Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Jesus talks in today’s parable about seeds and sowing of the seeds. The seed in question is not wheat or corn, it represents, and it is a symbol for the world of God. I am planting seeds even as we speak. I am telling you that God loves you. God provides for you and has created a world which will sustain you. God wants to be involved in your life. God wants to be involved in your life. God wants to protect you from evil – both the evil outside you and the potential for evil that’s inside you and inside all of us. I am planting seeds of faith – faith that God can be trusted, faith that God’s plan for you includes a life beyond death. God promises to resurrect you and all that God has made and give you an eternal life of peace can joy with him. That is the Word that is the seed I am planting.
The seed is a powerful symbol. A symbol at one level is or sign for something else – a symbol represents other things. The cross is a powerful symbol of God’s love. The cross was the Roman instrument of torture and execution reserved for its worst enemies. Jesus, God himself, dies innocently on the cross for us. Jesus takes on our guilt in innocent suffering. The cross then is the symbol of the peace made with God by this innocent suffering and death. When we see the cross we see hope, love and promise. It symbolizes all that God has done for us in Jesus. It moves us powerfully. My Dad used to cry every time he sang the “Old Rugged Cross”. The symbol had immense power for him.
Today is June 14. It is Flag Day. The flag is an immensely powerful symbol for us as Americans. It is much, much more than just a piece of cloth with 13 strips representing the original 13 colonies and 50 stars on a blue field representing 50 states. it is the primary symbol of American unity. It stands in for the nation and the values and most cherished beliefs of the nation.
Some years ago, we had a guest at our house, a young Belgian man who was on tour with a group called “Up With People”. I took him to Washington to show him the sights for a day. We went to tthe capital building, the White House, the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, saw the memorial celebrating the sacrifices of World War II and end at the Wall which commemorates the losses of the Vietnam War. He asked me at the end of the say, “John, I’ve traveled all over Europe and no country in the world that I’ve seen flies its flag the way you Americans do. Why do you think that is?”
I replied, “I think that is because we have such a short history and we are such a melting pot of peoples. We don’t have a King or Queen, or a Monarch who symbolized our unity and demands our loyalty. The USA is born out of an idea and a set of principles about the dynamic inter-relationships between individual freedom and loyalty and obligation to a nation state.”
“How so?” My friend Jan asked.
“Well for example, we believe that everyone has the duty to defend this nation against the enemies who would want to attack and destroy it. We have obligations to the nation which are binding and may involve considerable personal risk. Yet, we also believe that the state has no right to over rule the conscience of the individual citizen. If a person believes that bearing arms and killing another human being violates the dictates of his conscience, the state cannot force someone to soldier. The state may require such an individual to serve the war effort as a medic or in another supportive role, but being free means that no power can force or compel anyone to override their most sacred personal beliefs”.
He asked, “What if everyone refused to bear arms by reason of deeply held personal conviction?”
I replied, “That’s a risk the nation has always been willing to take. That is in fact what the flag symbolizes or represents. True freedom, true liberty involves real risk, because everyone is free to say no. Everyone has the right to object and to resist compulsion and arbitrary power. We have no monarchs here no one can compel us go against our conscience. Government exists by collective consent. I agree as a citizen, to let the government govern me. Yet my right to change that government, to resist and to over turn it using the political process is guaranteed by the constitution. The flag represents the idea that people are free and consent to be governed. We made decisions corporately and every citizen has a stake in and the right to influence the process. No people on earth at the time, 1776, had ever tried such an experiment on such a huge scale.
The flag is a symbol or our unity. It represents our nation the United States, but more than the physical territory, the geographical reality, it signified the ideas behind it – freedom, justice, the rule of law, the right to peaceful dissent to try to persuade others to your way of thinking.
The United States of America also points to the future. It points to the belief that all people on earth deserve the same freedoms and blessings. It is no accident that the US came up with the idea of a United Nations and gave the land to house, shelter and protect the building and the idea it stood for. It is no accident that one of the very first acts of the United Nations was to issue an edict called the Declaration of the Universal Rights of Humankind (it used to be called Man), but even that has been changed in keeping with the notion that all people, men and women have the same rights.
Of course, all this talk about freedom and justice came from God – directly or indirectly.
God sees us all as equals. St. Paul in Galatians says it most perfectly “No longer is there Greek nor Jews, slave nor free, male nor female but all are one in Christ Jesus”. From that understanding of and belief in radical equality and freedom, the USA was born. It is a blessing to be a citizen here. But it is our destiny as a nation and a people to spread the blessings of freedom, justice and equality to all the world.
It is exactly what God would have us do.
In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
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