The Parable of the Sower

Sermon

I’m grateful to be here. It has been a special blessing to continue to get to know you all and Westminster through my interview process and now as a newly minted member of the staff. There was a welcoming initiation ceremony last week with balloons and cinnamon rolls, and I must’ve passed, because here I am…

All the lovely hospitality and questions and required meetings and initiations have reminded me of the other times I’ve been through the call process. I’m coming to you after seven years of service in Nashville, Tennessee. All the interview questions there had more intense accents. There was probably “sweet tea” instead of cinnamon rolls (I don’t like sweet tea, but don’t tell the Southerners). There were difficult questions and great conversations that remind us the church is truly deep and wide, and sometimes having to find a new minister is a great way to remember that. But there was a particular question then that echoed for me for years after I was asked it because then I heard someone ask it of every new minister at every quarterly presbytery meeting: “Do you love Jesus?”

Somehow this question had become a tradition of the Presbytery of Middle Tennessee, and everyone loved it. Because after the harder questions, this was an easy yes. OR at least it should be an easy yes. I’m pretty sure I just said “yes,” because I like meetings when they’re over, and I’ve learned that if the answer is “yes” in any meeting of any governing body, say “yes” and only “yes”… but Jesus and I have been in a relationship long enough that I also don’t hesitate to say when I don’t love something.

And I don’t always love it when Jesus speaks in parables, especially ones like today that seem vague. I prefer Jesus to be direct: pray this way, eat, do this… that’s my speed. Keep it simple. Meeting over. Plus, it’s Jesus! Stuff He says is important. It’d be great if He picked a method and venue that’s easier to attend. With parables, it’s easiest for me to get lost in the sand or the crowd or the wind… and if you were to ask me afterward what Jesus was yelling about, I’d probably say, I don’t know, something about a coin or a camel. No. Wait, today it was seeds. Or seas. Seeds. Seeds by the sea.

The parable we read earlier is perhaps poorly located by the sea, with a crowd so intense that Jesus has to get on a boat to speak to them. I imagine He is shouting, doing his best, but I also imagine that parts of His story were missed. I feel a bit like this right now, starting a new job, in a new city, with a family who has started new things. I know there are some things that I’ve missed, things I couldn’t hear well or that have been loud enough for me to hear but I got so distracted by how hot it was or how big the crowd was or how hard it was to hear Jesus that I missed a lot of what was happening.

It is often hard to hear Jesus. I imagine that’s why Jesus keeps yelling, “Listen!” And I actually love that. Please do tell me to listen if you think I’m missing something.

Thankfully, one thing I do love when I hear Jesus tell parables is that they aren’t rigid—you may take from a parable what you need for the day, like an image in your mind after looking at a stained glass window or a painting or your roses or Mt. Hood… you can take whatever you got because while Jesus was talking the wind blew and your mind or your toddler wandered off and you missed the second half. And if what you need from a specific parable is to say, “This one isn’t for me,” that’s okay, too.

Jesus tells a lot of stories; maybe the next one or the previous one better fits where you find yourself. These aren’t moral imperatives. I bet we take Jesus’ parables way more seriously than Jesus does. One of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, said that parables are like jokes, and I do love a good joke. And since the best jokes for the occasion are rarely explained, Jesus isn’t often one to explain his parables. We do have an explanation of this parable in Matthew, but because we don’t see Jesus explain his jokes that often, many scholars think it was added later. Someone probably thought about what they got from the parable that day and wrote it down next to the parable. Copyright laws weren’t a thing yet…

It explains what types of soil these seeds may be landing on. And on any given day I think I can identify with all these soils: rocky, thorny, good, scorched, afraid of birds… these are all me and all people that I know. But for some reason, maybe I’ve seen too many terrible Bible billboards or had too many bad experiences with birds—this explanation initially makes me think: I’m the bad soil. I have made a tragic error and the birds are coming for me.

If you’re someone who does this, too, then let my word be to you today that you are not bad soil… there is no bad soil. Many of Jesus’ stories do include checks on privilege, judgments on the way we act around people different than us or the way we spend our money, imploring us to be accountable, responsible neighbors, and that’s crucial to the gospel and to the church—but starting from a place of thinking “I’m the bad” doesn’t further this mission. When you have a thought like it, say: that’s a thought, and return to the good news.

I’ve been honored to pray the prayers of people who have planned Pride marches and protests, people who have fought cancer and HIV and received organ transplants, people who would see a few seeds on a sidewalk, kneel down, and make sure those seeds made it to soil. I’ve learned from a great cloud of witnesses that the good news of Jesus can’t be bad news about you. So, even though my mind trails to “I’m the bad soil,” and even though Jesus isn’t very direct here, I can say with confidence that that is not the point of this parable. It might help to think of the term “rich soil” instead of good soil, as it’s written in some translations; when there’s a good soil, we often want to label and distinguish a “bad” counterpart.

OR maybe the best practice is to not try to identify ourselves or others with types of dirt!

One of my other favorite writers and pastors, Barbara Brown Taylor, asks, “What if this is not about our successes and failures… but about the extravagance of a sower who does not seem to be fazed by such concerns, who flings seed everywhere… confident there is enough seed to go around… and that when the harvest comes it will fill every barn in the neighborhood?”

Sow, what about this sower? Are they a fool? Probably no more a fool than a man on a boat at the beach telling a joke to a crowd. And not necessarily a fool at all in the context where Jesus was speaking; people would’ve known it was normal not to plow before you planted then, thus they couldn’t have known all the types of soil there. And any gardener knows that you could do all the research in the world, and there’s a lot of research you could do (I still get e-mails because one time I looked at one product about testing soils), and you could prepare the soil exactly, and for rich or for thorns, you can still be surprised by your harvest.

And what about this harvest? It is surprising!! No one would find it normal. Fourfold would’ve been normal, so 30 to 100 maybe is an unfathomable number. Sow. How do we explain it? Maybe we don’t… Just a chapter ago, last week, Jesus told us his yoke is easy. And explaining is hard. When you have to work to explain a joke, it really isn’t that funny anymore.

But Barbara Brown Taylor mentions one more thing that I think is for sure: there were sowers ahead of us. There were sowers ahead of us. This is important to remember, so that when we do hit the surprising feed-the-whole-city-for-a-year type harvests, and I believe we do and have and will, we aren’t tempted to explain the unimaginable away and take all the credit.

Do take some of the credit, please. Someone has to throw seeds. We need you. Don’t remove yourself from the parable. You’re here and I’m so glad. But there are other stories, and sowers, who we know formed committees and organized and made brooms and swept seeds off paths and shooed birds… stories we tell over and over because they made us who we are, and there are stories of sowers who felt the pain of thorns and rocks that only Creator knows.

There is more life here than we could have asked for or come up with on our own.

Sure, there are rocks and thorns and birds, too… Nevertheless, my hope is that we might be generous enough to yell a joke from a boat.

There is thirty, sixty, a hundred, an unfathomable harvest amount of life with Jesus…

and I’m grateful to be here with you. Amen.