by the Rev. Tom Damrosch, Rector of St. Paul's
Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”
Later, Jesus spoke to his disciples privately in the house and explained this parable to them. “Hear then the parable of the sower,” he said.
“When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”
The Gospel of the Lord.
In the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Our scriptures today speak to us of God’s abundance, of our struggles to let that abundance fill our lives, and of the power of God’s Word and Holy Spirit to nourish the faith that has taken root in us.
I have just spent ten days experiencing the abundance of God’s love and seeing how that love overcomes many human and natural obstacles. Our mission group from the Diocese of Western Massachusetts spent this time on the island of Hispaniola, up in the mountains which form the border between the two nations which share that island.
In the eastern, larger part, is the Dominican Republic, where European culture first established itself in the New World. We ended up spending our first day in its capital city, Santo Domingo, waiting for our luggage and supplies to catch up with us after nearly 20 hours of travel much disrupted by summer weather.
Coming from a country where we think of the Pilgrims as early settlers, it is daunting to step into a city of great stone buildings, including its Cathedral, which had been in place a hundred years before the first settler ever stepped ashore here.
Then we travelled west across the country to the border town of Jimani where we were to live and work for the rest of our stay. The Dominican countryside is lush and fertile. The language is Spanish. The society is a mix of first world and third world life. We saw comfortable homes and simple shacks. We also saw banana groves interspersed with cactus.
Finally, we reached Jimani, where we were welcomed by Padre Naftali, a priest from Haiti who has served for many years in the Dominican Republic. The church of San Pablo Apostol – St. Paul the Apostle – is typical of the Episcopal Church in that country – new, vibrant, evangelical and rapidly growing. Resources are limited but put to maximum use. There’s electricity in most places much of each day.
Water is delivered periodically by truck and pumped up to roof top cisterns when the electricity is available, though it’s not actually drinking water. There is no air conditioning, but the fans work much of the time and there is usually a breeze.
The church is new, airy, and beautiful in a simple way. It serves both the established population of the town and also Haitian refugees. Over the church are a parish hall and a small apartment for the priest.
Next door is a new medical clinic next door with dorm rooms on the second story for mission teams and for relief teams crossing into Haiti. There is also a church school under construction next door.
Here we lived for the next week. Our team of 12, with four Spanish speakers among us, worked with 10 local teens and one awesome grandmother, conducting Vacation Bible School for 175 children every day. The kids would begin lining up an hour early, and part of our team would lead them in singing as they waited, with more kids flocking down the roads to the church by the minute. After they were all checked in, we began each day with music and a skit.
Jim Munroe, the dean of our cathedral, was a show stealer in these skits, playing a sheep, then Satan, and many characters in between.
Then the kids were divided into three large groups by age, and distributed among thematically designed craft in the church, music and food upstairs (for some, their principal meal of the day), and games outside in the yard of an apartment building under construction. Then all came back together for a brief closing time and dismissal. My modest task was to get all three groups moving on time for each rotation.
We’d then have a meal with our Dominican collaborators and begin adjusting all our plans for the next day based on the many surprises we constantly encountered. As this was the first VBS every to be held in this town, this was a work in progress all week long.
The final weekend was a time of contrasts. On Saturday, we all piled into a small bus with Padre Nafatli and crossed into Haiti. For many miles within the Dominican Republic there are army checkpoints, watching for Haitian refugees. The border itself was well guarded and daunting.
A very large lake in Haiti sits in the mountain pass at the border, and its water level has risen greatly over the last year. So the larger buildings at the border sit abandoned in the flood waters, along with many trucks.
The road though this pass – the main road for relief supplies going into Haiti – is in poor condition on the Dominican side. On the Haitian side, it’s been totally swallowed up by the lake and now consists entirely of crushed rock from the mountain side pushed into the lake to make a rough temporary roadway. Down this road was heading a steady stream of trucks – including an electrical supply truck from western Massachusetts
Then we were deposited, with all our supplies, in the no man’s land between the Dominican and Haitian border gates. We were intensely aware of how often neighbors are divided and at enmity in our world – Israelis and Palestinians, Greeks and Turks, Northern and Southern Sudan, Protestant and Catholic Ireland.
This reality has echoes for me in our first scripture reading today, where the future patriarch Jacob schemes to trick his older brother Esau out of his birthright. That kind of enmity has been deep rooted between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Fortunately – blessedly – God has a way of entering such impossible conflicts and working through all our human stubbornness and creating something new. Last year’s cataclysmic earthquake in Haiti has led to such changes. And the two Episcopal dioceses of Haiti and the Dominican Republic have been pioneers in building the new bridges their great island so desperately needs.
And in a sign of this, a Haitian bus pulled up to our forlorn little group. Two Haitian Episcopal priests jumped out and embraced their Dominican colleague and the rest of us, and we were all to pile onto their bus and enter Haiti at last.
Immediately we saw great differences. On the Dominican side, cattle and goats were wandering about, grazing in the foliage on sides of the highway.
On the Haitian side, the mountains were deforested and cattle and goats were attempting to forage in lifeless soil and rocks. From the Dominican Republic, a country struggling for stability to find stability, we entered Haiti, the poorest nation in the entire Western hemisphere. And instead of four of us twelve speaking the language, we were all helpless in Creole.
Soon we came to the village of Fond Parisien. The church there was established many years ago by the sisters of St. Margaret, from Roxbury. The buildings of its school are rudimentary, and show many cracks from the distant earthquake in Port au Prince, the capital city of Haiti. We’ve been able to provide them with $ 8,000 for repairs, with more to come, and we brought several suitcases full of school supplies.
The priest for the area, Pere Valdema, had until last week been serving six churches with a thousand worshippers on Sunday. In the last week, two of the churches, including this one, have been taken over by a young priest, Pere Frederic, who also teaches one day a week in the our seminary.
Outside the church there is abject poverty and then a habitat-for-humanity style development of perhaps a hundred tiny, pastel colored houses for people who were both injured and displaced by the great earthquake.
We were welcomed warmly, and fed, and shared enthusiastic and beautiful worship with the people of Fond Parisien. Their resources are meager in the extreme. But the Episcopal Church is deeply rooted and vitally important in Haiti. It is by far the largest diocese of the Episcopal Church, and its schools – preschool to university level – have resumed functioning where the public institutions have simply been unable to do so. Educational aspirations remain very high, and the music sung by two groups of young people at our worship was breathtakingly beautiful. We came back from that day sobered, moved and deeply concerned to help these brothers and sisters rebuild what little they have, and for us to learn from their faith and determination.
Our final full day in the Dominican Republic began with the parish Sunday Eucharist at St. Paul the apostle, which was also the closing service for the Vacation Bible School. It was exhilarating. Indeed, introducing VBS in the Dominican Republic increased Sunday attendance at church by 50%.
Bathed in music and prayer and praise, I looked out at the Body of Christ at work, alive and growing and vibrant. It was clear that God had planted many seeds in those young people, and in our team, and in the team of Dominican young people with whom we had worked.
It was not easy for the community that had formed that week to disperse. There were many, many tears. But we came away from that place changed and more deeply aware than ever that the Body of Christ is indeed one body. We all have so much to receive from each other. And while our primary location for mission for each of us in the place where we live, we also know in a new way that our connectedness to the needs of the world and to the power that God’s love is generating throughout the church and the world matters.
Jesus challenges his disciples today with a question: What kind of soil are you for the word of God that has reached you, that tiny seed of faith that has been planted in your heart and in your mind and in your life? And he gives several examples and explanations.
If we’re honest, we will probably admit that all of Jesus’ descriptions apply to each of us some of the time. The real miracle of the sower, for me, is God’s patience with us. God only needs one tiny grain of faith to really take root in us. And God only needs us to allow God to keep nurturing that seed as it turns into a green and vibrant shoot.
That was one of the activities that our children did in their VBS – planting one bean seed in a plastic cup with a few cotton balls and some water. Five days later, the Altar at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle was covered with green shoots. A couple of hundred children had experienced the love of God springing up as they were seeing it in those plants. And we of the American team and our Dominican partners had seen and experienced that springing up of new life in ourselves and each other. And each of us from western Massachusetts has come home a lot more aware of our individual and collective blessings, and a lot more aware of the power of the faith that is in us and in our brothers and sisters here and abroad.
Amen.
