Seeds of Justice:
Sowing Our Future

Twenty-Fourth Sunday After Pentecost • November 10, 2019
Reading: Isaiah 65:17-25 (adapted from The Message)
Pastor Jeff Wells

Climate change is bringing massive fires, floods, powerful storms, melting the polar ice caps, and rising sea levels. We are witnessing a dangerous, growing, and emboldened white nationalism. Ultra right-wing nationalist regimes have taken power in countries across the globe. We live in a world different in scale, but not in substance, from the world of the Middle East in the time of Isaiah. So how could the great prophet, living through times just as precarious as our own, represent the vision of God using these words – and believe in it: 

I’m creating new heavens and a new earth.
All the earlier troubles, chaos, and pain 
are things of the past, to be forgotten.
Look ahead with joy!

Isaiah was not a pollyanna, any more than Jesus was. But he did see in God’s good creation that there was more than meets the eye. He saw beyond the immediate, depressing circumstances of his people. And he believed in planting seeds for the future. That was his job, his calling, his vocation as a visionary and prophet. Isaiah planted hope. He sowed seeds that are the stuff of dreams – dreams that may one day be realized, but certainly were not in his own lifetime.  

The Church of the Village is a community in the long tradition of radical, prophetic Christianity. As such, we reap the best fruit born of the seeds that were planted by those who came before us – fruit from many strains of resistance and reformation, from valued aspects of Wesleyan theology and practice, from the witness of our predecessor congregations, and from the visions cast by prophets like Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah, Martin Luther King Jr., and many more. Without all of this, we could not move forward with hope or look ahead with joy. 

Of course, we are called to love, care for, and be in ministry with the people around us here and now and throughout our lives. But our mission is not only to reap from the past and have concern for the present. One of our prime directives from God is to sow forward – to sow the future, to sow a vision of the kin-dom of God. It is our job – here and now – to sow seeds for what is to come. This future is both our own and not our own. We will see and experience it only in part. We are called to sow for people and for a world that will come after us. In some cases, the fruit from some of the seeds we sow may only be reaped long after we are gone. 

Our current social, political, and religious contexts we may feel like very infertile soil for sowing our future. It’s true that we exist in a moment of great risk in The Church of the Village, the United Methodist Church, the United States, and the world. How can the seeds we sow flourish in such soil? Yet we have an opportunity, even in these circumstances, to plant healthy seeds for a hopeful future. 

Our community – the Church of the Village – is small, imperfect, and challenged in many ways, yet from such small beginnings, great movements have sprouted before. In the early 1900s, a young pastor named Walter Raushenbusch became the pastor of a small immigrant congregation in Hell’s Kitchen, about 30 blocks north of here. There he came to know, intimately, the terrible conditions of life for the working people who worshipped at the Second German Baptist Church. They paid high rents to live in overcrowded tenements with no heat in the winter. They received low wages while enduring horrible working conditions. Raushenbusch came to understand that he was called to address not only their spiritual lives, but their whole existence. And he determined that the purpose of the church is not only individual salvation, but social salvation founded on promoting the kin-dom of God on earth. In 1907, he published, Christianity and the Social Crisis. In appeared in a very ripe context. For three years, it was the best-selling religious book in the U.S., after the Bible. Rauschenbusch became the best-known spokesman and proponent of the Social Gospel movement, which has influenced generations of Christians and others up to this day. The Social Gospel has also impacted every major reform movement from the New Deal to the Great Society, the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war movements, Black Lives Matter, and more. Walter Rauschenbusch and many who followed him loved and cared for the living breathing persons right in front of them. But they were also sowers of seeds.

Someone once said, “You don’t plant a tree for yourself, you plant it for the future – for those who come after.” We sowing the seeds of our own future, but more than that, we sow seeds of a future that we will not be around to witness. Our future belongs to us and also does not belong to us. This idea subverts our American tendency toward rugged individualism. The truth is, our fundamental interdependence is not with those with whom we co-exist. Interdependence links us across generations. This turns on its head the attitude that all of our decisions ought to begin with the question, “How this will benefit me?” The same truth is found in “The Seventh Generation Principle.” This principle is based on an ancient Iroquois philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. What is our dream for the seven generations that will come after us?  

Certainly, we don’t just scatter seeds and then hope something good come of them. We do all we can to make sure those seeds grow and thrive. Intentionally and with great effort and thoughtfulness, we work for the thriving of The Church of the Village and the progressive, radically inclusive, and liberationist movement it is part of. We continue to build up our pastoral and lay leadership. We keep seeking better ways to spread our message and attract new people to this beloved community. Our search committee has been working for five months finding and interviewing candidates for the new position of Minister for Leadership and Congregational Development. Hope for Our Neighbors in Need, our emergency food program, is nearly ready to become a 501(c)3 non-profit in its own right, so that it will be better able to gain funding and support from sources outside of the church. 

We have the opportunity now to plant seeds that will be very important for the future of progressive, radically inclusive, and liberationist Wesleyanism. Advent Gathering in Denver. Conversations going on in the NYAC. All of these things are seeds that we hope will bear much fruit in the future. 

Our congregation is relatively small and challenged in many ways, yet seeds we produce and sow spread far and wide. A lot of COTV members participate in our community for a time and then move away. As examples, Jessica Kawamura, Jamie Jones, and Scott Sprunger come to mind. And gosh, do we miss them and even to mourn their loss. Yet, we should also embrace this sometimes painful reality as a way in which we sow seeds elsewhere. These persons are seeds for the radical Gospel message we proclaim. We have always been a place of sowing seeds. 

At the same time, we continue to attract new people all the time who bring many gifts and graces and passions and experience into our community. I am not boasting when I tell you that we must be doing something right because we attract so many gifted young people. In can’t tell you how many times I have heard a statement very similar to this one: “I made a long list of churches to visit, but then I came to the Church of the Village and I never went anywhere else.”

As an example of the kind of seeds we sow, I want to share a reflection written recently by Hannah Ervin on her own experience (with her permission, of course):

My last year at Fordham was full of theological questioning and spiritual growth, I applied to Union Theological Seminary, denomination-less, and quite unsure of what would come, but fully aware that I was going where I was called to be. I embraced the unknown, and started to discern a call to chaplaincy, most specifically, prison chaplaincy. I started reading a great deal of George Jackson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., James Cone, and more. This is where I feel called today. And after I graduated, still living in NYC, I started exploring churches. I made a list of communities I wanted to visit, and never made it past the first community. I started attending Church of the Village in June 2018, became a member in December 2019, and became a Minister of Care in January 2019. This United Methodist community was everything I was looking for, plus some things I didn’t know I needed, like many older women who mentor, guide, and pray with me. This community lifts one another up, lets the spirit move through the place however that may look, and is open and affirming to people of all walks of life. This place has been the greatest gift, and taught me so much about parish ministry, pastoral care, and beloved community. The more involved I got, the more I read about Wesleyan theology and the Methodist tradition. In this imperfect community that promises to spread love and work for justice, I found a home. Briefly after I joined the Methodist Church, though, the institutional United Methodist Church decided to reinforce their anti-LGBTQ+ views and further restrict inclusion in the Church. This has, ironically, has deepened my call to ordained ministry. It is a challenging time to be Methodist, but it is something I am continually working through in community and with fellow Methodists. 

This was part of Hannah’s application for a chaplaincy education program for next summer. I admit to you that it made me cry when I read this. While Hannah has not been with us for long, she is a great example of the seeds we sow for a hopeful future. 

Given human experience over the past several centuries, it may seem very unlikely that we will ever see the kin-dom of God on earth come to fruition. Yet, in spite of the odds, God calls us to be a model of the life to come, a model of love, justice, reconciliation, and peace. Our intended way of life is to practice the countercultural values of the Church of Acts. God pleads with us to proclaim that same vision espoused by Isaiah and Jesus. We are gathered as a community to embody the dream and sow the seeds of the kin-dom.

Copyright © 2019 by Jeff Wells
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