What Kind of Ground We Are

This Sunday's Gospel is the Parable of the Sower, and I want to tell you before you hear it preached why it has been sitting heavily with me this week.

A sower goes out and scatters seed without regard for where it lands. Some falls on the path and is eaten by birds. Some falls on rocky ground and springs up fast, then withers because it has no root. Some falls among thorns and is choked out. And some falls on good soil and produces a harvest beyond anything the sower could have planted deliberately.

Jesus tells this story to a crowd standing on a shoreline in occupied Galilee, under an empire that did not particularly care whether ordinary people flourished or withered. He is not describing an abstract spiritual principle. He is describing what it looks like to keep sowing anyway, in ground you do not control, under conditions you did not choose, without any guarantee of how much of what you plant will survive to harvest.

I have been thinking about ground this week because of what is happening to a lot of people in this state right now.

Georgia is currently one of the top five states in the country for immigration enforcement arrests. Reporting this year has documented daily arrest numbers in the dozens statewide, an increase of roughly eighty-five percent year over year, aided by a growing number of local sheriff's offices and police departments that have signed agreements to perform immigration enforcement functions. Simply being pulled over for a routine traffic stop can now be the beginning of someone's detention and removal process.

Nationally, twenty-two people have died in ICE custody so far this year, on top of thirty-three deaths in all of last year. For comparison, there were four deaths in ICE custody in 2025 and three in 2022. Just this week, a man named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo died after ICE agents attempted to detain him in Houston. The agency's own account of what happened has not been supported by any video evidence that has surfaced.

Closer to home, the federal government spent nearly two hundred million dollars purchasing warehouses in Social Circle and Oakwood, Georgia, intending to convert them into detention facilities holding thousands of people. Those specific plans were scrapped after sustained community opposition, but the broader machinery of enforcement in this state has not slowed.

I am not telling you this to make a partisan point. I am telling you because this is the ground a great many of our neighbors are being asked to grow in right now: rocky, thin, and hostile, with very little protection from the sun that scorches or the birds that carry away what has been planted in them.

This Sunday is week five of our series, and the word is GROUND.

Paul writes to the Romans that the whole of creation is groaning, like a woman in labor, waiting for a freedom that has not yet arrived. That image has always struck me as one of the most honest things in scripture. Paul does not say creation is at peace, or that it has already been delivered. He says it is groaning. In labor. In the middle of something that hurts and has not yet resolved, but that is moving toward life rather than death.

That is what I think this Sunday's readings, taken together, are actually about. Isaiah promises that God's word does not return empty; it accomplishes what it was sent to do, the way rain soaks into ground and eventually produces grain, even though the process from rainfall to harvest is slow and mostly invisible. Paul says creation is groaning toward a freedom it does not yet have. And Jesus tells a story about a sower who keeps sowing into ground that is often rocky, often thin, often choked with thorns, trusting that some of it, not all of it, but some of it, will take root and produce fruit beyond anything reasonable to expect.

None of these texts promise that the ground will be friendly. They promise that sowing is still worth doing, and that growth is still possible, even in soil that has every reason to fail.

I do not have a tidy resolution to offer you about immigration enforcement in Georgia. I do not think Sunday's sermon will either, not because the topic is not urgent, but because false resolutions are not what scripture offers here.

What I can tell you is what this community has been doing and will keep doing: showing up as ground that receives rather than ground that rejects. The Blessing Bags we hand out. The Know Your Rights information we make available. The simple, repeated insistence from this pulpit that immigrants are our neighbors and not a problem to be solved by whichever agency has the biggest budget that year. None of that changes federal policy. All of it changes whether a specific, particular person standing in front of us on a specific day finds this community to be rocky ground or good soil.

We cannot control the weather. We cannot control the birds that come for the seed on the path, or the sun that scorches the seedlings with no root. What we can control, together, is what kind of ground this parish is for the people who land here.

Come Sunday. We will sit with the parable together, and with everything it has to say about sowing into ground you do not control, trusting a harvest you cannot yet see. 

Pax et Bonum, 

Bishop Greer