Sowing Salvation

Proper 10A: Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

When it comes to speaking of God and the things of God, “high profile language,” the language of scholars and academics and systematic theologians, simply does not cut it. Their abstract language has no heart, no spirit, preoccupied as it is with defining and explaining and pinning down mysteries. When speaking of God, what is needed is a language that favors subtlety, that relishes ambiguities. What we need, I think, is to follow Emily Dickinson, who advised in one of her poems to “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” “The Truth,” she explains, “must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind.”

“Slant-ways” and “gradual-like” describe well how Jesus himself taught. Rarely did Jesus say things bluntly or straightforwardly. More often than not, he came at a truth indirectly, sideways-like, in order to come in under our defenses and around our prejudices.

His best tools in this were his “parables.” Parables are more than fables or stories with a moral, as they are often thought of. They are rather like dreams or poems or perhaps an extended joke with a punchline. In them, Jesus takes images drawn from familiar things—crops in fields, weeds along roads, loaves in kitchens—and uses them a new way, to explain God’s Kingdom. In Jesus’ telling, things his audience would handle every day become vessels, illustrations of truths that seem clear to them one moment and hidden the next, like seed in the earth, like buried treasure, like a net thrown down to the depths of the sea.

Some, many, simply couldn’t get his stories, couldn’t grasp their meaning. We might suppose this was part of his pedagogy, requiring his listeners to not just listen, but to think, to puzzle, to chew on his words until they’ve sucked all the nourishment they could out of them.

At the same time, we can recognize Jesus’ cunning in taking this approach, as some say that was how he stayed out of trouble. Jesus could have been arrested for talking heresy and treason, after all. But for telling stories about sibling rivalries and sheepherding, not likely. By speaking in parables like this, Jesus could get his message across without saying it directly, so that his followers nodded and smiled, while his critics could only scratch their heads. 

As you can see, there’s more to parables than we usually suppose. It’s to our benefit then that Jesus’ first parable, which you just heard, is such an easy one to understand. The story begins with a man who goes forth to sow some seeds.

Having already removed all of the rocks and weeded the field, the farmer plows the soil into neat, straight furrows. Then he puts the seed in the furrows, carefully covering up the seed with about a quarter of an inch of soil, each seed about eight inches from every other seed. Right?

Well, no, that’s not what happens at all. Jesus says this farmer simply goes out and, with no preparation or care, starts slinging seed all over the place—on the road, among the rocks, in the thickets and hedges. The fact that some of the seed does manage to fall on fertile soil almost seems an accident, completely unintentional.

Now, I don’t know much about the farming practices of the 1^st-century Middle East, but I gotta believe that this kind of haphazard sowing wouldn’t have made sense to farmers then, any more than it does now. Casting your precious few seeds all over the place, without any care about whether the seed is likely to take root and grow—it’s crazy, foolish! Wasteful is more like it—with some of the seed immediately eaten by the birds, and others that started growing, before long, withered or got strangled by weeds.

Yet, as unbelievable as the Sower’s behavior is, even stranger is the fact that he nevertheless manages to take in a harvest, of thirty, sixty, even a hundred times what he sowed. He wasted the majority of his seed—maybe only 10% was left—and yet that 10% brought forth a miraculous abundance, way more than what “should” have resulted according to what we would normally expect.

Right there is a clue that this was no ordinary, straightforward story. This story about a farmer sowing seed is not really about a farmer sowing seed. Not long after Jesus told the crowd this parable, Jesus’ disciples take him aside to ask about its meaning. The disciples are a little slow. Jesus sighs, because he knows the power of his parable will be lost, like when you have to explain a joke, it loses the humor. But he obliges: The seed is the Word of God, the ground beside the road represents the hard-hearted or hard-headed who cannot receive the Word, the rocky soil are those who receive the word quickly but remain spiritually shallow and so wither when they face hardship, the seed among the thorns are people whose initial enthusiasm at hearing the word gets strangled by the cares and concerns of the world, and the good soil is the one who hears the Word and understands it, who then goes on to bear fruit, bringing thirty, sixty, even a hundred people to know Jesus. Got it?

Got it. Or maybe we don’t, exactly. Hearing this explanation, you likely have the same response I typically have to this parable. You start worrying about what kind of ground you are. You think about the hardpacked earth, the birds, the rocks, the thorns, and you start worrying about how you could clean them all up, how you could be richer soil, how you might turn yourself into a well-tilled, well-weeded, well-fertilized field for God’s message to take root. That’s the usual response we have to this parable. We hear it as a challenge to be better, as a call to improve our lives.

But there is something wrong with that reading of the parable. Because if that is what it is about, our making ourselves better soil, then Jesus would have called it the Parable of the Different Kinds of Ground, not the Parable of the Sower. To be sure, Jesus tells this parable in part to explain why some people don’t believe. But the story says more about the Sower than about the ground where he sows the seed.

I mean, we can talk all about the things that prevent us from growing in the faith, and we can make contemporary analogies to the soil conditions mentioned in the parable— the hardness of heart brought on by cynicism and ideological commitments, the strangling of our energies by the busyness of business and the distractions of digital media, the shallowness of our interests, our penchant for get-rich-quick schemes, our instant gratification culture of indulgence and fads—all things that make us poor soil for receiving God’s Word.

But the point of the parable, it seems to me, is not what kind of soil we are, even less how we might improve ourselves through spiritual tilling and religious fertilization, as beneficial as they may be. The point is rather to explain why the Sower goes to the trouble of sowing seed in the first place, why he is so indiscriminate and wasteful in spreading seed where he should know it won’t grow.

He does it, we gather, for the sake of the seed that does fall on good soil, the seed that does take root and grow and bear fruit, thirty, sixty, a hundred times what he put into it. The point isn’t the seed that doesn’t grow, but rather the seed that does. Instead of calling the sower foolish for wasting it, the farmer is simply sowing the seed he believes in, that he knows will grow. That’s why the farmer keeps lobbing seeds at even the unlikeliest of targets.  It’s not that the farmer doesn’t understand farming. It’s just that when you’re talking about salvation, it’s not finally about strategy but about the persistence of a God who won’t stop.

This story is then less about worthiness of the soil and more about the extravagance of the Sower. The focus isn’t on us and our shortfalls as soil, but on the generosity of our Maker, the prolific sower who does not obsess about the conditions of the field, who isn’t stingy with the seed, who casts it everywhere, on good soil and bad, who is not cautious or judgmental or even very practical, who doesn’t fret about failures but who just keeps on sowing, confident that there's plenty seed to go round, and that when the harvest comes at last, it will fill every barn in the neighborhood to the rafters.

Such a strategy may make no sense when it comes to growing crops, but, as I said, it makes perfect sense for sowing salvation—where no corner of the earth is dismissed as unfertile ground, and where any growth, however small, has the potential for miraculous multiplication.

This is encouraging news for those of us who want to see God’s Kingdom grow. For, sometimes attempting to be Jesus’ followers, to share the truth of God, is discouraging. We plan, we pray, we work, but often the results seem so meager. Why aren’t there more people here this morning? Shouldn’t we be reaching more people? Why are we putting so much energy into something so few people want?

Jesus’ parable reminds us of two things: one, a lot is out of our hands. There’s plenty of just plain bad soil, and there’s a lot working against us. On this bright summer Sunday like today, with the attractions of the river, the beach, or just sleeping in, it’s a wonder anybody comes out to hear a countercultural, subversive, challenging message like that of Jesus!

And secondly, the parable reminds us that, for all our concern about the failure and fizzling out of our efforts, by some grace, sometimes the Word does take root and grow. That’s the scandal of it. The gospel is not a fail-safe system. It’s a seed. And seeds disappear into dirt before they ever produce a thing. But when they do, it’s like watching a miracle happen right in front of you.

The first congregation one of my colleagues served was a little church of about a hundred members, with an average attendance of twenty. A young couple moved into the little community, a comparatively rare event at the time. They visited the church for a few Sundays and my colleague called on them, urging them to become members of his church. The young man said to my colleague, “I can’t believe that somebody with your training and abilities has been sent here, to a tiny church like this. Is this your only job, to care for just these people as their pastor?”

My colleague felt defensive at that and started talking about all his many responsibilities. But then he realized that he missed the young man’s point, for the man went on, “I think this is wonderful. I went to a high school with 4000 students where no teacher ever knew my name. Then I went to a community college with 10,000 students and no professor ever had a conversation with me. Now I am working for a company with 20,000 employees, just one cog in a great machine. This church, and you as its pastor, could be one of the best things that ever happened to us.”

Just goes to show you, even when our efforts seem futile, pointless, and doomed to fail, they may yet bear fruit. We might wish it were otherwise, that we could plan and strategize and market capitalize our way to success, but God does not do things the way we do things. The ways of God among us often seem inefficient, slow, and unspectacular. Yet the Kingdom of God breaks out among us in unexpected, miraculous ways. Such that, often what we consider to be waste is in reality God's glorious work of redemption.

If we have any doubt of that, we have only to look at Jesus’ own life. He came to us reaching out in love. He told us the truth about ourselves and our world and the truth about God. And we responded by rejecting him, abandoning him, nailing him to a cross, where his life's blood drained out of him. And even there, he kept reaching out to us, embracing us, forgiving us. And then when God raised him from the dead, he came back to us, back to the very people with whom he had failed so miserably, back to the very ones who betrayed him, and he promised them, "I will never leave you, no matter what.”

To an outside observer, what God did in Jesus was utterly inefficient, unnecessary, wasteful. But God did it anyway. For, what we call waste is what God calls grace.

And he calls us to show grace, to “waste” ourselves for others too, even when it seems fruitless. He assures us that our work, his word, the Church's witness are not in vain. In the end, some few seeds will take root and there will rich harvest. That promise is enough to keep us uneasy with our accommodation to defeat. Our task then is not to try to control the outcome, but to keep sowing seeds, putting ourselves out there, inviting friends and strangers. Because in God's kingdom, there is a great deal of waste, much wasted effort, wasted intentions. But by the grace of God, there is also much good harvest. Those who have ears, let them hear. Amen.