NEW HYMN TEXT - God Is Like a Foolish Farmer
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The longer I hang a round churches and lecture halls, the more I’ve grown to love the parables of Jesus. After you’ve heard your fill of moralizing, expounding, lecturing, explicating, haranguing, answering, elaborating, theologizing, and just plain bloviating from both pulpit and podium, the parables come in like the first spring breeze through the open window of a cramped and stuffy room. For Jesus take the simplest of things—seeds and weeds, sheep and sparrows, widows and day laborers—and tells a short (preachers and professors take note) story. That’s it; no three-point explanation, no two takeaways or applications, no one-sentence moral a la Aesop’s fables. Just the story.
But why? Why doesn’t Jesus—who is, after all, God made flesh—not tell us the answers? Why doesn’t he tell us exactly what to do, which would seem more more efficient than all this vague, equivocating storytelling? Perhaps the most basic answer is that giving moral directives doesn’t usually work. W. H. Auden seemed to think so: ”You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables.” Or maybe boiling down stories to one or two definitive meanings forecloses on a story’s necessary multivalence, the many meanings and questions and answers that could arise if we give them room to breathe. Or maybe, in the end, “there are no answers, just stories” (Garrison Keillor). Or maybe there is something necessary and salutary in wrestling with a story to discover how it might bless us if we refuse to let go. In his lovely definition of parables, this seems to be the conclusion that Welsh New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd comes to:
“At its simplest, the parable is a metaphor or simile dream from nature or common life, arresting the bearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.”
Or maybe Jesus just knew people enjoyed stories and, at best, tolerated sermons!
But the second aspect I love about parables is how often they defy common sense. For those of us who live in urban environments of the twenty-first-century United States, an agrarian society in the first-century Middle East presents multiple cultural divides (urban vs. rural, industrial vs. agrarian, high value on hospitality vs. high value on efficiency) that the contemporary reader must bridge if they are to understand how counterintuitive, even ridiculous, many of these parables would have sounded to their original audience. For why would you sow good seed on bad land? That’s wasteful. Why would you leave the majority of your herd defenseless to search out one sheep that was stupid enough to get itself lost? That makes no sense. Why would you pay people that worked for one hour the same as people that worked all day? Not only is it dumb, it seems unjust.
In Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon’s Kingdom, Grace, Judgment, he makes the basic argument that this is exactly the point of the parables. They are told in this absurd way to remind us of the absurdity, the wasteful immoderation, of God’s mercy and grace. There is a foolishness to the parables that should shake us awake and point us to the seemingly foolish prodigality of God and God’s love.
So, in this hymn text, I tried to tease out some of those blessedly foolish parts of the parables (and one parable-esque story from the Old Testament).
God is like a foolish farmer
sowing rare and costly seed
in a soil too hard and arid
for the harvest to succeed.
God is like a foolish lover,
disregarded and betrayed,
vowing to be fiercely faithful,
loving still the one who strayed.
God is like a foolish ruler
throwing guests a lavish feast,
shutting out the rich and mighty,
welcoming the lost and least.
God is like a foolish shepherd
losing countless nights of sleep
far away from flock and family
searching for a single sheep.
God, subvert our human wisdom—
law and logic’s cold embrace—
use instead our “foolish” methods;
startle us with stunning grace.
© 2024 GIA, Inc.
A demo, where you hear why I tend to avoid hymns in Ab.
You can purchase the music here via GIA Unbound.
Wonder-ings
In British environmentalist and writer Paul Kingsnorth’s essay “In the Black Chamber,” he recounts his visit to Grotte de Niaux (Niaux Cave), a cave in the French Pyrennes. Here the 15,000-year-old cave art of the paleolithic “Magdalenian” people has been preserved. Depictions of mammoths, bison, and ibex cover the walls, and yet archeologists and historians are still not sure why. It doesn’t seem that the Magdalenians hunted the animals (there are no depictions of hunters and bone analysis suggests a diet of reindeer), nor are the caves habitations. Were they elite artistic encampments? places of worship or shamanic experience? “It seems obvious to me,” Kingsnorth argues,
“that whatever happened in the Black Chamber was not driven by utility. Whoever was here, and whatever they were doing, they were forging a connection to something way beyond everyday reality. These paintings are not expressions of economics or natural history. They surely sprung from the same sense of power and smallness and wonder and awe that I feel as I stand in the same place that the artists would have stood. This was a reaching out to, for, something way beyond human comprehension. This was a meeting with the sacred.”
In the remainder of the essay, he delightfully meanders from the etymology of “sacred” to the role of emotion and intuition in human cognition to the hubris of both the religious who claim too much knowledge of the sacred to the adherents of scientific progressivism who believe they can now take up the slack reins of a defunct deity and control the world’s destiny. He concludes by locating himself in the world as creature and not creator:
“I’ll say it plainly, because I’ve worked myself up to it: in ‘nature’ I see something divine, and when I see it, it moves me to humility, not grandiosity, and that is good for me and good for those I come into contact with. I don’t want to be a god, even if I can. I want to be a servant of god, if by god we mean nature, life, the world. I want to be small in the world, belong to it, help it along, protect myself from its storms and try to cause none myself.”
This Rumi line quoted in Kingsnorth’s article is worth pulling out: “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. / Cleverness is mere opinion; bewilderment is is intuition.”
I’ve been reading all I can of L. M. Sacacas’s wonderful Substack (which I highly recommend) The Convivial Society. He is a technological critic of sorts who challenges people to reflect critically (thus, a critic) on the tools we use and how they shape us—with thinkers like Ivan Illich, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Simone Weil, Wendell Berry, and W. H. Auden informing his work. His latest edition, “The Art of Living,” starts with a simple but profound thesis: “The art of living, like any other art, is the art of learning to work creatively within the constraints of the medium.” Using Wendell Berry’s idea that just as art must create beauty within the limits imposed by the medium (e.g., poems using words [usually] on a page; that’s how you know it’s a poem), so humanity must work creatively and strive for beauty within the limits of our embodiment. To reject our embodied limits is to reject our fundamental humanity, and life as art becomes life as machine. It’s well worth the read!
If I taught a course on biblical exegesis (which I should not do), I’d be very tempted to start with this G. C. Lichtenberg nugget: “A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”
May you be the recipient of some of God’s foolish grace this day, and may you extend that foolish grace to a few people who don’t deserve it.
Peace,
Dave