Clean Hearts, Remediated Souls
St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Owings Mills MD
July 12, 2026
Year A, Proper 10: The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Isaiah 55:10-13
Psalm 65:1-14
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit with in me” (Psalm 51:11). Amen.
Very much like Baltimore, my hometown of Jersey City was once an industrial powerhouse.
Beginning in the 1800s and stretching all the way into my childhood and teenage years, the city was dotted with warehouses, railyards, and many factories.
The Joseph Dixon Crucible Company had a giant factory that cranked out the iconic Dixon Ticonderoga pencils – without knowing it, you’ve probably held in your hand a sliver of Jersey City.
Colgate-Palmolive had a huge plant on the Hudson River waterfront, just a few blocks from my high school. The perfumes used in soap and detergent wafted in the air as we made our way to and from class.
Not too far from where I grew up, there was an ink factory. And many Jersey City kids of my vintage have fond memories of witnessing the very strange sight of workers outside on their break, covered from head to toe in ink, purple people.
And there were lots of other factories, making all sorts of things, employing many thousands of people, doing work that may not have been particularly enjoyable or always safe, but provided a reliable income and the chance for a decent life.
Of course, almost all those factories have since closed, all those jobs that weren’t automated were moved south or west or overseas.
Some of the old industrial sites have been torn down and others have been converted into condos or office buildings – the city is now quite different than when I was a kid.
But, no surprise, all that industrial activity has left a poisonous environmental legacy in the city – over the last few decades there have been many clean-ups, with one of the biggest at the site of a factory that once produced chrome.
Not only was the chrome factory site contaminated, but chromium-contaminated soil was used as fill throughout the city for much of the last century – so there was chromium all over the place.
Until a few decades ago, when community organizers – lay people and clergy –led the fight to clean up this toxic mess. As you’d guess, there was a lot of resistance to paying for this expensive work, but in the end, there was a remediation that took many years to complete.
But even still, anyone growing vegetables or fruit in Jersey City would be wise to have the soil tested, or just play it safe by using fresh soil in a planter box.
I got to thinking about this Jersey City story of contamination and cleaning, when I first sat with today’s gospel lesson, what Jesus calls, and what everybody else usually calls, the Parable of the Sower.
And certainly, the sower is an important character in the parable – the sower generously provides all those seeds, all those sources of life.
And isn’t it interesting that the sower doesn’t seem to be as careful with the seeds as we might expect?
Now, just like I don’t know much about sheep or math or beasts of burden, I don’t know much about farming or gardening – but I do know that seeds are valuable – precious - so it’s odd that this sower seems to be, well, wasteful, tossing seeds all over the place, including locations where they are unlikely to take root and grow.
So, the sower is important to the story and the seeds are obviously important, but it seems to me that the parable really hinges on the soil.
The bad soil – the path, the rocky ground, the thorns – the bad soil cannot receive the gift of life, cannot nurture and grow those seeds into something beautiful and nourishing.
But the good soil – the good soil receives the seeds – the good soil nurtures the seeds, and produces amazing abundance.
Of course, as we heard in Jesus’ explanation in the second half of today’s gospel lesson, this parable isn’t really about a sower, not really about seeds or soil.
The parable is meant to get us thinking about how well our hearts, how well our souls, how well our “soil,” can receive the Good News, can welcome and understand the Good News, how well we can let it grow inside us, let it grow into abundance, grow into something amazing.
Unfortunately, just like the land in Jersey City and many other places, our hearts and souls can be poisoned.
Our souls can be poisoned when we’re not deeply rooted, when we don’t give much thought to what we really believe, what’s most important to us, our values, our priorities, what we are willing to sacrifice.
What would we stand for, who would stand beside, no matter what?
Our souls can be poisoned when we’re too concerned with worldly things (as important as they may be), when we judge ourselves or other people based on possessions, how much we have or don’t have - when we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the world’s troubles, forgetting that love is more powerful than hate, life conquers death, and God just won’t let go of us.
Our souls can be poisoned - and I think we can all agree that there is so much spiritual poison all around us.
This poison can harden our hearts, giving us a kind of amnesia. We forget that here on our earth, we are all siblings, with much more in common that whatever might divide us.
We learn the wrong lessons – that we should be angry all the time, that we must fear one another, that if you win, I lose; that there just isn’t enough to go around for everybody.
And just like at the chrome factory, some of this poisoning is carelessness – just not paying attention – and some of this poisoning is quite deliberate.
In any event, the solution is the same:
We can ask God to clean our hearts, to remediate our souls.
And, while this work doesn’t require hazmat suits, it will probably require us to turn off the cable news – or, if we can’t go cold turkey, cut back, and maybe sometimes even watch cable news from “the other side.”
This work calls us to shut down our screens and talk with actual human beings, to observe closely and listen carefully, to give most people the benefit of the doubt, because the truth is that most people just want a decent life for themselves and their families and are doing the best that they can.
And this will come as no surprise, but I believe that remediation of our souls happens when we come here, each Sunday, as often as we can.
Our souls are remediated when we come here and get reminded of those hard baptismal promises: to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to respect the dignity of every human being.
With God’s help.
Our hearts are cleaned when we gather here with other people, probably some people we otherwise would never have met, might never spend time with – when we’re here with all kinds of people, some people with whom we probably disagree about a whole lot, and yet, and yet, we pray together, do good together, and love one another.
Our hearts are cleaned, our souls are remediated – and then our soil is healthy and rich with spiritual nutrients, ready to receive all those holy seeds God is sowing all over the place, everywhere, ready to welcome the Good News of Jesus, and, with God’s help, nurturing those seeds into a transformed city, into a beautiful garden, God’s dream made real.
And so, we pray:
Create in us clean hearts, O God, and renew a right spirit within us.
Amen.
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