Homily, July 26, Rev. Holly Cardone

The Ninth Sunday After Pentecost

July 26, 2026

On July 12 we read the parable of the Sower — you could also call it the parable of the Four Soils, or the parable of the Miraculous Yields. The Sower threw seeds on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Then the Sower tossed seeds on rocky ground, where there wasn't much soil. Some seeds came up quickly because they had no depth, and then burned up under the hot sun, scorched. Some fell among thorns, which grew up and choked whatever had sprung from the seed. But some fell on good soil, and the harvest was abundant.

An abundant God throws grace everywhere, just as Jesus spreads the good news to everyone he meets. God doesn't know what kind of soil the seeds of grace are falling on, and Jesus doesn't know which disciples are going to get what he's saying. He says again and again, "Whoever has ears, listen." Some days we listen better than others.

Jesus faced persecution and the threat of death during his public ministry, and by the end of chapter 13 he's run out of his own hometown. As disciples, servants of God, and human beings, we face our own hurdles — first and foremost, the pain of being human. We can be consumed with anxieties living in this culture. Maybe the tape of I'm not enough, I don't have enough, I'm not successful enough, I need more of everything to feel okay plays on a loop. Those days, we are shallow ground. Sometimes we are the path, the birds, the rocky soil, the thorns — and sometimes we are the good soil. Sometimes we have ears to hear, and sometimes we are deaf to what Jesus is asking us to do and be in the world.

Coming to church, following a spiritual path, engaging in practices that open our hearts to be more loving, kind, and compassionate people — this is how we are changed into servants in God's kingdom on earth.

Last week Jesus taught that the kingdom of heaven was like someone who sowed good seed in a field, but in the middle of the night an enemy came and sowed weeds among it. The weeds grew up alongside the wheat, and the crop would be separated later, at the harvest.

But who is the enemy Jesus is talking about?

This parable shines a bright light on humanity's stubborn preoccupation with who is in and who is out. Two thousand years ago, Jews were out and Romans were in. Jesus and his followers were out, and the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees — who ran the temple alongside the high priest and chief priests — were in. Within the Jewish community itself, anyone deemed "impure" was out. The purity laws in Leviticus drew a symbolic boundary separating the forces of life and God's holiness from the forces of death, decay, and human mortality.

We don't have to look far — turn on the news, open a newspaper — to see that in our own country, it's clear who's counted "in" and who's cast as "out." Tens of billions of dollars are being poured into deporting immigrants, and citizenship, residency, a valid work visa, a green card — none of it seems to matter. What matters, all too often, is the color of someone's skin. That is not what the kingdom of heaven is supposed to look like.

The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed someone sowed in a field — the smallest of all seeds, growing into the grandest of shrubs, a tree where birds can nest in its branches. The kingdom of God is like yeast a woman mixed into three cups of flour until the dough expanded and transformed. The kingdom of God is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid again, then sold everything he had, joyfully, to buy that field. The kingdom of God is like a merchant searching for fine pearls, who found the one pearl of great price and sold everything to purchase it. The kingdom of God is like a net thrown into the sea, catching fish of every kind — and when it was full, the fisherman sorted the good from the bad.

Have you been to a vineyard? Every row neat, tidy, uniform. Vines tied to stakes with a loose figure-eight of twine, giving each vine room to expand. Plants set six to eight feet apart, rows eight to ten feet apart. It's a science, really — to get the best grapes, you follow the parameters of planting, tending, and harvesting.

We humans can get caught up needing things just so, like the vines of a vineyard: neat, orderly, precise. Sometimes that hunger for certainty looks like longing for a time we've romanticized as the best time, avoiding change like the plague.

But the kingdom of God is invasive and unpredictable. The seeds God tosses haphazardly here and there fall on the just and the unjust alike. And our wanting things to stay the same — our fear of the stranger, the immigrant, our failure to care for the unhoused, the prisoner, the hungry — doesn't leave room for the Holy Spirit to work in our lives, our community or the world, or for all that God has for us as individuals, a community, and a society, to flourish.

The pearl, the treasure, the tiny mustard seed hidden among all the others — these are parables of how God keeps invading our tidy sense of order to spark transformation. The mustard seed grows into a vast tree, sheltering the birds: a picture of a kingdom built not on power, but on shelter for the vulnerable. Yeast, a symbol of impurity to the Jewish people, becomes in Jesus's hands the very ingredient that turns the mundane into the sacred — proof that God works through what we've written off, not around it. The pearl and the treasure are buried, invisible until someone dares to look, just as God's justice, mercy, and compassion are so often hidden in plain sight, overlooked because they don't announce themselves the way power and violence do.

This is the scandal of the kingdom: peace for the planet will not come from empires or armies, but from something small, patient, and easy to miss — planted quietly until it changes everything from the inside including us.

Amen.