Isaiah 55:10-13 • Psalm 65:(1-8), 9-13 • Romans 8:1-11 • Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: "Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen! … Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty."
Jesus liked to tell stories. They actually were a specific kind of story: a parable. I don’t know about you but as a child I was fascinated by stories. No matter how old I was or what else I was doing, when the teacher called for story time, I would stop everything to go and get on the mat to hear a book read. During silent reading time I would sit at my desk and it was as if I entered into a whole other world—of Narnia, of a different part of the country, or of another galaxy. Now today, my passion for stories has gone to some extent into films. I have no doubt that one of the main reasons why movies continue to be so popular in our culture is that they are one of the primary vehicles for stories to continue to be told. Stories have a way of feeding us, and we will always hunger and thirst them.
For several years now there has been a resurgence in academia scholarship about the power that stories have in giving meaning to our lives. More than any principle, dogma or doctrine, stories have the power to shape our lives, give them purpose, and to construct reality for us more than anything else. Not only do stories have the power for us to make sense of our lives, but also to make sense of our faith. It’s no wonder then that Jesus liked to tell stories. In telling them he gives us glimpses of God’s story of gospel love—love that draws us in because God always has a place for us in God’s unfolding plot line.
Jesus doesn’t tell any old stories. He tells parables. We’ll be hearing many of his parables in the lectionary readings from Matthew’s Gospel for the next several weeks. Parables are very short—they don’t belong in the “short story” bookshelf at the library. They are allegorical. They cannot be understood unless we understand who is speaking them. Jesus’ parables have a subversive power because the meaning in them isn’t obvious—it’s concealed. They have a hidden purpose of de-legitimizing whatever tries to keep us out of the story of God’s gospel love.
Jesus’ parable story we hear today is one that to us human beings do not make any sense, and does not seem to have a place in it for us. A sower goes and sows seed, planting it on all different kinds of ground: a hard packed path, rocky ground, thorny ground, and good fertile ground. When we picture a farmer going out to plant crops today, we picture a farmer doing all he can to make the soil good before he goes out to plant and maximize his crop. But the sower in Jesus’ parable scatters seed down on the ground regardless of whether there are rocks there or not; regardless of whether the ground is tilled or not; regardless of whether the soil has any barriers that would keep growth from happening.
What kind of sower is this? Is this a fantasy? Is Jesus crazy? Does he not see that that’s not the way to grow an abundant crop? Or could this be a story not about our understanding of growth, but about God, and how and where God operates?
In Jesus’ story, the sower could represent many things. He or she could be God, Jesus, the disciples…it could even be us. Regardless, do we not share stories with the sower’s experience? Do we not scatter seeds of investing ourselves in ground that does not give the return we expect? What about an investment of time, talent or treasure we’ve made in someone else that didn’t pay off? Perhaps as a parent it’s compassionate guidance that falls on a teenage son or daughter’s deaf ears. Perhaps as someone who is lonely it’s an investment in a friendship that shows no signs of mutual affection. Or perhaps as an employer, it’s a complete commitment to offering workers a living wage and as quality a product as possible, only to see clients flee for what’s cheaper and more profitable. On one level we connect with Jesus’ parable because it speaks to the truth we know in our lives. As Paul Harvey in his radio voice would say, “But that’s not the rest of the story.”
The whole story is that at the end of the parable, there is growth. There is an abundance. There is a hundredfold yield! A seven-fold yield is considered a good amount—plenty to live on for a year. A hundredfold isn’t just abundant. It’s a miracle. The full story of the parable is that God doesn’t just scatter seeds of the saving good news of Jesus everywhere. God scatters those seeds everywhere trusting that an abundant yield is there. That yield may seem hidden now, but it is there, waiting to be revealed. The purpose of the sower—whether it is God, Jesus, the disciples, or us—is to continue to scatter seeds of investment in others—even in those where no results seem possible. Regardless of the outcome, we trust that God will make the abundance visible in surprising, unexpected ways.
The history of the Christian church is replete with examples of ways in which we have made it up to God to scatter seeds of God’s love, rather than us. The church been more comfortable believing those inside the church are good soil, and that it’s God’s job to scatter the seeds out in the world where all the rocky soil is, so they can be brought in to the church and grow. This is what happened in the year 325 C.E. when the Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as his Empire’s state religion. The church became faced with the challenge of becoming an institution unto itself, and seeing only itself as the good soil—the arena of God’s saving activity. The problem is that there is just as much rocky, thorny, and hard-packed soil in the church as outside it. Jesus’ parable says nothing about whether we have a choice about whether we are good soil or not.
But we do have a choice about whether we will seek out the One who chooses to scatter seeds of God’s love and power on us no matter what kind of soil we are. We can go out into the arena of the world where God’s saving activity promises to take place in the least “strategic” of places and the least “worthy” of people. We can scatter the seeds of God’s love and power as freely and indiscriminately as God does.
In a book called Pathyway to Renewal that many leaders in our church have been reading, the authors drive home this kind of approach to evangelism. Even when churches struggle, the book says it is not true that the salvation of this or any church lies outside our walls. The truth is that we have salvation right here, right now—in the freely given seeds of God’s power and love that Jesus scatters on us. The church has already been saved. We have all we need to go out and scatter those seeds of the life-saving gospel of Jesus.
How do we do that? We tell stories. We tell stories of Jesus and his love. We can tell Jesus’ story and trust it has the power to produce a hundredfold of God's grace, love and justice. We can trust that the yield will be abundant. Jesus’ story, after all, is the one that makes us grow. It’s his parable that shows there’s all different kinds of people beyond these walls hungering to have seed scattered on them. When we tell his story, we find that it’s not just we who are telling about Jesus’ love; it’s Jesus who tells the story of his love through us. Amen.
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