Matthew
13:1-9, 18-23
When I have time to
garden, I enjoy it very much. I enjoy
digging around in the dirt, working with the life of plants, helping them to
grow and show their beauty. Each time I
dig around in the dirt and encounter tree roots, rocks, hard ground, or other
barriers to growth, I find myself reflecting on this parable. This parable is so rich with meanings. And where we stand, where we live, what we
experience daily has a great deal to do with how we hear and understand and
relate to every parable, this story being no exception. Even with Jesus’ explanation of the parable,
we still hear it from our own contexts and understand it in that light.
What, for example,
does rocky ground look like today? When
you hear this parable, what comes to mind when you think about those who, in
the words of the parable, receive the seeds of Good News, of hope, of promise, with
joy but then quickly fall away? And what
are we talking about when we talk about seeds?
These seeds that are planted but do not always grow or do not grow
strong? Are we talking about faith? A belief in the Good News? Are we talking about a commitment to
following in the Way, to living out our lives with justice and compassion and
commitment to our God of love? Are we talking
about lives dedicated to loving our neighbors, and yes, our enemies, as
ourselves? I believe this parable, and these words can even be applied to easy,
simpler situations, not just to the big picture of what it means to be people
of Faith. Sometimes we feel God’s call
in our lives, for example, to do something specific and it just doesn’t take:
God plants the seed in us of a dream, a hope, a calling. But sometimes when we feel called to do a
particular thing and it doesn’t work out for us, we can wonder if we’ve heard
the call wrong, or if the seed we planted just wasn’t very good. But this parable gives us another way to
understand it. Sometimes the call we
have or the message we’ve been called to follow just hasn’t found the right
soil yet. Or perhaps the soil needed
more tending, more tilling, more fertilizer.
And sometimes it simply isn’t the right time for the planting. That’s why common church phrases such as “we
tried that once and it didn’t work” are simply not helpful. When God plants a seed in us, a call, an
idea, sometimes it won’t work not because its bad seed but simply because the
soil isn’t right for it at that moment or in that place or, most likely, with
that particular combination of time and place.
But whether we are
talking the little seeds of a particular task God gives us to plant or the big
seed of living out lives of faith and following in the way, the ultimate point of
this parable is that planting the seeds, being the sower, being the one to bring
and attempt to grow things, ideas, visions, missions is hard. Trusting in our calls to carry the Good News,
in our words, in our actions, in our lives; trusting in the seeds that we are
given, especially when they don’t seem to grow, can be so very hard.
For the disciples, these words that we hear Jesus speak
today, this parable – these are words of encouragement. After Jesus has gone, the disciples will share
their stories, their experiences of Jesus, the imperative to live lives of love
with others, but they must be aware that their words, the Word of God that they
speak and that they ask others to live out, may not easily be received or
followed. They will encounter all kinds
of people and they will not be able to succeed with everyone they meet. Each person will come from their own place
and their own perspective. Some will not
understand at all and will never be able to hear. Others will hear and accept with joy the Good
News they are given, but will have no depth in their faith, in their
understanding, in their commitments to living the life that this demands of us,
that will allow them to persevere when things become hard or challenging. And some will find they are lured away from
acting or living out, growing their seeds to fullness by the values of the
world. Jesus tells them this parable to
reassure the disciples. Their job, their
only job, is to plant the seeds, to speak
Good News, to live God’s truth, to be the people God calls them to be and by so
doing to plant and plant and plant the seeds God gives them each and every day. They are not
responsible for how it is received or what people do with what they hear. They are not responsible for the growing of those
seeds, only the planting of them. There
are many reasons why those seeds might not grow, why the visions God gives them
to plant might not grow, and ultimately the disciples may not know the good
they are able to accomplish in some. But
that is not theirs to worry about.
We are given the same
words of encouragement. But still they
are hard. What do you do when things
don’t work out? When you think the seeds
you’ve planted, by actions, by deed, by the way you live your life, or by your
words were good and you think the soil or groundwork foundation upon which
those seeds were planted was well fertilized and abundant, but it still just
doesn’t work out? What do you do when the
seeds don’t grow, for one reason or another?
Current emphasis on church
growth looks at doing studies ahead of time, or, to put it in this parable’s
terms, to actually dig into the soil to understand it a bit before seeds are
planted. But this has been found in many
ways to be ineffective. Will we ever
really know what is in or under the soil?
We can be educated about our communities’ needs, we can care about what
is going on in the lives of those around us, but ultimately, knowing the heart
of one another takes time, it takes work, and it takes a willingness to plant
seeds without knowing whether they will flourish long term or not.
Sojourner’s magazine published an article entitled,
“Have churches become too shallow?” Stephen
Mattson wrote, “Christians ultimately attend church to meet with God. But
sometimes we turn our churches into distractions, and spiritual leaders
mistakenly prioritize things beyond God, becoming obsessed with marketing,
consumerism, and entertainment — creating false idols…..Truth is gauged by the
amount of attention received, morality judged by popularity, holiness measured
by fame, authority determined by power, security based upon control, and
happiness evaluated according to wealth.
This is what happens when we ignore God — or simply try to make God more
marketable: Jesus becomes a product. The Gospel becomes a promotional tool.
Parishioners become customers. Pastors become celebrities. Sermons become
propaganda. Churches become businesses. Denominations become institutions.
Faith becomes a religion, which eventually becomes an empire. Instead of striving to be a place for divine
communion where disciples praise and worship …, churches become infatuated with
accommodation — making people comfortable, happy, entertained, safe, and
content. Contrarily, churches can go to the opposite extreme and remove any
hint of joy, encouragement, comfort, and inspiration. Instead, they choose to
implement fear, guilt, shame, and other abusive tactics to legalistically
manipulate people into “loving” God. Both
types of Christianity are illusions built upon lies and a facade of clichés,
where cheap sales techniques and overused stereotypes are reinforced using the
powerful motivations of insecurity, convenience, ignorance, and a deep fear and
hesitation of being brutally honest, uncomfortable, humble, and vulnerable —
scared of risking it all. This is why
people often abandon Christianity and stop attending church — because God has
been replaced by shallow gimmicks. Instead
of helping the poor, feeding the hungry, tending to the sick, sheltering the
homeless, fighting injustice, speaking for the voiceless, sacrificially giving,
and wholeheartedly loving our neighbors (and enemies), churches have become
co-opted by secular values and empty content.
Emulating Christ is not for the faint of heart, and following his
commands will probably mean becoming a church that embraces conflict,
discomfort, work, pain, suffering, and truth. This is the messiness of
Christianity — following God through the Pilgrim’s Progress of life, forsaking
the riches of this world for the treasure of a Divine relationship. Are we
brave enough to embrace this?”
The call to plant seeds, to do the work, to have the
conversations, to risk truth-telling and to risk truly loving others, and
acting in a way that really empowers, liberates and feeds others – that call
requires being brave. I found myself
thinking about the Dr. Seuss story, Horton
Hears a Who. Horton did not want the
job of protecting the teeny tiny Who community that was on the little clover
flower. But he took it because the job
needed to be done and it was in front of him.
He was given the seed, the opportunity to serve and he planted it by
taking the job. In contrast, a little
later when the Whos were trying to get the attention of Horton’s disbelieving
community by shouting with all of their might, one of the little Whos was not
participating. This little Who didn’t
want to do it, he didn’t think it would matter whether he did what he was
called to do or not. In the end, when he
was finally convinced to try, it was his voice, the littlest voice of all, that
added enough volume to the collective shouting that Horton’s community could
hear him and change their minds about the Whos existence. That one voice, that one decision to say “yes”
to the call to answer the needs at hand, to stand up, to be a voice for truth
and justice, that one voice made the difference.
Will it always?
No. But again, we are not in
charge of the outcome. We are not in
charge of whether or not our voice, our work, our efforts make a
difference. We are not in charge of
whether or not the seeds we plant will grow.
I realize that is a hard lesson to bear.
When we work hard at something and get nowhere, it is easy to give
up. It is easy to say, “it’s not going
to make any difference, so why bother?”
(starfish?)
We also can’t always anticipate which seeds will grow
what, or what good they will do.
Sometimes the things we consider to be weeds give the most life. As a world, for example, we are having a
crisis about bees dying. In the process
of studying bees, one of the things that has been found is that one small
reason for this is that we get rid of “weeds”.
One of the weeds we get rid of, dandelions, happens to be one of the bees’
favorite flowers. Similarly, gold
finches are most attracted to thistle.
Sometimes when we think the seeds we’ve planted are turning into weeds,
we have to take a more studied look at what is, in fact, growing after
all. We may find ourselves unhappy about
the thistle and the dandelions until we see the life that surrounds them. I have a friend who planted what he called a
“butterfly plant” in his yard. He found
that the caterpillars of the butterflies kept eating most of the leaves on this
butterfly plant. He became very upset
and determined to poison the caterpillars until his son pointed out that the
caterpillars were what was becoming the butterflies he was hoping to
attract. He had a choice. To let the caterpillars eat much of the plant
but be rewarded with the butterflies, or to kill off the caterpillars and lose
the butterflies as well.
I began today’s
sermon by saying that where we stand has a great deal to do with how we hear
this story. Wherever we stand, we tend
to assume that our hearts represent the good soil, that we are the ones who
have heard, in whom the seeds have taken hold and grown, the ones with depth of
soil in whom the roots can also find room to move and deepen. But my experience says that all of us hold
all those different types of soil in one area of our lives or another. Maybe the good soil within us, for example,
takes strong hold of God’s words of grace offered, given and accepted into our
hearts through our trust and faith in it.
But maybe at the same time, the call to love our enemies as ourselves
has not found good soil in terms of loving a certain kind of person, a certain
type of person, whatever or whomever that may be. Or maybe it is the opposite. We have good soil within us that encourages
us to live lives of action and love towards our neighbors, but when it comes to
the soil that allows the seeds of God’s grace and forgiveness, the new life
that God offers to US to grow, our soil is not so rich.
In all of these
cases, the soil is not up to us. What
happens with the seeds that we plant is not up to us. We can pray for good soil, pray that God will
enrich the soil, fertilize the soil. But
what we are called to do is our job - keep planting the seeds, within our
world, within our communities, within our churches, and mostly, within
ourselves – to keep doing the work of God, being open to receiving the seeds
God asks us to plant, keep listening in every way that God speaks, and to pray
for the good soil that only God, ultimately, can provide.
I want to leave you
with one more thought about planting seeds.
There is a story about a group of people who were taking a pottery
class. The teacher divided the students
into two groups – a quality group and a quantity group. The quality group was told all each of them
had to do was make one beautiful pot.
The quantity group was told they needed to just make as many pots as
possible. Which group do you think did
the better job? The quality group did
not do well because they spent all their time on one pot and when it was not
going well, they just kept trying to redo it.
The quantity group produced beautiful pots because with each one they
made, they learned something and could improve on it with the next pot.
When we do the work
of God, we will be given more seeds to plant.
Each time we will learn and get better at the planting. Do justice.
Speak the truth. Share the Good
News of God’s love for ALL people. Stand
up for the voiceless.: the call under all of it is simply to love one
another. These are the seeds we are
called to plant. Plant lots of seeds of
love. Each time you do, you will get
better at it. But even so, let go of the
results. We are not in charge of the
soil, that is up to the hearers. And we
are not in charge of the end results: that is up to God. And in that, there is great hope. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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