Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

You all know I’m a “Bible nerd.”  I freely admit it.  It’s no surprise, I guess, since I’m your pastor.  But I had to laugh at myself last week when I was going off to Cape Cod for a little study leave and was almost out the driveway when I had to slam on the brakes and run back into the house to get my Bible.  My husband stood there laughing at me too, because I’d already packed 3 bags of books to read in 3 days – Toni had suggested a great book on prayer that I’d been reading, along with another favorite devotional book of mine, but I also took along a few books about grief and a few about stewardship, not to mention the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer that David Matte had loaned me, which I was reading for fun.  But how did I forget to bring a Bible?

It got even more funny when I arrived at the room where I was staying and went to unload my car and found the canvas bag I kept in the trunk for emergencies.  I’d forgotten it was there.  Inside were a couple of extra bottles of water, a wool blanket, a hooded sweatshirt, a first-aid kit, a flashlight, and of course, a Bible – the New Revised Standard Version – the really good one with a concordance and maps in the back.  And then, once I was settled in and went looking in the hotel drawer for a phone book, what did I find?  Of course.  Thanks to the Gideons, there was a King James Version!

I not only had 3 printed Bibles in hand that week, it turns out the room had wireless internet – so I also had use of my favorite on-line Bible reference website, Oremus Bible Browser, at www.bible.oremus.org.  I have to admit, that’s the Bible I read most often while on my retreat.  It’s just so easy to look up a favorite passage when you have an electronic search engine.  So that’s why, when my daughter Lela went off to Silver Lake this past week – when I told her “Don’t forget to pack your Bible” and she said, “No, Mom.  They have plenty of Bibles at camp” – I didn’t try to argue with her.  What was the point?  In this “information age,” where you can quickly Google the answer to just about any question, The Good Book just doesn’t hold the same position it once did.  It has become just one self-help book among many – drowning in a massive sea of publications on every topic in history, philosophy or religion known to humankind. 

We forget how many seeds of Western Civilization and Christianity have been planted by the Bible, however.  This past year the 400^th anniversary of the King James Version got the Bible some fresh attention, but I think we’ve come to take our Bibles for granted.  I was reminded of the Bible’s impact on world history and culture last summer, when my family was in France, in Strasbourg, meeting up with my son Jacob – who had been on tour with a New England regional choir in Europe.  Strasbourg claims the honor of being the town where (in 1440) Johannes Gutenberg was living when he invented the printing press – and of course, his “Gutenberg Bible,” later printed when he went back to his hometown of Mainz, Germany, and other mass-produced books played a huge role in the development of our modern age.  So on an early morning walk, I passed through the Place Gutenberg and had a chance to take a close look at the statue to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of Herr Gutenberg’s historic invention. 

The statue of Gutenberg is one thing, but it was the 4 sides of the base that got my attention.  There were 4 bronze bas relief depicting these 4 scenes:  one with children down below reading books with great joy and interest as many of the world’s greatest writers and thinkers gathered around approvingly above them – people like Milton, Cervantes, Spinoza, Descartes, Isaac Newton, and so forth.  The next side was full of world-changing political writers and thinkers, including a trio of Jefferson, Lafayette, and Washington holding hands – but also Samuel and John Adams, Patrick Henry, Ben Franklin and others.  The third side was dedicated to William Wilberforce and other abolitionists who were untying the ropes binding African slaves, who were kneeling in thankful gratitude to God – God whom the Bible says, as Jesus announces in Luke, quoting Isaiah, proclaims release to the captives.  And the fourth side shows the sending out of Bibles to all the nations, translated into many languages and shared around the world by missionaries to the Americas, Asia, Africa, Pacific Islands, and the Middle East.

The seeds of our faith have been planted far and wide – especially thanks to the worldwide publication of the Bible – but I wonder if we realize the power of God’s word of love and Christ’s church to still change lives and transform our society?  Remembering that statue of Gutenberg and thinking of how familiar the Bible has become to us today, I started to wonder – with the prophet Isaiah, and with Jesus here in this famous seed parable of Matthew – if we still place a high enough value on God’s Word to us.  Have we forgotten what a difference the Gospel can have in the world?  Are we spending more money on things that don’t satisfy, as Isaiah suggests, than on good spiritual food? 

Just stop and think about it for a moment.  Do the math for yourself.  How many of us spend twice as much on a couple of weeks of summer vacation as we do on our yearly church pledge, for instance?  It’s all important to us – helping others, as well as providing life-giving Sabbath time when we can rest and be renewed – but shouldn’t those amounts be somewhat equivalent?  Our congregation continues to struggle with meeting our budget – we have big bills to pay right now with important things like funding the Men’s Mission Trip not to mention just re-painting and re-roofing our meetinghouse to keep it watertight.  Even with the fund-raising we’ve done and the insurance money we got from the winter leaks, we’re still coming up short of money.

We might wonder, with Jesus in Matthew, if we allow other things compete for our time and choke out our spiritual growth.  How much time do we invest in our church, or in mission work, or in prayer or Bible study compared to the time we spend on other priorities?  If it’s true (and I believe it is) that God is still speaking, maybe we need to work just a little bit harder on the listening and the doing.  We might need to spend a little more time tending to the garden of our souls if we hope to continue to bear good fruit.

Look around you and see how much good fruit has already been harvested from the spiritual seeds that were planted around here months ago – from the January Refugee Resettlement project that expanded from our original 2-month commitment to 4 months and now 7 to our springtime Thrift Shop project that (when it came to fruition in June) bore nearly $1,000 for Brookfield Social Services.  Think about how long our men worked and planned this Men’s Mission Trip just returned from South Dakota (and the abundance of those colorful Patchwork Prayers blankets they took with them).  All of those projects began with a word, the germ of an idea, but they were carefully tended and watered with real investments of time and money, not to mention prayer and enthusiasm, over the course of many months.  It’s the same with all the babies we baptize, with our weekly Church School classes, with our Vacation Bible School and our youth mission trips – just think how many young lives get touched by the Good News of God’s love through our ministries here!  Those are perhaps the most important seeds we plant.

Sometimes all it takes is one well-planted seed to make all kinds of difference in the Kingdom of God.  After all, it was one generous giver with one $1,000 check in memory of Ginny Van Horne, one of our Stephen Ministry leaders who died in winter of 2010, that made it possible for us to train Leslie Sands last August to be our new Stephen Ministries coordinator and to renew that whole program – with the help of Marion Miller and Harry Gerowe leading the training class this past spring.  And now we have 5 newly trained Stephen Ministers able to help people with spiritual companionship.  Or think about how people in our church who are sick or homebound benefited from the visitation ministry of Harry Gerowe, whose life we will celebrate here tonight.  Your simple giving to our church, through your Sunday offerings, made that staff position possible, along with others who keep our many ministries going – from the church office to our nursery.

These are among the many seeds that have been sown around here – seeds of God’s love, seeds that help in very real ways bring to fruition that prayer we pray together each week, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  We scatter them as freely as the sower in the parable does – some seeds fall on the path or on rocky or thorny ground and don’t come to much.  But we keep on sowing – doing what we do here in Christ’s Church – with the hope and prayer that at least some of what we offer lands on fertile soil and grows tall and strong for God.  We can be thankful for every opportunity we have – to hear and to share the Good News of God’s love, and to plant with our lives, seeds of Christ’s Kingdom on earth and in heaven.  Amen.

 

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Psalm 119:105-112

¹⁰⁵Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.

¹⁰⁶I have sworn an oath and confirmed it, to observe your righteous ordinances.

¹⁰⁷I am severely afflicted; give me life, O Lord, according to your word.

¹⁰⁸Accept my offerings of praise, O Lord, and teach me your ordinances.

¹⁰⁹I hold my life in my hand continually, but I do not forget your law.

¹¹⁰The wicked have laid a snare for me, but I do not stray from your precepts.

¹¹¹Your decrees are my heritage forever; they are the joy of my heart.

¹¹²I incline my heart to perform your statutes forever, to the end.

 

Isaiah 55:1-3

55Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. ²Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. ³Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love...

 

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

13That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. ²Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. ³And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. ⁴And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. ⁵Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. ⁶But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. ⁷Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. ⁸Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. ⁹Let anyone with ears listen!” ...

¹⁸“Hear then the parable of the sower. ¹⁹When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. ²⁰As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; ²¹yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. ²²As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. ²³But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”