Matthew 13: 1 That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake.2 Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. 3 Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. 9 Whoever has ears, let them hear.” 18 “Listen then to what the parable of the sower means: 19 When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart. This is the seed sown along the path. 20 The seed falling on rocky ground refers to someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. 21 But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. 22 The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. 23 But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”
Many of us have heard this parable so many times that it may seem tame to us now, even shop-worn to a comfortable familiarity, like your favorite pair of old shoes. But as the first question in the sermon outline suggests, “What is so strange and shocking about the parable of the sower?” there is a detail in this story that would make its First Century Palestinian audience drop their jaws or lift an eyebrow at least and say, “Hunh?” Peasant farmers of every day and age since would catch it too.
If you’re a subsistence farmer who lives hand to mouth, day to day, from harvest to harvest, all your hopes for survival are in the seed grain that you so carefully select from the harvest every year and protect until planting time. So, why would you sow such precious seed, your future in effect, anywhere but on proven, good ground that has been carefully prepared, broken by the plow, with weeds pulled out and fertilizer dug in? You would never waste it on the kinds of places that Jesus mentions, not on a pathway, not on shallow, rocky soil, nor on any land that has been left to grow brambles and thorns. It’s that precious. Some years, if the harvest came up short, it takes all the self-discipline and restraint one can muster to keep from eating next year’s seed grain. But no matter how much your stomach is growling and shrinking, no matter how much your children are crying with hunger, you’re still better off boiling and eating your shoe leather or your belt, than eating any of next year’s seed grain. So why would the farmer in Jesus’ parable so shockingly, surprisingly waste any precious seed on any place where even a non-farmer would know that it won’t survive, let alone grow?
That’s similar to the question that probably ran through the mind of Stephen Grellet, a Quaker preacher in the early 19th Century. For some time he had felt a strong pull from God to go preach the gospel at a lumber camp on the American frontier. It would take a long trek through broken country, and the rough working men of such a camp were not known to be soft-hearted and all that receptive to spiritual things.
Finally, Grellet gave in to the constant, pressing idea and walked all the way to the frontier lumber camp, on a journey just as long and as hard as he feared, only to find the camp quiet, empty and deserted. And still he could not shake the conviction that he must preach there. So he did. In the dining hall he preached one of his most heartfelt and convincing messages ever……. to empty benches and tables.
Then he left. Why, he must have wondered, would God, if it was God, send him on a mission to sow the precious seed of God’s Word here, when there was no one there to even hear the message? What good was that? What a waste!
Some of us may have the same questions, feelings and bewilderment sometimes as we think about those who may have grown up in church and a Christian home, and gone to Sunday School, or VBS. For many of us, and for many others we know, that combination of Vacation Bible School and Drift Creek Camp, were powerful experiences on our journeys of faith. But for a few others who also walked that way, they seem indifferent to God and the church, or embarrassed. In a few rare cases, even worse. So, was all that effort at Christian nurture a loss? Should we have been more reticent, reserved, guarded and restricted with the seed of God’s Word, saving it for only a worthy few, like a real subsistence farmer saving wheat seed for the most fertile ground?
Which brings me to the next question in the outline: What does the surprising, shocking, seemingly wasteful extravagance of the farmer in Jesus’ parable, tell us about God? It tells us that God is a bold, generous, extravagant and risk-taking God, who doesn’t worry, like we do, about whether or not there’s ever going be enough of all the best stuff in his treasury of grace and good gifts. This is the God who “makes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the just and the unjust,” so he’s not calculating who’s worthy and who’s not to receive his offer of grace. With unconditional and extravagant generosity, he puts His Word and himself out there for all to receive or reject, to embrace, to ignore, even to seek out and destroy, like the birds which came and ate up the seed sown on the path. And it’s risky, because many did and will do just that. It might seem more prudent of God to reserve himself and his Word just for those people and places most ready, open and receptive. Or most deserving, we might be tempted to think? But that would not be true to the prodigal, generous, extravagant God of the Gospel. The strangely extravagant action of the sower tells us that this gracious God likewise wants the good news and the grace of his kingdom to go out widely, generously, indiscriminately, even recklessly, everywhere, to all, whatever the risk to the sower.
Which brings us to the third question, What does the strange and shocking extravagance of the sower say about us? Three things: first, (subpoint a) that we are also to be extravagant, generous, bold and risk-taking in the ways that we sow the seed of God’s Word, in word or deed. Don’t be intimidated by the birds waiting to come eat it all up. Don’t calculate as to who seems most worthy, sympathetic or receptive. Be as open, assertive and bold as the Madison Avenue Advertisers, so many Hollywood movie makers, and MTV, in preaching their gospel and sowing their seeds of materialism, consumerism and hedonism-the worship of pleasure. Be as open, willing, assertive, extravagant, bold and risk-taking, as the Defense Department and the military recruiters who boldly sow their seeds and spread the gospel of militarism and unbridled nationalism. Of course we don’t want to be disrespectful, manipulative, condemning, threatening or misleading just to score big numbers of converts, like trophies to put on a wall. And while so many people accuse us of just that, I wish that MTV, the recruiters, Hollywood and Madison Avenue advertisers didn’t do such, that they were more respectful of their audience’s liberty, intelligence and dignity, as I hope we try to be.
We can’t match Madison Avenue and Hollywood for power, money, glitz and glamor, and all the symbolism and media savvy with which they evangelize us 24/7. But we did a good job with what we had in this week’s Vacation Bible School. Those qualities of generosity, boldness, graciousness and risk-taking were visible in the ways people led worship, in the creativity, the artistry, the courage, energy and enthusiasm with which people led songs, did skits, taught and led in the reciting of memory verses, and in the love and interest shown to our guests and partners. There were generosity, extravagance, boldness and risk-taking in the hospitality, the games, the food and treats, the Then and Now activities, and in the youth and adult leaders who shepherded their young charges through all the activities and reflections. And behind the scenes were many organizational and administrative skills, much financial generosity, cooking, shopping trips and errands, sound and light system, and many, many prayers. Even if you did not speak God’s Word to anyone, your presence, your prayers, the food you baked or bought and brought, the smiles you gave, the prayers you prayed, all those helped sow the precious seed. And that without knowing if or how the seeds of God’s Word might take root in any lives and grow, nor what fruit they will bear, if any.
Which brings us to subpoint b of What the image of so extravagant, so seemingly wasteful, a sower of seed tells us about ourselves: secondly, that we are to trust God for the results of our sowing the seeds of God’s Word, and not ourselves. We are to trust that there is in every Seed of God’s Word planted in anyone’s heart and mind a power and a desire for growth which God put there, and which God tends and nourishes and encourages toward growth even when we don’t see evidence of that, and that this power for growth is always there, even in unpromising circumstances.
Farmers and gardeners know this by experience. Hopefully the gardeners among us have had better success with growing plants from seed than I have had with things like beets and carrots (about 50% germination) and parsnips (about 0%). I’ve done something wrong there. But no matter how well and wisely we tend the seeds and the sowing and the seedlings, the very life that sunshine, warmth, dirt and water unleashes from a dry little seed is still a miracle from God. We don’t make that miracle happen; we only call on it and rely on it.
The same with the seeds of God’s Word. The growth of Christian faith, hope and love is a miracle and a mystery of God’s Holy Spirit, just as much as is the germination and growth of a tomato seed. We are responsible to keep sowing the seed. But we don’t make the growth happen; we only tend it as it happens, encourage it along, and pray and trust and love and wait whenever it doesn’t seem to happen. Yet.
That should keep us from getting too anguished, angry and impatient about those who have not embraced the faith, or who have left it on the shelf for a while. God is not done with any of us yet. To borrow the words from Psalm 139, “If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, Even there Your hand will lead me, And Your right hand will lay hold of me.” Some people may have to run that far, morally and spiritually, before they discover that there’s nowhere anyone can go where God cannot touch the soil of anyone’s heart, and water and warm the seeds of the Word still hidden and dormant there. The prayer in today’s bulletin is by such a saint, who spent the first half of his life running from the faith of his upbringing, before he spent the other half running back toward God.
So again, Why would Jesus have the sower risk so much precious seed on places where there’s so little chance of growth, and such great risk of loss? The third reason, subpoint c, is so that we might take stock and ask ourselves, Just what kind of soil am I? How does my own life welcome or resist the seeds of the divine Word? Since we can know nobody’s sins, struggles and weaknesses as well as we must know our own, that would make us all the more grateful and amazed at the mystery of our own lives of Christian faith, hope and love. So, what are we doing to help the seed put down roots? And what kinds of fruits is the Word bearing in our own lives? For those things we have responsibility and power, to tend the soil conditions of our own hearts and minds.
When Jesus told his parable of the sower, he may well have intended his disciples, and others “with ears to hear,” to think of these similar words of Hosea: (10: 12): “Sow with a view to righteousness, Reap in accordance with kindness; Break up your fallow ground, For it is time to seek the Lord Until He comes to rain righteousness on you.” Breaking up the fallow ground of our hearts and lives is about self-examination, confession and repentance, prayer and even fasting, while “sowing with a view to righteousness” involves making restitution for anything we have taken from others, or for any way in which we might have injured them. It also involves almsgiving and stewardship, helping the poor and the weak, and sharing the seeds of God’s Word in word and deed, as was done this week.
So again, What this familiar parable tells us about God is 1) about God’s bold and risky extravagance in sowing the most precious thing in the universe wherever it is welcomed and received, or not: His Word. Secondly, what it tells us about ourselves is a) that we be as bold, extravagant and committed to spreading the seed of God’s Word, as we were this week in VBS; b) that we seek and trust God for the growth of the seed into fruitful Christian lives, and not ourselves; but c) that we attend to the soil conditions of our own hearts, over which we do have some power and responsibility. Because only time will tell what God does with the seeds we plant.
We’ll see the fruits on the day when we shall “know as we are known,” and “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” But God might also bless us with sneak previews even before then. As happened to Stephen Grellet, the evangelist whom I mentioned earlier. Some years after his sermon to the empty tables and benches in the empty dining hall of the empty frontier lumber camp, Grellet was in London, England, standing on a bridge overlooking the Thames River. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Turning, he saw four perfect strangers looking at him, smiling. One of them said, in an American accent, “You’re Stephen Grellet, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he replied. “How do you know that? I don’t remember having met you.”
“Remember that sermon you preached in the empty dining hall at the deserted lumber camp some years ago?” one of the men asked.
Grellet was about ready to faint and fall into the river. The man went on: “It wasn’t completely empty. I had just come back to retrieve a tool when I saw you in the camp. So I hid myself, to see what you’d do, and I listened to your sermon. It so spoke to my heart and opened my eyes that, after you left, I gave my life to Jesus Christ. And then I ran back into the woods and told the other fellows what you’d said, and these three gentlemen with me also found their hearts opened to the message. And now the four of us are going about the world sharing the faith that gave us hope and changed our lives.”
Keep cultivating the seed of the Word sown in your own hearts and lives. Keep sowing the seed that has been sown in your hearts. For we never know just what other seeds it might grow and sow.