The Reverend Holly Antolini, Sunday July 12th, 2026

©Holly Lyman Antolini Sermon for Proper 10 Year A, 7-12-26

St. George’s Episcopal Church Long Cove, St. George ME

Let us pray.

Send us out in joy and lead us back in peace, accomplishing the purpose of your Word. AMEN.

It is barely a week since the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, and I don’t know about you, but I still have the spacious skies and amber grain waves and purple mountains of “America, the Beautiful” echoing in my ears. So how irresistible that today the theme continues! There is a lovely cosmic coherence between the outside world and the lectionary world: between our fields and gardens, and the prophet Isaiah and Psalm 65 and Jesus’ parable in the Gospel of Matthew, we have flourishing plants abounding!

Rain and snow assure abundance in Isaiah, making the land “bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater.” And in God’s care, the aromatic and sturdy cedar triumphs over the thorn, the perfumed myrtle over the briar.

The Psalm underscores this divine abundance. Affirm verses 8-14 again with me, responding by half verse, after the asterisk:

Those who dwell at the ends of the earth will tremble at your marvelous signs; *
you make the dawn and the dusk to sing for joy.

You visit the earth and water it abundantly;
you make it very plenteous; *
the river of God is full of water.

You prepare the grain, *
for so you provide for the earth.

 You drench the furrows and smooth out the ridges; *
with heavy rain you soften the ground and bless its increase.

You crown the year with your goodness, *
and your paths overflow with plenty.

May the fields of the wilderness be rich for grazing, *
and the hills be clothed with joy.

May the meadows cover themselves with flocks,
and the valleys cloak themselves with grain; *
let them shout for joy and sing.

In Jesus’ parable in Matthew, all this promise of abundance gets nuanced a bit. The seed has a variety of challenges we probably know well. I live them in my garden daily, over on my point in Cushing: the hard clay resists embracing the seed, and the rocks and ledges are infamous, thwarting deep roots right and left. My lawn bakes hard and yellow in the July sun. In my pollinator garden, sharp, snagging thistles and multiflora briars spring up everywhere, threatening the bee balm and butterfly weed, not to mention my ankles and weeding fingers. And the hawthorn thorns in my hedgerow – each a good three inches long – are so tough they can pierce a tractor tire! (No myrtle around here, and no chance of cedars in my neck of the woods, though white oak acorns occasionally sprout out there, buried among my perennials by enterprising squirrels and chipmunks). Speaking of which, it’s not just birds raiding my seeds; how about those squirrels? The burrowing chipmunks? God help us: the ground hog who has taken up residence under my porch!?

Now, let me propose something some of you may find a bit outrageous, but as Jesus says, “Let anyone with ears listen!” I propose that we don’t even need the anxious and earnest second paragraph of the Gospel. Matthew borrowed it from Mark’s Gospel, as if afraid his hearers wouldn’t GET Jesus’ import. We don’t need all that exegesis for Jesus’s seed-sowing parable: God’s Word interprets itself in our backyards. Jesus’ initial parable can stand on its own! Forget the ferocious devils and moral instruction of that second paragraph and let the natural world – which, after all, is God’s Second Book, the Book of Nature, as the medieval Scholastics called it – let the natural world speak for itself. Besides, a wise poet-preacher friend once warned me not to seal off meaning in tidy anaerobic little moral packets. In so doing, he warned, you suck the oxygen out of Jesus’ story-telling and foreclose the very open-ended surprise that makes Jesus’ parables so fruitful! Their poetic ambiguity is exactly what enables Jesus’ stories to speak to such a wide variety of human experience.

Given the rich and fruitful fecundity of all this wonderful imagery this morning – resonating with the peepers in our ponds, the flittering fireflies alight in our meadows, first the peonies throwing out such a Baroque riot of petals they cannot hold their fragrant integrity more than a few days before they scatter petals like blown laundry everywhere, and no sooner do they pass than the day lilies erupt in a glory of gold and orange and burgundy and commandeer the rock walls, vying with the last imperial purple spears of the lupine – I think we might find it helpful to step back not just from Matthew’s attempt to reduce Jesus’ story to an improving moral but back from all of these readings in their burgeoning particularity. As I often must step back from a drawing or painting I’m working on and take a good long view of what I’m up to, perhaps we can step back from the details of these readings and let the underlying flow of narrative – the river of God’s Word that flows under and through the whole wondrous landscape of abundance the Scripture is weaving for us.

And what do we see from an Eric-Hopkins perspective on these readings, high above the islands of Penobscot Bay? We see an immense assurance of God’s persisting, burgeoning, overflowing, indeed riotously generous profusion showered upon us. But not just image piled upon image piled upon image of prodigality: prodigality after or even in the midst of deprivation! Isaiah is addressing a people who has suffered unimaginably in exile. The thorns and briars have wrung misery among his people for two generations. But now, rain and snow past, the seed for the sower and bread for the eater proliferate; the cedar and myrtle prevail. The mountains and hills burst into song; the trees of the field clap their hands.

Jesus’ people in Matthew have suffered Roman occupation for generations also, and Jesus’ resurrection didn’t send the Romans packing. The hard ground and burning sky of oppression has thwarted the seed; the terrible weeds of wealth’s corruptions and seductions have choked out growth. But Jesus’ divine sower has continued to broadcast the seed anywhere and everywhere, with its attendant promise of fertility and blessing wherever the ground of people’s hearts is soft and open enough, and wherever the compost of suffering has given rise to the ripeness of kindness, compassion and generosity.

All this abundance speaks of God’s blessing, as downright profligate now as ever, whatever the climate and political conditions on this anniversary of our democracy that might cause us to doubt and fear, and even to tighten up and become inhospitable soil ourselves. As God is an ever-generous God, broadcasting God’s promise of abundance upon any and all, so we, the recipients of those blessings, are called to the same generosity, the same broadcasting of abundance. As the stewards of God’s garden, we are not merely to see to the soil’s condition and harvest its plethora, we are to be sowers of blessing likewise. If it is God’s nature to bless, then we, made in God’s image as we are, are likewise to extend the blessing we receive far and wide, to draw no boundaries on who may be benefited.

In service to that extension of blessing, let me share with you as my closing prayer Verses 3 & 4 from the new hymn we are going to sing in closing today, a hymn written precisely for this 250th anniversary of America’s independence by lyric writer John Dalles and tune writer (and my long-time colleague, the Minister of Music at St. James’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge, MA) Patrick Michaels:

We the people trust God’s guidance

To enlighten and provide us

Ways to lift the low and poor,

Seeking justice evermore,

Joining hands to serve together,

Joining hearts and minds forever,

God bless America today!

We the people pledge and promise

To extend God’s grace beyond us:

Fairness, mercy, liberty,

For our world community.

May God’s people work with spirit,

Till true freedom all inherit.

God bless America always!

Amen.