14.07.2026
Saint Francis
Pentecost 7
Pastor Elizabeth Ekdale
July 12, 2026
Dear Friends in Christ,
We are in the middle of the long green liturgical season. There are numerous gospel readings in which we will hear about planting, sowing, harvesting, separating weeds from plants, and mustard seeds, (very agricultural themed) as Jesus teaches through stories and parables what the reign of heaven is about. In a few minutes we will reflect on the extravagant sower parable from Matthew, however, I don’t want us to miss the lovely message from our prophet Isaiah. These words are spoken to a beleaguered community who have been removed from their homeland and forced into exile in Babylon. They were Judean refugees in a strange and unfamiliar land yearning to go home -- to receive a word of grace and forgiveness from God in their displacement.
Coming home. Yearning for home. Have any of you been away from home for an extended period of time and felt a longing to be home? Deep inside, you know it’s time to come home.
Imagine being a refugee and not knowing when that time will come. There are over 117 million refugees according to the UN Refugee Agency. Over half of the refugees are children. Waiting in limbo. Days, dragging into weeks, months, years. Longing for home but not knowing when homecoming will happen and if a home remains. Worrying about missing family and friends, grieving over the dead, recovering from the terrors of persecution and famine and illness.
Our present-day landscape of refugees from the Ukraine, Sudan, the Middle East and Syria are not all that different from the refugees who were waiting in Isaiah’s time to return from Babylon to their beloved Palestine. The question on every refugee’s mind in our time or in 540 B.C.E is “When can we go home?”
After two generations in exile, Isaiah’s hearers struggle to trust words spoken in the name of God about homecoming. They had heard so many predictions from so many prophets that never materialized. (Troeger, New Proclamation)
Words were simply that – words – empty and hollow. But Isaiah illuminates a God’s sacred promise which took root in God’s people who were hungry for home, hungry for hope, hungry for a word which when planted would yield life. God’s word, God’s promises are as unstoppable as the cycle of sowing, growing, and harvesting. Even broken hearts took note.
Listen again to the promise-filled words from Isaiah: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall My word be the goes out from My mouth; it shall not return to Me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”
God hears the cries of all refugees – all those who long for home – and responds. The words from God’s mouth are not empty, but provide lifesaving nourishment. Words which when planted produce a spark of hope and anticipation of restoration in the midst of despair. Comfort and hope blossom from God’s word – even nature joins in the celebration for all who return from exile: ... “the mountains and hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” Nature becomes co-worshipers with us.
For those of us who have not lived this specific experience, we can still know the feelings of displacement, dis-ease, and longing for the simple routines of normalcy.
I take heart in my own struggles with the parable Jesus presents to us about the generous nature of God. Christ as the sower liberally and graciously shares and spreads God’s life-giving word in all places, for all people. The sower throws the seed extravagantly and indiscriminately – seemingly not taking care where the seed might land. And it landed everywhere – on good soil, on rocky ground, on paths exposed to the elements, amongst the thorns. Some might judge the sower as wasteful of the seed. Not being protective enough of the seeds and where it will fall. I see this kind of planting of being reflective of God’s extravagant goodness and graciousness for everyone – not holding back divine love and mercy anywhere or anyplace.
Seed falls on good soil -- seed falls on dead soil. Our own lives include more than the seed that fails and more than the seed that takes deep root and produces an amazing harvest. It includes them both. To despair because of failure is to overlook the seeds that produce. To expect total success is to overlook the failure that will be part of any of our lives. A more mature vision of a life of faith is one that can hold both success and failure in tension, understanding that both will be a part of life and faith.
I read a story years ago about a baker living in England during the Kosovo refugee crisis. He anguished over the refugees in Macedonia and longed to plant seeds of hope and comfort for them in whatever way he could. But what could he offer, how could he help? At his own expense, he transplanted his bakery and employees to the middle of a refugee camp and began baking bread -- not the way it is baked in England, but bread that a Kosovo refugee longs to place on their dinner table for a meal. They baked and baked and gave out thousands of loaves of traditional tasting bread to the refugees, reminding them that all of creation, all of God’s harvest which produced the wheat, all of God’s people, will work to ensure their homecoming and then celebrate along with them. The smells and taste of homebred bread, like seed planted on good soil, produced a harvest of hope and feelings of solidarity in anticipation of returning home.
God’s heart rejoices as we tend the harvest of the gospel in our own lives through worship, prayer, reflection and study, and acts of kindness -- and then sharing the seeds of grace and mercy passionately, generously, indiscriminately with all we encounter. We go out in joy not knowing the results of the harvest, but caring for the seeds of justice, of compassion, of hope with all that we have, all who we are, so that even the hills shall burst into song and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Go in joy, plant seeds of sacred love and justice, and be led back in peace. Amen.
