Pentecost 7

       This past week, we delivered our third harvest from the Community Garden to the MLK  Food Pantry — 29 bags of Swiss chard, tender lettuce, arugula, eggplant, and enough herbs to supply Chef Emily with a week’s worth of Newport dinner parties: mint, rosemary, thyme, chives, curly and flat-leaf parsley, and basil. The garden is riotously abundant, and the raised bed closest to Spring Street is flat out of control. A crook-necked squash vine is making a break for the summer traffic on Spring Street, offering drive-by fruit to anyone who happens by. I was thinking about how our crazy garden grows at Thursday’s percussion concert, one of my favorites so far in this year's Music Festival.

      The Festival itself reminds me of Emmanuel's gardens — so many people gathering from all over to be nourished and surprised by unexpected insights and beauty. Thirty concerts over seventeen days, sunrise to sunset, at The Breakers, The Elms, the Norman Bird Sanctuary, the Redwood, Rosecliff, the Newport Art Museum — and even here in our own Nave yesterday afternoon, part of our ongoing collaboration with Newport Classical that keeps opening new life and new possibilities for us both.

      Thursday night’s piece was Goddess Insect, a contemporary 22-minute concerto for violin and percussion, in its Rhode Island debut. Co-commissioned by Newport Classical, the piece is built around the psychological idea of the "God-Bug Syndrome" — an inflated, sense of self-importance that psychologists might call a “God complex” when it masks a deeper, hidden fear of not measuring up. I know there are times when I feel like a bug in God’s larger garden plan, and just hope that I’m useful in my own buzzy or fluttering bug-like way! The composer uses the percussion ensemble for rustling, chirping insect sounds, with the violin soaring around the rhythms.

      Vestry member Laurie Bosman attended and told me at intermission she found it captivating — rattling seeds, brushed sheets of brass, a shaking instrument made of goat hoof trimmings, tuned two-by-fours and zinc pipes struck with mallets, shaken plastic takeaway containers half full of BBs, metal discs played with a bow and dipped in water to “bend” the sound, all of it woven around the violin's melody. Listening with her eyes closed, as the violinist

suggested, Laurie said she found herself thinking about seeds — how they grow, where they land, and what they produce when they germinate where they’ve landed. And we hadn't even been talking about this morning's gospel!

      Yet here we are on the 7th Sunday after the Pentecost: Matthew's version of the Sower of Seeds. We tend to hear the parable of the sower, as we commonly call it, as a simple, folksy agricultural lesson: good advice for the gardener (or the disciple) about preparing soil and pulling weeds. But the word parable itself means to overturn or cast aside. Parables are stories Jesus told on purpose to upset what we think we already know. Matthew tells us plainly that Jesus and his stories put all of Jerusalem in turmoil. A parable isn't supposed to comfort our assumptions. It's supposed to overturn them. So here's my overturning question for us this morning: where do you stand in this story? Most of us, I think, line ourselves up as the sower — as the one scattering seed, hearing this as gardening advice about our own effort, our own good soil, and our own diligent weeding.

      But what if we tried on another place in the story instead? What if we're the birds, surviving only by what we manage to snatch up along the way? What if we're the weeds — because a weed, after all, is just a thriving plant growing somewhere the gardener didn't want it? (Ask that squash vine making its break for Spring Street whether it thinks of itself as a nuisance or as remarkably, stubbornly alive and bearing fruit.)

      What if we're the seed itself? How do seeds behave? What do they do when they’re scattered, and what happens around them when they sprout? Does anyone get nourished? Is anybody encouraged by the blossoms? Do the plants that grow create a resting place where bees and butterflies can feed before carrying pollen somewhere new? Do the roots hold the earth in a hard rain? Do the fallen leaves feed the ground for whatever grows there next? And what if we're the soil? Do we offer a fertile, secure, accommodating foundation where life can take root and actually flourish — even life we didn't plan for, didn't expect, and maybe didn't originally want growing right there?

      I think about that question every time I think about our Rector's Discretionary Fund. Friday, I wired July’s First Sunday of the Month collection — nearly $2,000 — to the Mothers' Union tailoring training program in the Diocese of Western Tanganyika. That's twenty sewing machines! This more than doubles what Emmanuel has helped that program purchase over the past few years, and the Mothers’ Union’s next plan is to reach more than six hundred widows living in the diocese. The machines are sturdy treadle models, easy to maintain for decades, and when the students graduate, they take their machines home to start small businesses making clothing for their own communities. DWT Mothers' Union executive director Agripina Mtengu wrote recently that this work isn't only about sewing — it's about sustainability, women's empowerment, and economic independence as real protection against exploitation. A sewing machine plus training is a path to income, dignity, and freedom. That's good soil.

      The Mothers’ Union’s work has caused me to reflect on how we use the RDF here at home. For years we’ve used it to provide small, one-time grants for urgent needs — mostly help for folks behind on rent or utilities. But one-time relief doesn’t root and grow lasting stability, and we've been wondering how we can do better. So we're trying something more relational. Rather than simply sending a check to a landlord or to RI Energy and stepping back, we'll walk alongside people — connecting them with trusted partners like RI Legal Services, Rhode Island Outreach, the Women’s Resource Center, No Wrong Door's Laundry Love program, and other local nonprofits, while offering what Emmanuel actually does well: welcome, practical support, and sustained presence. Our focus going forward will be a back-to-work ministry, more like the DWT Mothers' Union's own path to independence — short-term food support, résumé and application help, interview preparation, appropriate clothing for employment.

      When financial assistance is part of the picture, it will fit inside that larger relationship, coordinated with other providers, so help doesn't fall through the cracks and we're not trying to duplicate work that other nonprofits already do better than we could. We want to be good soil to support strong roots when that’s where we stand in the parable. Collaboration with with other nonprofits invites all kinds of contribution — practical help, a listening ear, an open door, and the prayers of this whole community.

It lets us walk with our neighbors not only in the moment of crisis, but all along the road toward steadier ground. So, in this parable, are you the sower? One of the birds that eat seeds scattered on the path? A weed pushing the envelope to live out its own truth? A seed becoming something new in an unexpected place? Or fertile, stable, soil? Maybe the overturning truth of this parable is that at different moments, we’re every single one of them —  scattering, snatching, stubbornly surviving, sprouting where we're not expected, and, if we're doing this right,

becoming the kind of ground where somebody else's seed can finally take root. Amen.