By The Reverend Lilo Carr Rivera, Diocese of Long Island (Province II)

The Reverend Lilo Carr Rivera delivered this sermon at the UNCSW68 Closing Eucharist, Chapel of Christ the Lord at the Episcopal Church Center in New York City, on Friday, March 22nd, 2024.

Texts: Luke 8:1-15, Proverbs 1:20-23

My husband and I lived in Brooklyn for many years. That’s where we raised our son for the first several years of his life. Near our apartment, there was a little playground where we’d take our son to meet up with his little friends for play dates. In the center of this playground, there was this huge oak tree – just towering high and obviously quite old – captive in a concrete skirt.

Every fall, the tree would shed hundreds of acorns on the playground. 

They were quite big and oblong – [shows how big]. I was standing one crisp fall on that playground, and my son’s friend, Owen, ran up to me, planted his feet with confidence and smiled one of those snaggle-toothed five year old smiles – a crazy mix of baby teeth, adult teeth and gaps everywhere. He held up one of those huge acorns between his forefinger and his thumb for me to inspect. 

“Look!” He pronounced. 

“There’s a tree inside!” 

He deposited the acorn in my hand. 

For a few moments, I was struck by the wonder of this little guy’s statement…There was a mighty oak inside this acorn. All the information necessary for that tree was contained in this little package. That’s amazing! I became aware of the mighty force that moves through everything, giving life, the force that could unfold a towering oak tree from the hard case of this acorn. 

I looked at Owen, who seemed pleased with my silent contemplation of his gift. Then he turned and ran off, crushing the acorns on the playground pavement with little red sneakers. I looked down and noticed that there was a blanket of crushed acorns everywhere – pulverized by the feet of happy children. This old tree dropped hundreds of acorns every year – yet there was still only one tree there, not hundreds. Clearly only a very small percent – or maybe even none – would ever become like that old, towering oak. My sense of wonder turned to dismay.

I came to UNCSW this year to see the Kingdom of God. 

I was here last year, and knew that having eyes for the Kingdom was the best way to survive all the other material at CSW. I came to see where the Word was made flesh. Where the love and justice of God was incarnating in this world. I came to see Jesus – the Risen Christ – the New Creation that God is unfolding in this world right here and right now…God’s continuous work of the renewal of this world – shown to us in the Resurrection. 

I want hope. Hope in a world filled with gender-based violence (a term used so often at CSW that we know it by its acronym – GBV). Hope in a world filled with war and oppression and severe poverty.

I want to see God’s Kingdom right now! I want that sense of wonder of God’s awesome power that I experienced in the acorn.

And I think that’s what the people of Jesus’ time wanted, too! They wanted the Kingdom of heaven to come! They wanted liberation from Rome! They wanted Israel to be restored right now! But Jesus tells them this parable of the Sower. The Word of God – the message of God’s tremendous love and power and justice – it takes time to come into the world. It takes the right conditions. Some of it grows. Most of it does not. It’s choked by weeds and poor soil and brambles. It’s killed by our ignorance and hatred and greed. It’s killed casually and innocently – like Owen crushing those acorns on the playground with his little feet.

Yes, there is hope – not just some abstract hope – but a real promise that the Kingdom is Coming – has come already through Jesus. 

I have seen the promise of the Kingdom made incarnate – these past few weeks: in the work of the Dominican Sisters in Cameroon and Ireland; in the extraordinary liberating power of solar cookers (of all things!); and most powerfully in the passion, intelligence, and compassion of women – women of Wisdom, like our reading from Proverbs, who raise their voice in the public square and call for the world to repent at their rebuke!

But I think that this parable of the sower also tells us – that this hope and promise of all things being put right, it sits right next to failure, to dismay, to frustration, to trauma, to death. There are a lot of crushed acorns. Hope and failure – they are side by side. The same ecosystem. Hope and death. So if you’re feeling like you have one foot in each place right now, like I do, that would be normal, perhaps even Scriptural. 

Amen, my sisters! Battle on!

I think it’s often a very warm and pastoral message often eked from this parable: “Be patient. All will be well in God’s Time. Do your work of justice trusting that some of it will come to fruition.”

And that is true, I think.

But you know, that message may feel good and comforting to me – and I am comforted by it – in my solidly middle class life in Long Island, but is that the message I’m going to extend to the women living in poverty in refugee camps in Kenya??: “Be patient.”

What if Jesus offered this parable not just for comfort and education but also as invitation to co-cultivate the Kingdom of God? What if we look at that field and don’t like those odds? Maybe we could actually weed! Or cut down the brambles! Or remove some rocks from the soil! We don’t have to be relentlessly hopeful. Relentlessly positive. Relentlessly patient as we wait for these seeds to sprout and grow.

I don’t know…but I think that can lead to complacency.

Maybe we can get impatient and fed up with the sad state of the field and do something about it. Open some minds. Help some people. Do some advocacy.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s an either/ or proposition. 

I think we MUST rest and allow ourselves to be comforted and renewed by hope while waiting, sure in the promise that God will do God’s thing. It is God’s field. God is the sower, hopefully with an endless supply of love and justice in that seed sack. 

But we also need to take action, as best we can, to prepare a way for the Lord. We must call the world to repent and cry out on top of the wall, at the city gate. We must take up our crosses, put on the yoke of Christ, and sharpen those pruning shears…Come Holy Spirit, we’ve got some acorns to plant!

Amen.

About the author: The Reverend Lilo Carr Rivera, Diocese of Long Island (Province II) is the Interim Priest-in-Charge, at Christ Episcopal Church in Bellport, NY. Lilo holds a Master of Divinity from General Theological Seminary, a Master of Social Work from Hunter College (both in NYC), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from MassArt in Boston, MA. Before her call to the priesthood, she worked as a hospital chaplain in palliative care, social worker, and as a graphic designer. Lilo loves preaching, spiritual formation and social justice ministry. She grew up in a family of five girls and is a wife and mother, experiences which inform her passion about global women’s rights.