Sermon 7/13/08
Seeds of Faith: Good Soil - Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
(view lectionary notes for this text)
This July, we’ll be looking together at some parables from the gospel of Matthew, parables of Jesus with a common thread: so many times when Jesus is teaching the crowds, he uses imagery related to growing, gardening, planting, and harvesting. In these summer months, it seems particularly appropriate for us to look at these passage – to think about plants and weeds, seeds and soil, and what those images can tell us about being disciples. Some of these parables, like today’s parable of the Sower, seem like they will be so easy for us to understand. Jesus certainly used language and imagery that he thought would make sense to the crowds. They were farmers and worked in vineyards and fished and herded sheep and were tied to the land – and Jesus’ teaching reflects that. The parables seem so sweet, quaint, maybe even picturesque to us today. When I read this parable of the Sower and the Good Soil, I can’t help thinking of the musical Godspell, where this parable is told almost as a children’s story, a children’s time lesson. The emphasis is on how simple the parable is. There’s lots of kinds of soil where the sower sows seeds, but none of it thrives except that which is sown in good soil. Obviously, we’re supposed to be the good soil. Easy.
But the problem for us as contemporary hearers of Jesus’ parables is that we aren’t, for the most part, farmers and vineyard workers and fishers and shepherds. We don’t live in an agrarian culture anymore. For most of us today, our lives are lived indoors, not on the land, and our food comes from the grocery store, not our yard, and our gardening experience might include some landscaping, but not supporting ourselves with what we grow. I’ve had some gardening experience – my grandfather was a small-scale farmer, and always gave me a little corner of land for my own growing experiments. But more likely than not, I would be the child whose bean seed in a Dixie cup never would sprout, and though I regularly buy seeds with good intentions of having a little garden, so far in my five years of ministry I have not planted anything other than marigolds, which the lawn caretakers accidentally mowed over. My point is, we don’t have the perspective and understanding that the crowds did in Jesus’ day. We’re not tied to the land anymore in the same way. And so these quaint parables about seeds and plants and growing – we have to be extra careful that we understand them.
Is this parable about the Good Soil so simple? For example, consider this: what kind of sower would throw seeds around on a path, and on rocks, and among thorns? Most gardeners plants seeds carefully in rows, certainly paying attention to get all the seed into good soil. Seed isn’t perhaps the most expensive thing in the world, but it is a commodity, and certainly would have been in Jesus’ day, and in any day, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to waste resources needlessly. If God is meant to be the Sower in this parable, why isn’t God a little more discriminating in throwing the seed? Wouldn’t that solve the whole problem? Why would God sow seed where it’s bound not to grow?
Or, here’s something else we might miss that Jesus’ first hearers would have caught. A two-fold harvest for a farmer like this would have been a pretty good return. A five-fold harvest would have been remarkable, a miraculous blessing. But Jesus says the farmer reaps 30, 60, even 100 fold from these seeds that he sowed so haphazardly. What kind of seeds would produce such a harvest, especially if so few of them seem to make it into good soil? Jesus is clearly exaggerating to make a point – his audience would have picked up on that, but we might miss it if we’re not careful. Jesus is making an over-the-top statement about this seed and how it grows – and you might remember me telling you before that these parables from Jesus usually tell us something about what the kingdom of God is like. So what’s Jesus trying to tell us in this not-so-simple-after-all parable?
First, we have to think about what this seed is that the sower sows. Jesus calls it “the word,” but doesn’t explain it more. I think the word, then, must mean the good news – which for Jesus, was the news that the kingdom of God was at hand. We might also think of it as the good news that God loves us unconditionally, the grace is a gift offered to us without price. That’s the good news we talk about, for example, in our communion liturgy. The good news is love.
So if the seed that the sower sows is meant to be God sowing the good news, then in the parable, Jesus tells us that God sows the good news everywhere. Not carefully, but extravagantly, not holding back, but being a little wild and carefree about it. That’s how God sows good news, how God sows blessings, and grace, and love: freely. God isn’t concerned about whether or not the people on whom the blessings of grace fall are worthy enough or good enough to receive it. God will sow God’s love on everyone. That’s the kind of sower God is. God sows as if the seed isn’t a scarce commodity that’s about to run out – because it isn’t! God’s love, God’s grace, God’s good news comes in a limitless, endless supply. That in itself is good news for us.
Then we have to turn back to Jesus’ saying that the seed sown by the sower would bear 100 fold harvest. We don’t have to be in the midst of a struggling economy to know that any investment you make that brings you back 100 times what you put in is a very good investment indeed. It’s astonishing – a deal not to be passed up for any reason. If the sower is God, and the seed is good news, and God’s love, and it can be sown everywhere, on anyone, Jesus is also telling us that we can expect awesome, outrageous, unexpected results: when you share unconditional love, extravagant love, limitless love, crazy, outrageous things will happen as a result. Not-to-be-missed things, shouldn’t-pass-up-the-chance things will happen as a result of the way God sows good news in our world.
So, God the sower has limitless seed to spread, seed which brings a shockingly outrageous harvest. God has limitless love to share, which affects the world in shocking ways. But where do we come in? Here’s the thing – here’s one more assumption that we’ve made in this simple but complex parable. Nowhere in the telling or in the interpretation he gives afterwards does Jesus say that God is the Sower. We assume, or at least I do, that God is the sower. And I think we can learn a lot by thinking of God as the sower. But to push ourselves, to really get this parable, I think we also have to see ourselves as the sowers. If we are Christ’s disciples, meant to be like him, then we, too, are called to sow and seek good fruit, a good harvest. We can help in God’s work of planting and harvesting. The trouble is that it seems harder for us to be extravagant with our seed as God is. We’re meant to share the good news too, share God’s love, tell of God’s grace. But perhaps, unlike God shaking seed out everywhere, we’re more discriminate. We look around us at others and decide that their soil is too rocky, or that their lives have too many thorns to bother sowing seed there. One pastor writes, “There's sometimes a sense that the good things God has for us are in such limited supply that the only kind of good and responsible stewardship is to guard it very carefully, give it only to those we're sure are worthy, protect it like the last egg of the rarest endangered bird.” (1) God wants us to be sowers too – but if we take up this task, we have to sow as God does – with reckless abandon, confident that the grace we’re sharing never runs out. And if we are sowers too, we have to be ready for the harvest God will return to us – 100 times more than we’re expecting.
We are called to be good soil – to cultivate the lives that God gives us and try to be open to receiving the blessings that God wants to sow in our lives. In some ways, this parable is that simple, even though being good soil can be quite hard! But this parable asks us for even more – to understand God and how free God’s love is. When it comes to God’s grace, it’s ok to be a little wild and crazy. It’s ok to share God’s love even where you think it might not thrive. Because God’s love is a gift without end. And the harvest is 100 times better than you were thinking. Thanks be to God. Amen.
(1) This quote and basis for sermon are by Sarah Dylan Breuer,
http://www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2005/07/proper_10_year_.html