Today, my motto is “If I can’t mow it, I don’t grow it!”
Still, the
image in today’s Gospel was probably pretty familiar to most if not all of
Jesus’ hearers, even if they weren’t themselves farmers.
Jesus gives us
an image of a farmer “broadcasting” seed—a person reaching into a big pouch and
throwing seeds on the ground as the farmer walks in a field that he’s cleared
and prepared. It was probably a common sight to all of Jesus’ hearers when he
first used this image in his teaching—even among those who never grew a blade
of grass.
Jesus says that
different things can happen to the seed being sowed. Some of the seeds will grow
a little but then the sun bakes it; some of the seeds are eaten by birds; other
seeds falls among weeds and thorns and grows for a while and then the competing
plants kills it; and some seed lands on good soil and grows and grows and grows
until it’s time for the harvest.
While this kind
of farming was once a common practice, it is very different from how farming
happens today! Today, modern farmers wouldn’t think of risking the loss such a
high percentage of seed to birds, sun, and predators. Modern farming implements
carefully plants each seed one at a time, in just the right depth of soil, at
just the right time, and is given just the right amount of water and fertilizer
to maximize crop yields.
But that’s not
that’s all that’s different or strange about this story: of all Jesus’ parables
that we have in the Gospels, this is the one parable where Jesus explains the
meaning for us. If you can remember back to your high school English class,
what we have here is no longer a parable, a one-point illustrative story, but
an allegory, where one thing represents another. Jesus generally did not teach
in allegories—most of rabbinic tradition still doesn’t teach that way.
Somewhere between Jesus’ first saying the parable of the sower and when it
written down in the Gospel of Mark and later in Matthew and Luke, the people
who remembered Jesus’ parable attached to it an interpretation. And the
interpretation was preserved along with the original parable itself.
What Jesus
taught his followers is one thing, but what we have now is entirely different:
it is a teaching for the church from one of the earliest churches, the
one that gave us the Gospel of Matthew. And today Jesus and Matthew’s Church is
teaching us. What is the Holy Spirit saying to God’s people today?
The story of
the sower answers a couple of nagging questions not only about our mission but
also about our lives of faith, questions that the Church rarely asks out loud.
For one thing, if our “News” is so “Good,” then how come more people don’t
believe it? If the Gospel of Jesus truly is life-changing, culture-challenging,
purpose-giving, then how come people just don’t flock to our doors and fill
this place up? This is the question Matthew’s version, and the other versions
of story of the sower found in Mark and Luke attempts to answer.
The answer is
that sometimes things happen. Life’s competing interests can starve and choke
off our response to the word; sometimes good things just don’t take—we are
caught up in the emotion of the moment and we never do anything with that;
sometimes there is direct opposition and our response to the word is eaten up
even before we fully hear it. And sometimes—more often than we think—it does take hold, and it grows. And even
when it grows, it grows at different rates. In some people it grows a lot, in some
a little, and in others even less.
And also,
sometimes we don’t broadcast the seed we have, but carefully preserve it as if
in jars, stored away in own personal root-cellars, for some future time. Here
the seed is safe, I suppose. It’s neither eaten by birds nor trampled
underfoot, but it’s never planted nor broadcast. It just sits.
If our News is
so Good, then why don’t more people believe? As I said, there are lots of
reasons—life happens; things get in the way; and we live in a world where there
are choices. But more times than we know, the Good News does take hold and seed does
take root and people do grow in
faithfulness.
This passage is
also an invitation to look again at our own spiritual stories. This, I think, is the
point of the parable as Jesus first taught it. What kind of soil do we live in?
How do we cultivate a listening ear and open heart to the voice of God? Where
has God broadcast seen in our path and where has it grown? Where are our weeds?
What in our life has eaten up the Word of God and the Love of Christ?
In remembering
Jesus’ words, this is what Matthew is saying to his Church and to ours. Here is
what we can do about it:
Sow, baby, sow. This Gospel lesson is not a lesson of fatalism—you know, where we shrug and say to ourselves “what can we do? Seed happens.” No Jesus’ lesson is a lesson of hope! We keep putting the Good News out front and growth happens in surprising ways!
Be smart about where you sow. Even the broadcaster who threw seed out on the ground to grow wheat knew enough not to do it on the seashore or on the mountain tops. We should be going to where the soil is—where there are people able to see us, hear us, get to know us. When we go out to sow the Good News, do the best we can possibly do.
Let go of the need to control the outcome. Today’s disinterest might be tomorrow’s “a-ha!” And today’s enthusiasm may be tomorrows ho-hum. We can’t know where our work today will lead someone tomorrow. Just ask any teacher who gets a thank you note from a former student who seemed, at the time, to be asleep in the corner of the classroom but somehow was touched by that teacher just the same. You never know.
In God’s world,
it’s always the season to plant. Broadcasting the love of Christ, proclaiming
God’s word, living under the grace of the Holy Spirit happens every single day,
and we are all the ones doing the planting, when all of us go to where we live
and work and play and by our words, our actions and our character show people
the Good News of God’s love and power in Jesus Christ. That’s where we proclaim
the Gospel with all our being and our doing—and every now and then we even use
words! We are like the sowers who go into the world to sow. We are responsible
for the effort. God is responsible for the harvest. Sometimes we see the
results of other people’s sowing and that is exciting, too. But most of all, we
plant, and we cultivate in joy… giving to thanks God for whatever these seeds
might bring!
As baptized
people, we communicate the Gospel. You may be the only Gospel that some people
see. And as followers of Jesus, we are also that place, that garden, that
ground, where the love and power of God is planted and grows. Jesus’ parable
was, at first, an invitation for all of us to prepare the ground for God, to
look out for what encourages and stifles growth, and focus our energies on
nurturing and growing those practices that help us flourish, grow in our
faithful living.
Today’s Gospel teaching is both…it’s a parable about mission… and it’s a parable about faithful living. Jesus invites us to walk our paths, take some risks, broadcast widely, nurture ourselves, and sow God’s love extravagantly wherever we go!
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