What is sown among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22).

The Parable of the Sower tells us everything we need to know about teaching.  It’s not the seed we sow, but the soil it falls on.  And the corollary to that is: There are no sacred documents, but there are sanctifying and corrupting documents.  So we should stop grasping at symbols and instead preserve the spirit that gives them life.

The U.S. Constitution received a lot of symbolic attention at the opening of Congress, but even more serious scrutiny as we heard Congresswoman Giffords read the First Amendment with great conviction.  We heard  it in the context of a citizen violating her right to speak and assemble, indeed violating her right to live. And then we heard it in the context of a national conversation about how we should speak and the limits of political discourse. That has been an inspiring conversation.

When citizens talk about what free speech means, then we are revering the Constitution, not when we give it a public oration, congratulating ourselves that we have a splendid document to govern us.  We revere the Constitution when we ask ourselves how its seeds fall among us, how they invade and transform our hearts.  Our country has had a period of serious self-examination, because of the events following the reading of the First Amendment, but not from the words of themselves.

The words themselves may sow corruption. Before 1964, the Constitution did not protect the voting rights of all citizens. Before 1920 the Constitution did not protect the voting rights of half of its citizens.  It was good seed, but it fell in bad soil. But some of the seed fell on good soil, and it produced the Nineteenth and the Twenty-fourth Amendments. The Constitution would be sham without them.

The First and Second Amendments to the Constitution have been driven north, south, east, and west in attempts to justify what citizens wanted and believed.   Opponents on both sides of political controversy have invoked the same amendments to their advantage. Corrupting and sanctifying. That is how laws get made and rights are protected. To invoke those amendments as though they inherently protected our political convictions misses their point. They are the seeds sown by our Founders. We are the soil they fall upon. We should be more concerned with the soil, than who owns the seed.

Let’s stop invoking the Constitution as if it were the guarantee of everything we want. Let’s stop demonizing those who disagree with us as though they were the enemies of the Constitution. Let’s stop using the Constitution as a symbol and remember that its value is in how we live it.

Jesus compared the word of God to seed. If the word of God is no more than seed, which is barren without soil, how can we presume that the words of men, however eloquent, can be any more than that? How can we use that word against our fellow citizens, when we are all soil, all the resting place of seed, the producers of fruit?

When we are considering the limits of free speech, we might consider if we are the soil for our treasured documents or the thorns.