Bible Month 2; Mark 4.8 “other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain…”
On the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration as President of the United States I sowed ten Shirley tomato seeds in pots in my greenhouse. I was beginning to think Spring was surely just around the corner then. Little did I know that Spring would not really happen and it would be cold until late May then burst straight into a season of Summer heat. Of my ten seeds only two germinated. So much so that by about late March I sowed some more seeds, a different variety, and they did much better.
I won’t bore you with what happened to my brasillicas or my kale but as Jesus’ parable of the sower reveals, the type of soil and all sorts of other factors play a part in determining the outcome of the horticultural process. Some seeds grow really well, others struggle in various ways, it all depends on the type of soil and the weather conditions not to mention the husbandry skills of the grower.
So, I wonder what sort of soil you are? Because I think this is the essential question behind Jesus’ parable. How receptive are you to the seeds that are sown, to the words that you hear?
Jesus’ parable then moves on to explain what each different type of soil or conditions mean, this is technically what I was taught not to do when reflecting on a text when long ago I studied such disciplines in the University of Lancaster Religious Studies department. I was taught to let the parable speak for itself, not allegorize so every detail is explained. Leave the message for the hearer to work it out for themselves.
Let me approach the thrust of the parable a different way. How receptive are we, you and I, to new things/ new ideas/ new messages from God directly or through others? And I use a story to illustrate it. Many years ago someone once said in a Worship Consultation in one of my churches that the worship wasn’t Methodist. What they meant of course was that they had not experienced some things before. In fact, nothing we did could not be found in or permitted by a Conference authorised book, but the key thing was, it wasn’t in their book, it wasn’t in their experience! (and needless to say I don’t think they ever thought of looking in such a book to find out). Acknowledging that we hadn’t done that before or like that, is a different statement altogether to the one they rather rashly made in the meeting. One of the things that has struck me over the last eighteen months of this pandemic has been the variety of things we have sung in on-line worship. I have sometimes teased Bruce by exaggeratedly saying “I did not know any of the hymns you chose today!” I have churches who say this to me every time I go. They are from a different book to the one they regard as the norm for starters. I tend to choose from Singing the Faith because that is the latest Conference authorised book. And that is important to me as one who tries to live in full connexion with the Conference. But for many this is not their norm. What is normal for us varies of course. My dad used to say that when he was young (1950’s) at his local church, Skinningrove in the Loftus & Staithes Circuit in this Darlington District they sang out of the Sankey Book each week at the Guild mid-week meeting but always out of the 1933 Methodist Hymn Book on Sundays. There was a principle there that I fear some of our churches have lost sight of. We have churches and preachers for whom other books are the norm, often because they sit lightly to official Methodist things, or perhaps don’t really understand them. And many don’t come from a Methodist background anyway, there isn’t anything wrong with that but the significance of something authorised by the Methodist Conference for use doesn’t cut much ice. I fear that that which was obtained as a supplement has become the first choice of books, the default norm. That is not necessarily to say everything in other books is bad. But in the book “Singing the Faith” we have a range of items from traditional hymns that sometimes catch out those of us who sing hymns almost from memory because the words have been changed to meet the times we live in, they also contain new items from worship songs, to items from our communion within the World Church and the Ecumenical wider Church catholic we are part of. So, for example we have items from Graham Kendrick and Bernadette Farrell in our current book, items from independent evangelical groups at one end of the spectrum to Roman Catholics at the other. We now have hymns about climate change, justice and ecological issues that we did not have before. The John Bell type of items that we need if we are to serve the present age and not a past one. We also have items at the back of the book entitled “liturgical settings” with short responses for use in prayers or versions of prayers and other ancient texts like the Gloria, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, set to music so they can be sung. We have always had this kind of thing in our repertoire but they often went un-used. And many did not even know they were there. The previous book Hymns & Psalms had psalms and canticles pointed and set to Anglican chant for singing, we had a Gloria setting. Hardly any Methodist churches used them, but some did. The first time I went to Cambridge Wesley they sang a psalm as part of the service. The book prior to that (and I am showing my age now because I was brought up on the 1933 MHB had a similar selection of chants for canticles and psalms, but also music for singing the responses to the commandments to use in conjunction with the 1936 Book of Offices Communion Service, including settings by composers like Merbecke and others for the words “Lord have mercy upon is and incline our hearts to keep this law”. It also had set out the words of the Gloria and Agnus Dei, with an assumption that such an items could be sung to any setting you might care to use. At the said church meeting where my sister in the Lord told me what we did was not Methodist I could have taken her upstairs to where the choir music was housed and showed her dozens of settings for canticles, that the choir had obviously used in the past. But she chose to forget that or didn’t acknowledge it.
When Donald Soper was President of the Conference he chose to use Morning Prayer from the Book of Offices as the Conference Service liturgy and it caused a bit of a stir. I am sure there were many who said it wasn’t Methodist! But it was included in the Conference authorised book. You see Methodism is supposed to appreciate both the formal and the informal, the written liturgical style as well as extempore prayer. Not just one type. He also chose to preside at Holy Communion everywhere he went as he travelled round the Connexion. And that caused a bit of a stir too!
So, I wonder what sort of soil are we? What sort of soil are you? How receptive to things that are new and unfamiliar to us are we? Do we have a pre-conceived idea of what Methodism should be like? What Church should be like? What worship should consist of? And if any of our responses to those sort of questions produces negative reactions we might want to ask ourselves if the seeds that might be being sown find a receptive place to germinate and grow in our minds and hearts or whether like the parable they shrivel up and die or are in danger of being classified like seed falling on stony ground.
How receptive are we to new ideas or ideas that might be different from our assumptions? A long time ago I won a place at University to read History, so I tend to read everything through that lens, and I happen to believe that there is pretty much nothing under the sun that is new- it will have been tried before somewhere. But in the life of the Church our experience is often narrow. We know what we do at our chapel and think every other place is the same. Of course, as in every walk of life, we only know what we know, our experience is the determinative key factor, we tend to think we know what church in a Methodist flavour is like. Some find much of it bland, that there isn’t much diversity of styles. The initiative “New People New Places” is encouraging new churches for new people based on the recognition that new people are unlikely to be attracted to many of our existing forms of church because much of what we do is from a culture that is alien to many. Most churches would welcome new people warmly but the new folk might struggle to comprehend what it was all about and we might find it hard to explain why we do things the way we do. Coupled with all this is the need we are recognising most crucially that we need to do re-planting, re-seeding, do better at making known the gospel message in all sorts of different ways in order that people can hear the good news and respond in their own way. “Take seeds of his spirit, let the fruit grow, tell the people of Jesus, let his love show”