Scattered Seeds

Editor’s note: Sermons are published unedited. Only grammar corrections are made.

Preached at BPFNA/Bautistas por la Paz Summer Camp 2024.
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Mark 4:4

I would like to begin with a word of deep gratitude for the invitation to preach this evening. When I stepped onto this campus as a student in thirty years ago, I had no idea how my life was about to be transformed. I find it amusing now that coming here from Sylva (about 45 minutes away), felt like I was going to the end of the earth. I had been raised in a Southern Baptist Church and came prepared to protect my faith, as I received many warnings that there would be plenty of professors who were at the ready to take it away.

I spent a good bit of my first couple of years in protection mode, and then mercifully along the way, I met people like Paula Dempsey, Kathy Meacham, Nancy Hastings Sehested, Ken Sehested, Kim Christman, Stan Dotson – and so many others since that time who met me where I was and gently opened up a world to me that I didn’t know existed. I was captivated when I was introduced to Will Campbell and folks who lived in intentional communities like Koinonia Farms, Jubilee Partners, and the Open Door. 

I discovered through these, and many other wise ones along the way, that the real invitation was for me to figure out how to embody my faith – beyond just knowing that Jesus was in my heart. I am eternally grateful to all the people along the way – many of you in this room who I haven’t named, but whose names I have known for nearly 30 years from working with the Peace Fellowship’s mailing list during the internship I did with them in my senior year. You have expanded my world, transformed my vision, and helped me learn how to listen more deeply. And Ken Sehested, I give thanks for your vision of this organization and for your constant, unfailing encouragement and support for me all these years.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t name that I continue to be genuinely grateful to the community that raised me, that set this good news story deep in my soul in my growing up years in Sylva. They set the stage for my “faith to be ruined” in the best possible way.

“As he was scattering seed, some fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it.”

There is a beautiful, illuminated image in the Saint John’s Bible depicting the parable of the sower, seeds, and soils. This image caught my attention a few years back when a copy of the St. John’s Bible was on display out at Montreat. I was at a conference there, and during the breaks, I could not pull myself away from it. I stood and studied the pages of the Bible, mesmerized by the beauty and wonder of such a meticulous creation.

In the illuminated image in the St. John’s Bible, the sower is standing on the grass with his bag of seeds around his neck. His hand reaches just outside the border of the image as he tosses the seeds generously into the text beside him. The seeds fall down the page through the words of chapter three of Mark, where Jesus calls the disciples and apostles, those who will be a part of his inner circle.

You might notice on the left side of the page, there is a little bird flying beside Mark 3:20, clutching a small rope in its claws. The rope runs down the edge of the page and is connected to a line that was inadvertently left out by the calligrapher. The bird’s beak points to the place where the line belongs. The missing line is inserted into its place by the bird and the story continues.

This sweet little bird that makes the correction to the text in chapter 3, shows up in Mark 4:4 to scoop up and eat the seeds that had fallen on the pathway. When I’ve read this text in the past, my assumption has been that those seeds that fell on the ground and were eaten by the birds were lost. They didn’t produce any grain or fruit or vegetables or flowers. That was the end for those particular seeds. Lost. Wasted. Unable to fulfill their appointed purpose.

Learning a little more about birds helped me see that this couldn’t be further from the truth. There are birds, like the European Mistle Thrush that carry seeds in their beaks and deposit them elsewhere, in hospitable environments that enable them to germinate and thrive. There are also birds whose digestive systems allow seeds to pass through and land in places where the seeds will grow and be nurtured, all while retaining the nutrients of insects and other foods in their bodies.

So these seeds that end up on the pathway don’t necessarily go to waste. We just don’t get to see them embodying their appointed purpose.

When I have read this parable in the past, I have often looked at the text from the perspective of the sower, as the parable is often referred to as the “parable of the sower,”and I have listened to a lot of sermons that were focused on where we sow seeds and how the faith of others gets nurtured from that sowing. But this parable doesn’t seem all that interested in human efforts or interventions that may or may not contribute to the flourishing of plants that grow in this particular garden.

The Saint John’s Bible image made me think about the perspective of the seed. In the artistic rendering, the sower generously tosses the seeds into the air, and the seeds primarily fall in and around and through the names of the disciples and apostles who were being called by Jesus. This prompted me to consider what this text has to say to us from the perspective of the seeds. The central question for me has become, how are the seeds at work in and around and through us?

Can we imagine for a moment that we are the tiny seeds. Just as Walt Whitman says that we “contain multitudes,” seeds contain millenia. They hold the past, present and future. All of the genetic information passes down from seed to plant to seed to plant, and on and on and on, all the while growing, adapting, changing. In order for new life to spring forth, a death must take place. The seed must give way and surrender itself to forces that will make all things new.  A softening and breaking open must happen, as a warm, earthy tenderness enfolds the seed, relaxes and eases the outer layer, extending the invitation for the seed to be open to something completely new, something larger than it could be on its own. Even when we understand it all scientifically, miracle, beauty, and mystery remain woven through it all.

One of my Mars Hill professors reminded me the other day about my disdain for hospitals when I was a student here. I wanted nothing to do with them. I resisted going to them, even when I needed to. I’m not sure what the source of that deep disdain was, but it was definitely there. Yet, twenty years later, I found myself doing a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education in a small rural hospital in Rutherfordton, which later led me to working at our regional hospital, Mission, first with LifeShare of the Carolinas, our region’s organ donation organization, and later as a chaplain. 

I stepped out of my role as a chaplain a little over a year ago so that I could speak publicly about the decline in quality of care and services, as well as the egregious things that continue to unfold in our region’s primary health system under the ownership of the for-profit company, Hospital Corporation of America. Ah, the irony of the places and forces that are at work within us that we can’t even fathom in the times of dormancy, preparing us for the right conditions that will beckon us toward that which is far beyond what we are capable of imagining or creating on our own.

The moment took me by surprise. We were both wearing masks. It was the height of COVID. I was screening at the emergency room door because Hospital Corporation of America who had recently purchased our hospital system through shady, backroom deals had drastically cut our hours as chaplains. I mean, who really needs chaplains in the middle of a global pandemic anyway?  As a screener, I was the first person people encountered, usually when they were experiencing the worst, or at the very least, a not-so-great moment in their lives. No one really comes to the emergency room in the middle of the night for fun.

He walked in and out several times, which wasn’t unusual. This happened often with people in the hundreds of hours I spent as a screener at the emergency room door overnight. People were nervous or anxious and needed fresh air. They needed to take off their masks for a few minutes. They needed to go smoke to calm their nerves. Each time he passed by, I had to ask him the same questions and take his temperature over and over, even if it had only be three or four minutes since he stepped outside.  It felt ridiculous and unnecessary, as if someone was going to suddenly develop a fever in that short period of time, but it often turned into an odd sort of sacred ritual, where the person I was screening and I mutually recognized the absurdity of it all. Sometimes we laughed and made jokes. What else can you do in such a moment?

The man and I made eye contact each time. It was hard not to make eye contact while pointing a digital thermometer at someone’s forehead. On his final pass through the doors, he lingered for a moment and said, “You that preacher woman? You don’t remember me, do you?” I admitted that I didn’t recognize him with the mask. He pulled his mask down below his chin and quickly put it back on his face. 

Immediately, I responded, and called him by name. We will call him Joe. “Yes, Joe, I remember you.” His eyes softened and tears welled up. It was clear he couldn’t believe that I remembered his name. But it was a name I would never forget, as our time together a few months before had ended with his grief-soaked threats that he was going home to get his guns and return to the hospital following the death of one of his beloveds after the hospital. Security got involved. 

In those few seconds when he showed me his face and I called him by name, a flood of memories came back to me of that singular moment when I had been most scared in my work at the hospital. While all of these details were flooding back into my mind and body, I continued to make eye contact because I wasn’t sure where this was heading. My hand was in my pocket ready to activate the device that would page security if I needed them.  But then something happened that took me by surprise and released my hand from the panic button in my pocket. He said, “I’ve been hoping I would see you again. I’ve wanted to tell you for so long how sorry I am about that night.” We talked for a minute or two after that. I told him thank you. And then he was gone. I haven’t seen him since.

Apparently, we both had thought about each other a good bit since we first met – as we spent our days rising, sleeping, rising and sleeping.  And here we were a little over a year and a half later, in the middle of a pandemic, in our masks, looking each other in the eye, both of us, being taken by surprise, being broken open again in that holy moment in the very best of ways. I didn’t expect it. He was more ready for it than I was. But we both stood there within the mystery of it.

When I left my job as chaplain at Mission Hospital, I had reached my limit in terms of what I was witnessing and experiencing within a very broken system, owned by a corporation whose focus is fixed squarely on profits for shareholders, rather than quality care for patients. I could talk for days sharing stories about the negligence, dehumanization, harm, danger, and ultimate abandonment (by HCA executives) of the support of medical staff who took a sacred oath to do no harm. The moral injury that I experienced and that medical and support staff who continue to work within the system experience is overwhelming and staggering. I give thanks every day for those who remain and somehow offer the best care to patients and families that they can, in an environment that sees them as nothing more than interchangeable cogs in a machine. By the way, HCA has set aside over 70 million dollars to break an upcoming nursing strike, all the while refusing to safely staff and fairly compensate nurses who are already working there.

Over the past six months, I’ve found myself working with a community coalition in this region, where I’ve found a thread of hope alongside kindred spirits – doctors, nurses, clergy, elected officials, attorneys, community leaders, and concerned citizens who are working tirelessly to take our healthcare system back. 

We are about to launch our campaign into the world next week as RECLAIM HEALTHCARE WNC, and for the first time in five years, I have begun to believe that it actually may be possible that we might succeed in getting HCA out of town and replace them with a non-profit healthcare system. The group finds it amusing that, as a pastor, my theme song through it all has been Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” which by the way is a handy song to play loudly and sing along to in the car around a multitude of circumstances we face in this wild and wonderful, beautiful and broken world. Give it a try.

In this work, I’ve found myself in a more public facing role than I am comfortable being in. For those who know me well, they would attest that I’m more of a behind the scenes kind of person, However, the enormity of what I saw and witnessed within the HCA system has catapulted me into a place where I never imagined I’d be.  It has stretched me. It has called me more deeply into the work of justice and peace in this world, as much, if not more so, than anything else in my life up to this point.

And, wouldn’t you know it, I’ve had to wrestle with the fact that if I really believe what I say most weeks to our congregation – Circle of Mercy – that they are all beloved children of God, then I’ve got to acknowledge that the HCA executives, who have dismantled and destroyed our healthcare system – they are beloved children of God too. I’ll be honest, that’s where I’ve got some work to do. I keep having to remind myself, with Will Campbell’s voice a constant echo in my mind, “If you’re gonna love one, you’ve got to love them all” and “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.” Hopefully those reminding words will continue to work their way fully into my heart.

I am certain, that as I tentatively walked, scared and uncertain, onto this campus 30 years ago, not sure if I was going to pack up my things and leave at any given moment, the way was being prepared. Seeds were being scattered around me that would take root within me in ways I never could have imagined, and I actively resisted those seeds taking root, especially in my first year. 

Here’s one example that will give you a sense of where I was at that time. It is with deep regret when I think back now about how I walked around this very campus as a freshmen, taking down signs that my classmates had posted for a new LGBTQIA support group that was being formed on campus. In my mind, such a group was wrong and shouldn’t exist.

I was probably quietly thinking and sometimes spouting off similar prejudice and hate, clothed in the language of my faith, in classes and other groups I was part of on campus. My ideology was fueled by friends and classmates who thought the way I thought and believed the things I believed. The miracle that met me on this campus came in the form of the people I named earlier, as well as many others – including fellow classmates – who listened, who engaged with me, who spoke a similar language of faith, with added nuances of love and compassion and a God who was way bigger than I had imagined possible up to that point in my life. And these people stuck with me. They were the very definition of a word we don’t use a lot these days – long-suffering – of my ignorance and overt attitudes that were less that loving and compassionate.

The miracle of what I found in these people and this place was a community that somehow knew how to call out the better parts of others – out of me. They didn’t shy away from engaging and being in relationship with me. They asked me challenging questions and stuck around as I fumbled through the answers I thought I was supposed to give and as I eventually landed on honest responses that poured out of a deeper well within me. They pointed me to the pioneers and saints in our Baptist tradition who took the words of Jesus seriously and landed in a very different place than where I had found myself up to that point in my life – theologically, politically, and socially. The steadiness and faithfulness of this community was an invitation to me – not to abandon or denounce my faith – but to take it more seriously than I had ever taken it before. They walked with me as I wrestled. They scooped me up when I struggled. And they did all of this while neither they nor I knew where it was all going to land.

And now I find myself being challenged to find pathways to engage with family members and friends who are firmly rooted in that land of certainty, where my feet were once firmly planted, where the answers are clear, where the Bible is seen as literal and infallible, where ideology and dogma at times supersede love, compassion, and sometimes ignore the life and teachings of the one we claim to follow. 

In our ever-polarized world, this has been some of the hardest, most gut-wrenching work I’ve done in my entire life. For me, in my own path, it’s a calling to nurture relationship with people I deeply love but struggle mightily to understand, much less relate to or agree with. What keeps me engaging around it all is not the fact that I think I have the answers or some absolute truth to impart. It’s not even that I think I can convince anyone to change their minds. What keeps me engaging is that I know what it meant in my own life for people to be patient and kind as they walked alongside me, as they invited me to take my faith more seriously than I ever had before. If it hadn’t been for the folks I met here 30 years ago and have met in the years following, I wouldn’t be standing here with you today. If it hadn’t been for my family and community in my growing up years, I wouldn’t be standing here with you today. Both are part shaping of my identity and both infused within me this Good News story.

These seeds of justice and peace that have taken root within me along the way, have been nurtured by people like you, who have committed your lives to walking in the way of Jesus, remaining steadfast in the path of peace, a way and path that do not compute in the world around us. I know that I would not be here today if you had not answered such a call, as you have opened your own life to the possibility of transformation, which involves both a letting go and leaning into something new, not yet fully known. You are the multitudes within me. And I thank God every day for that sacred gift.

Thanks be to God for those little birds, who have scooped and continue to scoop us up. Thanks be to God for those who continue to scoop up the seeds we sometimes don’t even notice and place them where they need to land within us when we are receptive and ready – especially in those times and places when we don’t even know we need or want to be ready. 

May the seeds continue to fall all over and around us. May they be embedded in the places where we are being prepared to receive them. May we surrender ourselves to the expansion and growth they bring.  The truth is, we never really know when or how it’s going to happen. 

Honestly, it’s happening right now. Just look around. Listen. 

In and through it all, may we always do our best to live our lives in ways that are open and that hold what we cannot see. May we keep leaning toward it all in love.

Amen.