By Rian Adams

Have you ever noticed that this farmer doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing? Jesus says he went out to plant a field, but he missed the mark 75% of the time. If you only succeed at your job 25% of the time, my guess is that you’re preaching sermons or a politician.

Now, I’m not a farmer, but I am well educated in the agricultural sciences. I was the top graduate in my 9^th grade Agriculture class at Blountstown High School. 

Among the lessons I learned that year—including the fact that Amber could drive on the Massie Ferguson tractor—was that you must purposefully plant your crops where there is an adequate root zone. 

This “sower” would fail Mr. Pitt’s agriculture class. He doesn’t realize the most important part of sowing seeds; roots need space! He flings seeds in hard places, and he throws seeds onto the rocks. He doesn’t even care if the wheat lives or dies; the man slings it among thorns, knowing if it comes up, it will starve. 

Now, let me say I’ve never heard a sermon about this guy.

We have always heard that this is the parable of the four types of soil. You know the sermon faaaaaaar too well. It goes something like this: “There are four types of souls that represent four types of people in the world. There’s the hard-hearted, the shallow, the one distracted by cares of the world, then the last person hears God’s word and allows it to take root.”

But my sermon differs from what most pastors are preaching today. I’ll focus on the sower, and not the soil. 

We need to ask questions. 

My first question is: Does Jesus really pigeonhole people into four simple categories? Is he really confining the complexity of a human being into one of four boxes? 

I don’t think Jesus saw humans as that categorical. I think we hear it that way because we think of the soil as a fixed location in a field with definitive boundaries. 

What if the field is more extensive than defined plots? What if there are rocks are in every field? What if there is shallow soil in every field? What if the wind carries a few seeds into briars? 

Let’s tell the truth about ourselves… we all have four soil types inside of ourselves.

Here’s an important point… hold on to this one in your mind… we always put ourselves in the place of the soil. What if we put ourselves in the place of the sower?

Let me be radical… maybe even controversial about this for a moment… Could it be that the parable teaches us that nowhere is beyond God’s reach? 

What do you think? Can God reach the hard places? What about the broken places, the places where life trampled us, the places where C-19 stole the light from us? 

God can reach the hardened corners of our souls! Our call is to do the same for others! 

Look at the parable again; the sower is more concerned with spreading seed than he is about using his magnifying glass and inspect every inch or the field. He does not judge the worthiness of the entire field based on small portions of the ground. No, he sows seed!

What does it look like to sow seeds of love in the broken places? It means we treat people with dignity, love, and compassion, in the name of Jesus. Trust me, people will notice! When we are generous, especially to the suffering, they feel differently!

The sower doesn’t ration the seeds; he sends it into the world in abundance. He’s not a prudent farmer as much as he is an evangelist of possibility. 

Be brave, and sow seeds in the broken places.

I’m at Ft. Hood at the height of “the surge.” A young Sgt that I know well comes to my office, sits down, and with a straight face asks me for last rites. 

“Last rites?” 

“Yes, Sir, this war in my head is too much. I’m going to kill myself. I’ve already decided when, where, and how, so don’t try to talk me out of it.” 

Five days later, I walked through the doors of the largest mental health hospital in the south. It was Sunday after a chapel service, so I was in clericals. I rode the elevator up a few floors, stepped out, and knocked on the door. 

The door buzzed and opened. I greeted the guard, then asked a nurse at the nurse’s station where to find Sgt. V. I walked into a large open space with patient rooms lining the wall. 

As I walked through the common area, one of the patients rushed me.

She was yelling, “Father! I knew it! I know you’d come, I never doubted.” I waved off the concerned guard. The young woman threw her arms around my neck and started sobbing. 

I disobeyed all the church warnings… and I wrapped my arms around her while she cried. Her tears soaked my the whole shoulder of my shirt. 

When she stopped, she looked me directly in my eyes and asked me, “Father, will God forgive me?” 

“Forgive you for what?”

“For taking a life in Iraq.” 

My heart broke… and I said what I believe are some of the holiest and intimate—and tragically underused—words in our prayer book:

We said Amen together. Then her eyes glossed over, and she turned around and skipped away as if the whole thing never happened. 

I visited Sgt. V, and on the way out, I wondered if that young woman even remembered our conversation. 

On the way out, the guard stopped me. He looked me square in the eye and said, “Father, what you did for that young lady over there got me. I’m here every day, and no one cares about these people. It moved me to see someone who finally did. Will you bless me?”

Looking back on that event in light of this parable, I wonder if God wants us to trust the ministry field he has given us enough to sow seeds even in the broken places, even on the rocks, even into the wind, and even on the hard places where people have felt crushed under the weight of C-19,….

Sow God’s seeds of love and hope with reckless abandon! 

Amen!

What does it mean to be born again

Sermon by Fr. Rian Adams

There’s been a lot of fighting about this passage over the centuries. Churches have even split based on how to interpret John 3:16. So I decided to stay away from the theological debate. I decided to preach one of the many points found in the text and avoid the “born again” theology. 

I wanted to preach that Nicodemus was a religious leader, a scholar of the Law, yet he didn’t understand the Law of Love. That’s a good sermon, and I reserve the right to preach it one day.

But my soul wouldn’t allow me the luxury of an easy way out. I avoided writing for two days, and then I realized that hard texts – the ones that have divided us – hold Good News too.

 So I went on a quest to unravel the great mystery; what does it mean to be born again. I grabbed some books I knew would help. They didn’t. They didn’t even address the issue. Then I went to favorite lectionary commentaries. They pointed out various aspects of the text that were enlightening… but had nothing to do with being born again. 

After two or three hours of research, I had a revelatory moment: No one has the courage to speak about being born again except for evangelicals. Well, I’ve never been a man to back down from a challenge, so I decided to preach about the words of Jesus. 

My sermon titled: What does it mean to be born again?

My answer? I’m not sure, but I can make a couple of observations from the passage that enlighten the question.

First, being born again is a process. 

In John’s Gospel, we meet Nicodemus, and Nicodemus has a problem. He wants to meet Jesus, but his religion is in the way of a relationship. He’s a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin court, which makes him one of the most influential Jewish scholars in the world. 

He’s in a race against the clock, and his window to meet Jesus is short. He longs to hear the wisdom of a young Rabbi likely half his age, but he wants to protect himself and his reputation. 

Jesus is often a risk to our “reputation.” 

So he sneaks out at night and wanders the back alleys to find Jesus. He must be back home before dawn, or his silver slipper will turn back into a dusty sandal. 

He finds Jesus, but he doesn’t find what he expects. The first pitch is a curveball that Nicodemus can’t hit… Jesus says, “Unless someone is born again, they can’t see the Kingdom of God.”

HE swings, “Born again? How can a person reenter the womb?” He misses. 

Nicodemus falls prey to a literalist mindset, that’s why he misses the secret to being born… and being born… again. Giving birth is a process. And it’s not a pretty process either. Birth is violent, painful, bloody, and terrifying. There are screams, and tears, there is urgency.

In August 2009, Amber was in labor for nineteen hours. The epidural helped, but it wore off about an hour before. Then time sped up. We were about to meet our boy, who weighed about 8lbs. But we had a problem: We were not in the delivery room yet.

The nurses were rolling her down the hall, screaming, “Open the delivery room doors now, or this kid will be born in the hall.”

New birth is a willingness to go through the pain, the pressure, and the anxiety of reentering the world again as a vulnerable learner. Nicodemus normalized to the role of expert. Jesus urgently says, “Nicodemus, you’re a leader in Israel, but you missed the point. To be born again is to be born anew into vulnerability and curiosity.”

Let me stop here… being born again confronts us every day, especially today in the Eucharist. Would you like to get over the rage you’ve harboredm…. toward yourself? Come back to God, allow the Spirit to blow as it will, and reenter the world with self-compassion and self-mercy.  

It’s Lent, and we ask God to forgive our sins and have mercy on us. We say it dozens of times. What if being born again allows us to have mercy on ourselves as God forgives our sins.

New birth is growing into the likeness of Christ, over and over.

Second, being born again is joining a family. 

Nicodemus also has a second problem; can his theology make room for a kingdom that’s bigger than his “denomination.” Will he step outside of the box he drew in the sand.

He thinks a family tree is more powerful than a broadness in God’s mercy. 

This is so important to understanding this passage. If we miss this concept, we miss the meaning of John 3:16. 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so whoever believed would have everlasting life. God didn’t send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but through him, for the world to be saved.”

People weaponize that verse to exclude. They say you must say a  “sinner’s prayer” or you’re excluded. I believe it means the exact opposite. “Nicodemus, God is not confined to a race or people, or a sect of particular beliefs.”

That must have scandalized Nicodemus! It scandalizes us, too. There was only one way to enter the Kingdom of God, to be born into it through a literal descendant of Abraham. Everyone else was excluded. 

There was even a term they called non-jews. In the Harry Potter world, non-magic people are called “muggles.” Jews called non-jews, “gentiles.” 

Jesus confronted that exclusion, “Nicodemus, you know the God of exclusion through a birth family, allow me to introduce to the God of inclusion. “For God so loved the world (not just Israel), that he gave his son that no soul is outside that doesn’t choose to be there.”

Allow me to recognize a painful truth: Religion is most dangerous when it focuses its energy on exclusion instead of mercy. 

The whole passage is about who’s in and who’s out. Either a select few are God’s “true” family, or everyone is invited to become part of God’s family by following the ways of Jesus. Paul talks about this is the letter to Romans we read: We are “born again” through the Spirit. When that occurs, a person is “born again.”

How NOT to view being born again.

Some people never understand that being born again is surrendering to God’s ways, and being born again is to accept that the wind/spirit blows on whoever it will. 

A few years ago I met a friend of my parents at a 4^th of July function. He didn’t know I was a priest, but I doubt it would have mattered anyway. “Mr. Christian” decided to evangelize me into the true faith of conservative evangelicalism. Apparently, he decided I was a heathen.

So I played along. His one pitch was that I needed to be “born again.” Finally, I had all I could stand… I said, “You’re the first person I’ve met who framed a birth certificate to prove they were alive.”

Amen.

Matthew: 5:20-37

Counterfeiters make over a billion dollars a year, making fake designer clothes and handbags. That billion is from the United States, not the rest of the world. These are not cheap knock offs from street vendors; they are well-made fakes. There’s an underground black market where you can pay $450 for a well-made handbag that’s impersonating a $6k Chanel.

In 2018 The New York Times ran an article about customs seizing enough counterfeit handbags, shoes, and belts to fill 22 shipping containers. They estimated the loss to American retailers to be half a billion dollars. 

One young woman, who spoke with anonymity, “Rachel,” as they called her, is 27. She works at a downtown law firm in Atlanta. She says she spent $1k on a fake handbag because the real one sells for $10k. When the reporter mentioned a proven link between the counterfeiters and human trafficking, terrorism, and arms trading, she said, “Look, all I want is a handbag that looks to be worth over $10k so people in my field will have a better perception of me.”

The counterfeiting market highlights a spiritual problem. Authenticity no longer matters so long as deceit makes us look better in front of other people. I’m not criticizing nice things; I have them; you have them, John says that Jesus even wore a seamless robe. But I am against sacrificing our authenticity on the altar of perception. 

Jesus didn’t mind the company of sinners, but he couldn’t stand fakes. This Gospel lesson is about a group of that Jesus thought were spiritual imposters. They were the Pharisees. Jesus saw their counterfeit religiosity from across the room. This reading is an encouragement to be genuine. 

These verses sound so condemning. But when we hear them directed at the Pharisees, we can hear them as challenges to authenticity. 

The passage teaches a very pointed and specific lesson:

Sin, rebellion against the inauthentic self, is an issue of the heart, not the hand. 

Jesus is really direct here; until we can be honest with ourselves, we will sin, we will miss our target, we will surrender our baptismal identity, for a self-serving purpose. 

Let’s tell the truth… It’s exhausting when we pretend to be someone we’re not. When we do, we allow other people’s perceptions of us to control us. That indicates a spiritual problem. Jesus says, “It’s not your actions – like the Pharisees say – its an issue of your soul. Therefore, be brave enough to confront your motivations lurking under the surface.” 

On August 21, 1986, the villagers of Nyos, in Cameroon, heard a noise coming from the valley near Lake Nyos. The next morning, every person in the village (nearly 1800) was dead. The cattle were dead, the flies that would have been on the animals were dead too. 

Scientists rushed to Nyos to discover what happened. They finally realized that a build-up of carbon dioxide gas on the bottom of the lake bed caused the tragedy. They say that lakes near volcanoes are prone to have carbon dioxide deposits under the water. Most lakes release carbon dioxide very slowly. 

That night Lake Nyos released 1.8 million tons of Co2. It sat under the lake bed, continually growing for decades. The gases formed a toxic cloud, and when it reached the surface, a tragedy occurred.

No one realized that what was below the surface was more dangerous than anything on top. That’s why Jesus lists all kinds of sinful behaviors, but then he says, “The real issue behind the behavior is in the depths of the heart.” 

I think the key to interpreting this passage is this: These verses are a response to Pharisees. God doesn’t want us to  1literally pull our eyes out of our eye sockets. Jesus didn’t 80literally mean we should cut off our hands and toss them in the garbage. 

I hear these metaphors as an overarching message: Spiritual transformation matters more than behavior modification. Open the heart to the way of Jesus and, “Love the Lord your God…”

My sermon is titled: “Never Surrender Your Authenticity.”

Be real to the faith community.

It’s easy to beat up on the Pharisees, but I’ve been a Pharisee on numerous occasions. I’ve allowed myself to surrender my authenticity to impress people. 

When I was in seminary, they emphasized the importance of “clergy as chief scholar of the congregation.” I got dinged in a preaching class by a professor who said, “Your sermons need to develop an academic tone.” Ironically, he had never pastored a church. 

I bought that cheap, non-creative, knock off preaching method hook, line, and sinker. 

I came out of seminary well trained, and ready to use all the $20 words I learned. I wanted to impress people with my hard work. I knew theology, exegesis, languages (Gr. Heb. Theo…), and my homiletical marks were the highest in my class…. I had the world by the tail… and it was downhill pull.  

Then everything changed. 

Have you ever had a turning point that reset your entire trajectory? That’s what happened to me one faithful day. A decisive moment occurred, and I realized that I was a counterfeit when I tried to fit someone else’s mold.

The sermon, which was an academic lecture, was on how the book of Acts charts Paul’s growth away from prejudice and exclusion against gentiles, to embrace them through the work of the Holy Spirit. 

Well… I lost my place in my sermon notes because I didn’t have the pages numbered. So I had to ad-lib for a moment while I found my place. 

Then I heard something come out of my mouth that shocked me: I said, “Thus the existential and spiritual ramifications make his ontological transformation plausible.” When I said that, I paused… I was so shocked at myself that I had an internal conversation. I won’t repeat all of it because I’m in church, but it sounded something like:

“OMG! That was a hot mess!”

I finished the sermon, and I went home and wrote in my journal, “Don’t be a fraud and worry about how other people see you. A sermon should be Hemingway, not Faulkner.”

Then my wife confirmed my suspicion, “They sure know that you know what you were talking about… all three of them who were awake.”

That’s when I learned a motto I carry today, “The privilege of a lifetime is to be who you are.” That’s also when I learned that I don’t need a fake handbag. 

Amen…