Homily, July 12, Rev. Holly Cardone
The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
July 12, 2026
Just before the story this morning, Jesus was teaching in the privacy and safety of someone’s home, with his friends, his followers, his disciples. The people who get what he is teaching. They are committed to unveiling the establishment of the kingdom of God being here and now. Then he goes outside.
He leaves the house and goes to sit by the sea, the sea of Galilee. He wasn’t going to get much peace and quiet there. The harbor at Capernaum in the 1st century as Jesus would have known it was really, really, busy. The harbor was 2500 feet long, longer than the city itself, along the shoreline of the lake. This wasn’t a quiet retreat Jesus was seeking; he was going outside but he probably had a good idea that it wouldn’t be long before a bunch of people would gather there. And that’s what happened.
Just as was written in Matthew 9:36 we can be confident that the crowds gathered and Jesus looked at them and when he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
But Jesus was a smart guy and there was a lot he wanted to say but saying it out loud could cause him and his followers a lot of trouble. Maybe even get them killed. Perhaps in the crowd that gathered around Jesus forcing him in the boat to preach, maybe among those in desperate need of good news, were thieves, religious leaders, spies of the empire. What does Jesus do? He teaches in parables.
The parable Jesus tells today is about farmers. Most of the people Jesus was teaching would have had a very good understanding of the context Jesus was talking about in the story. No intro needed, because most people would have understood: a farmer, seeds, ground, yield. Here the farmer was indiscriminately and liberally throwing seed everywhere. Some fell here, some fell there, some elsewhere. Some were strewn along the path, birds ate it. Some fell on rocky ground, there wasn’t enough soil, so it came up quickly then the sun came up and it burned up because the roots weren’t deep enough, healthy enough. Other seed fell among thorns. The seed took, the roots were deep enough but thorns grew up around it and choked the plants and they died. And then some landed on good soil, it took hold and it produced a crop beyond the farmer’s wildest dreams.
When I was in seminary my preaching professor gave us this advice: don’t preach what you think your congregation wants to hear, or what you think they need to hear. Preach what the scripture is trying to teach you. Chances are what you need to hear might just be what your congregation needs to hear also.
Mostly, I need to hear about the extravagant love and grace of God. A lot. Because I forget, often. I am the dry path, sometimes I wander down the path, hoping I’ll get to where I need to be and trusting the path will lead me there. And I’m the bird, flying around picking up whatever has fallen sometimes keeping it for myself and sometimes taking it back to the nest to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves.
There are times when I’m the hardened, cracked soil. I’m hot and dry, disconnected from God, from myself and from you. I can try to work that ground, to soften it up, to aerate it, turn the ground to find the good soil underneath, douse it with whatever I think it might need to change it, and mostly, when I’m like that, dry, cracked, tired, hardened, I need a nap, or ice cream, or to go the movies, or read a good book, and pray. Just try to get quiet so I can feel the presence of the Holy Spirit.
And I’m the semi-fertile soil where thorns grow and choke the grace trying to take root there. Anger, resentment, fear, hopelessness chokes any chance of experiencing God and keeps me separated from you.
But sometimes I am the fertile ground that yields abundant blessings of love and compassion. That when God with wild abandon throws God’s love, mercy and grace anywhere and everywhere it lands on that dark, pungent, prepared and fertile soil and grows and grows.
Barbara Brown Taylor says of this parable, what if it is "not about our own successes and failures and birds and rocks and thorns but about the extravagance of a sower who flings seed everywhere, wastes it with holy abandon…confident that there is enough seed to go around, that there is plenty, and that when the harvest comes in at last, it will fill every barn in the neighborhood to the rafters?"
God doesn't discriminate when it comes to where His love, grace, and mercy are thrown. There are too many places wanting and needing that grace and mercy to hold anything back.
There are times when we aren’t deserving of it either. If we had to get good for God’s grace and mercy, the problem then then is neither does that family member of yours that is driving you crazy, or the guy that hit your car and didn’t leave a note, or that person that broke your heart when you least expected it or the alcoholic father, mentally ill friend, the liar, the cheater or the thief.
The best part of the story is how wonderfully wasteful the farmer is with everything he's been given—he scatters those seeds anywhere growth is possible. Anywhere growth is possible.
God has a much higher view of us than we have of ourselves. God is willing to throw all his money down on us. All of it. I heard in a meeting a recovery meeting last week, “God owns the casino and the chips are stacked in my favor.”
Because God knows, and we forget, that we are made in God’s image. What covers that deep seated divine goodness that is God within us is the dry path, the cracked, dry, barren earth, the ground that is prone to being choked with thorny bushes and somewhere, under there is the fertile, moist, dark, healthy, inherently creative and divinely created soil where the possibility of growth is limitless.