A homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 10, 2025
Wisdom 18:6-9, Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19, Luke 12:32-48
As it turns out, most of the stories about Johnny Appleseed were true, and only mildly embellished.
Here are a couple of salient paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry on this American folk hero:
Johnny Appleseed (born John Chapman; September 26, 1774 – March 18, 1845) was an American pioneer nurseryman who introduced trees grown with apple seeds (as opposed to trees grown with grafting) to large parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Ontario, as well as the northern counties of West Virginia. He became an American icon while still alive, due to his kind, generous ways, his leadership in conservation, and the symbolic importance that he attributed to apples. …
The popular image is of Johnny Appleseed spreading apple seeds randomly everywhere he went. In fact, he planted nurseries rather than orchards, built fences around them to protect them from livestock and wildlife, left the nurseries in the care of a neighbor who sold trees on shares, and returned every year or two to tend the nursery. …
According to Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, toward the end of his career [in the 1840s], he was present when an itinerant missionary was exhorting an open-air congregation in Mansfield, Ohio. The sermon was long and severe on the topic of extravagance, because the pioneers were buying such indulgences as calico and imported tea. “Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is traveling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?” the preacher repeatedly asked, until Johnny Appleseed walked up to him, put his bare foot on the stump that had served as a pulpit, and said, “Here’s your primitive Christian!”
Indeed.
Almost everything about what Johnny did and how he did it seems to come straight out of today’s Scripture passages.
Travel light.
Live simply.
Plant the seed and move on, but revisit what you planted and tend to it.
John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman is an American parable.
John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman is a Christian example.
It’s unclear whether he embraced any Christian faith tradition, because several of the itinerant preachers who intersected with him in their respective wanderings claimed him as their disciple.
But he definitely was a disciple of our Creator.
He definitely believed in the power and beauty of Nature, and of the need for fruit and shade and sturdy trunks and branches.
Meadows and metaphors. Literal and figurative.
And even if we can’t know how he was Christian or Christianesque, he definitely acted as a disciple of our Savior.
He believed in charity and social justice. The trees he planted and bequeathed to total strangers for generations upon generations to come are simple but powerful testimonies to that.
Often, as we hear and ponder Scripture, especially when Jesus’s words seem a little convoluted or, as in today’s passage, a tad condescending, we have trouble relating.
We don’t know many shepherds. Goats and sheep are at the petting zoo or Popcorn Park, maybe. The only mustard seeds we know of are in little jars on the lazy susan in the cupboard.
And if we take things too literally, the notion of letting the dead bury the dead makes our heads explode. The idea of selling everything, even our Stanleys and Yetis, and putting a PB&J into a haversack with one clean pair of undies and that’s it, to travel — where?? — that’s insane!
Who can do that?
Who does that?
Johnny did that. The proof still lives in Ohio.
Jesus did that. The proof lives in all of us.
Christ was, and is, a disruptor. A positive force, the ultimate positive force, the ultimate source of love and the ultimate force propelling love forward.
Our modern lives and responsibilities may not, at first blush, allow us to hobo-style spread God’s Good News. But our everyday lives and especially our everyday encounters with sisters and brothers who may or may not look like us, sound like us, think and feel like us, smell like us will nonetheless give us the opportunity — and the duty — to plant a charitable seed and, inshallah, come back to tend the seedling as it sprouts.
