A Sermon on Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff
To stand in an old growth California redwood grove is, for me, truly a mystical experience. All around you stand almost unthinkably massive living beings, the biggest and oldest of them 340 feet tall, 40 feet around, and over 1,000 years old. They’re so big that other trees live in their canopies, entire ecosystems in their branches. Understory is sparse, mostly ferns, and tremendous fallen logs incubate the next generation of trees, as they grow up and through these mother logs.
To stand in such a plant community is to inhabit a corner of creation that lives by a radically different scale of time. We humans scurry around their trunks while redwoods stand, and stand, the perfect life form for their geography, just inland from the Pacific Ocean, tucked behind a relatively new mountain range that protects them from the wind’s force and the ocean’s unpredictability, while delivering plenty of rain and sun in turn. The scale and the stillness of a redwood grove feel like a separate world: one of balance and peace, of God’s nearness.
Will you pray with me? Gracious God, we thank you for the gift of life, the gift of this version of your creation we get to inhabit. Uncountable seeds have been sown by hands, by cones and fruits to bring us here, and countless seeds will be sown in the future. Help us to make meaning, spiritual sustenance, out of watching seeds as they sprout, for good and for ill, all blessed to exist in your creation. Amen.
The story goes that 100 years ago, a small group of powerful men went to see the redwoods for themselves. As I was, they were deeply moved by the trip; so moved that they formed an organization called the Save the Redwoods League. Because they were powerful men, and because the drive to set aside and protect national lands was still new and novel, news of the league spread quickly and donations poured in. And over the years, at least partially due to the league’s work, hundreds of thousands of acres of redwoods have been preserved. Folks like me can experience these special places thanks to their efforts – the seeds of action that they sowed.
But, there’s more to the story. It turns out that one of the founders of the Save the Redwoods League, Madison Grant, was a leading proponent of eugenics, the since-discredited science of skull shape and dimension that validated racist ideas of white supremacy in the late-19th and early-20th century. Part of Grant’s motivation for saving the redwoods was that he reasoned that, just as Nordic humans are the highest form of human and should be protected and set aside, so, too, are the redwoods the highest form of tree.
But, in true white supremacist fashion, Grant and the league couldn’t resist the temptation to exploit the very thing they professed to save. They were powerful men, after all, with a large following and the public’s sympathy on their side. When the time came to divvy up the forests between what would and what wouldn’t be cut, the trusted voice of the league was at the table. And over the years, league leaders led the National Parks Service, and then the California State Parks system.[i]
As of today, only 4% of the pre-European contact redwood forests remain. Seeds of preservation were sown, yes. So were seeds of industry and seeds of white human civilization across the face of California and the west.
On our recent California trip, we stayed for one night in a cabin belonging to a woman named Maureen in the town of Honeydew in southern Humboldt County. To get there, we wove our way through the Redwoods National Forest for hours, up and down mountain passes, on tight roads barely two lanes wide. When we arrived, two of Maureen’s 21 cats, and all three of her horses became our fast friends, and we spent some truly special moments on a creek running through her property.
“Back in the ‘60s, you could buy 40 acres here for $50 down,” she said, and that’s what she did. It was logged land, land that the timber companies were ready to move on from. And for the last 60 years, people like Maureen have tended these pockets of the land in small ways, allowing the land to regenerate as it will.
Logging practices impacted ecosystems in profound ways, destroying delicate balances between soil, water, and animal life. We noticed trout fries in Maureen’s creek, baby fish, and we asked her how the creek is doing today. She told us that although the creek is in much better health than it was when she first arrived, stream monitors still find that fish numbers have yet to rebound.
Once balance is lost, it can take a long time to find it again, and in a new form.
In today’s scripture reading, Jesus compares a life following God to the sowing of seeds and, perhaps more to the point, to what it takes to make oneself into fertile soil for God’s purposes. And as all of Jesus’ parables are, the parable of the sower brings us to deep questions if we allow ourselves to go past the surface.
As I read this parable in light of our trip to the redwoods, I think of the redwoods and the seeds that humans have sown there over the past 100 years. I think of the limited knowledge, the competing interests, the distortions of power and greed that sat alongside sincere awe and desires to be good stewards and neighbors as the early seeds were thrown.
The period of northern European colonization of North America has brought a complicated harvest to us, to say the least. If you’re like me, it brings up gratitude for the comfortable life we live thanks to technological progress and the harvest of so many natural resources, but also sadness and even anger at how majestic ecosystems like the redwoods and the bison herds of the great plains have been reduced to sentimental museum remnants of their former grandeur.
In the language of the sower parable, surveying the 21st century reveals what has always been true: that sowing seeds is complicated. No soil is without rocks or fallen trees, no plot free of weeds – or of other crops planted in the same soil long ago. Not only that: we may think we’re sowing just the crop we need to thrive, only to have time reveal a crop of complications and mistakes instead.
To sow spiritual seeds is to grow one’s awareness of the soil of the world as we scatter our seeds of action. Which past crops have brought life? Which have choked out the very things we now need? Where does the soil need amending or tending with the aeration of a truthful exploration of how the soil has been harmed? How can we use the fertilizers of science and community and humility to be the best farmers and tenders that we can be?
None of these are easy questions. But they become slightly easier when we remember that life is not under our control. Ultimately, what grows is up to God. We are merely the tenders of the gifts God entrusts to each of us, not the architects of God’s commonwealth. Where architects execute a centralized vision based on a specific goal, tenders welcome new ideas before and after planting, new techniques and the experience of those who have made mistakes and learned, and allow life to evolve as it needs to.
While our culture teaches us to be decisive solo architects, our landscapes teach the value of tenders: of relationship builders, and historians who help us understand the full legacy of our ancestors; for those willing to vulnerably reach a full accounting of the soil’s health before doing the slow, ongoing work of sowing and tending to seeds. In all our planting, tending, and architecting, may we remember God’s presence in it all. May we slow down and take in all of what has come to pass, the soil in which we live and act, before throwing our seeds to the wind. And in our sowing, may we grow ever stronger in our partnership with God and with God’s creation. Amen.
[i] https://rewilding.org/the-ghost-forest-racists-radicals-and-real-estate-in-the-california-redwoods/
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