance, instead of something shallow that only looks like wheat. 

I believe the pathway to that harvest is described in our reading from the book of Romans. Paul urges us not to live according to the flesh, “for if you live according to the flesh, you will die,” but instead to live according to the Spirit. “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” For me living according to the flesh looks like piano lessons at their worst: like being consumed by competitiveness for its own sake, and being filled with envy for people who play music differently than me. That is the way of the weeds. But when I consider what it looks like to live according to the Spirit - that looks like my relationship with piano at its very best; it looks like a field full of wheat; and it sounds like music that encompasses my heart, mind, and soul.

What is it in your own life that gives you that feeling of being led by the Spirit? Maybe it is also music, for you. Maybe it is dancing. Maybe it is the freedom of walking, or running, or swimming; or the patient work of gardening. Maybe it is the flow of assisting with a complicated surgery, or the deep satisfaction of balancing an equation. Whatever it is that connects all the parts of you - body, mind, and spirit - think about that thing. Let it be a reminder of God’s choice to become human and live among us; to be incarnate with us. Let it be a reminder of what faith can be like when we don’t simply consume the world around us. Let it be a reminder of what faith could be like when we, ourselves, are the harvest. Amen.