Hebrew Scriptures – Isaiah 55: 1-5, 10-131
1Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2 Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 3Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.
I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. 4See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. 5See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you. ….
10For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, 11so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
12For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. 13Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the LORD for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.
Gospel Lesson – Matthew 13: 1-92
1That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. 2Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. 5Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 6But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. 7Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9Let anyone with ears listen!”
“Let Anyone with Ears Listen!”
A man once moved from the city to the country in search of a simpler life. He bought a farm with the intent to raise chickens. He bought himself a hundred baby chicks, but they all died. He purchased a second hundred chicks, but they all died too. He wrote to the local extension office and explained his problem. He explained what he was trying to do and asked if he’d been doing anything wrong. He thought he may have been planting the chicks too close together or possibly too deeply. The extension office responded by letter that they could not answer his question until he sent in a soil sample.
Well, this chicken rancher’s going to be at it a very long time unless he tries planting seeds instead of baby chicks! Everybody knows, especially in this part of the country, that the way to assure a good harvest is to start off by sowing right. What about the farmer in the parable “a sower went out to sow?” Did he plant anything more likely to sprout than baby chicks? And what point is Jesus trying to make in a parable with a three-fold failure, followed by triple growth?
Like maybe many of you, I grew up hearing a whole lot of sermons based on this parable. Over the years I’ve no idea just how many there were, but I do remember that they all seemed to make the same point. They identified me as the soil in which essence of “the kingdom of God” had been sown. They encouraged me to be the good soil of the parable that bears fruit and yields, well, at least “thirty” times the number of seeds that the sower had thrown my way. With some notable exceptions, I think that I’ve tried hard most of my life to be “good soil.” I doubt if I ever recognized myself as just a path from which birds snatch the seed before it has a place or even a chance to put down roots. There have been times, though, when I did recognize myself as rocky ground and as the ground that bears nothing much more than weeds or thorns.
When I was young, some classmates – even some friends of mine – would scoff at how much my family and I were involved in the church and would laugh at my desire for a peaceful, if not holy, life. Most of the time it wasn’t an issue, though; we just hung out at the beach – swimming and diving, playing underwater tag or jumping off cliffs into the sea, spearfishing, sailing, SCUBA diving – playing at life. There were so many good times to be had on an island in the Caribbean that there wasn’t any other time left for much more than a sleepy-eyed prayer of childish gratitude at the end of the day. So every time that I did listen to a sermon on this parable, I felt that there was just no way that I could hide from the facts of my life. I was always the wrong kind of soil; so (for awhile at least) I’d set my mind at doing a little bit of self-righteous fertilizing. There would come a day when I would turn myself into good soil and yield the fruit of the kingdom!
As preachers, I suppose that Roger and I ought to be pleased with any sermon that motivates people to work harder at hearing the word of the kingdom of God and yielding its fruit. I’m sure that all of those endless sermons about soil weren’t a total loss – even if some of them ended up being choked by weeds or uselessly dried up. At least they urged me to take my commitment to being a Christian seriously – it helped that my favorite Sunday School teacher was my father. So, many of these sermons did create a healthy tension between the way things were in my life and the way that they could be.
And yet there was always something about them that bothered me. Soil doesn’t make itself better. Its quality comes from something that’s given to it. Unless somebody works with the soil, unless somebody clears it of rocks and weeds and adds nutrients to it, it can’t be changed from bad soil to good soil. This is why, like most people, trying often as hard as we can, we’ve never been able to do it on our own. I couldn’t make myself bear fruit. Oh, I could go to Sunday School, read the Bible and make every effort to understand it, but how could I make myself “yield a hundredfold?”
Maybe I missed something that was actually clearly stated in those soil-sermons of my childhood – after all the parable does begin and end with the word “Listen!” If it was there I think that I missed something crucial; and it’s this: the subject of this parable is the sower, not the soil – it’s not about “good dirt,” it’s about the one throwing the seeds. And, surprisingly enough, if you read the parable closely the sower doesn’t seem to be very good at it; he just tosses the seeds all over the place! What kind of a farmer is that? Doesn’t he know the difference between a path and a field, between rocks and dirt?
But it doesn’t seem to matter. On each of them he hurls the same seed – and, did you notice, there always seems to be more than enough! If the sower discounted ¾ of his work as wasted we’re not told. But it seems as if he hasn’t learned a thing from what you and I would call his “mistakes.” The next time around he’ll probably do the same thing, and the next time, again, some of it bearing fruit and grain in extravagant abundance, some of it not.
I’ll tell you something: my fervent hope in life as a pilgrim struggling to follow Jesus rests on that sower. It rests on the One who never stops throwing seeds onto the soil of my life; and it rests on the miraculous power of that seed to come up with something good – at least for awhile, and sometimes for a long, long time.
I’m still bothered, even ashamed, by the relative rockiness and weediness of my life’s soil. But I’m also stunned with the ability of the seed to find the good soil – tucked away in the crevices – that’s also there. So I’ve come to trust the power of the sower, and of the extraordinary fertility of that seed to find its way and to take root in ways that I’d never be able to do if it were just up to me.
So after 63 years of life – and almost 39 of those years with a wonderful wife and now a family of my own – I’ve stopped worrying (well, less so) about what kind of soil I am. I have taken Jesus’ invitation seriously, though: “If you have ears, son, use them!” What you and I are called to do is listen, to know when we hear good news and when we don’t, and to trust that it will succeed in the thing for which it was sent.3
This isn’t an ordinary, common garden-variety, story. It’s a parable. And a parable doesn’t teach us something as much as it points toward something – it says, “Look at that!” or “Listen up people!” And it does its best work when it turns our world, our expectations, our assumptions, our conclusions, upside down.
So how is our world, our conclusions turned upside down in this parable? By acknowledging that in the realm of God failure and miracle, normal and the extraordinary, exist side-by-side. As one of my teacher’s (and a fellow of the Jesus Seminar) has said, “In failure and everydayness lies the miracle of God’s activity.”4 Moral perfection is not required, only effective actions; and everyone who for far too long has been considered an outsider, is in.
That’s the final surprise, the last twist in the tail of this parable – the re-imagining point. And, by God, that’s good news for us if we have ears to hear it. It’s the sort of good news that invites us not to have faith in Jesus but to have faith along with Jesus, in this re-imagined world of the parables.5
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1This portion of the Book of Isaiah speaks to a despondent community in exile that had given up on living. The destruction of Jerusalem and subsequent exile presumably meant the end of God’s involvement with them. This prophet, though, counters that their God is a life-giving God who seeks to renew the covenant with them.
2In the thirteenth chapter of Matthew Jesus is pictured in a boat teaching vast crowds by the sea with a series of parables about the “kingdom of God” – the kingdom is like this or that. We’re reading only the parable today, not the explanation that the community gave it some years later, so make up your own mind what you think it means; but if it doesn’t bother you – at least in some fundamental way – then you’re not getting the point of it. All of Jesus’ parables have a mysterious edge to them, inviting people into an entirely new reality, a new way of seeing and interacting with the world – if we’re listening that is.
3Isaiah 55: 11d.
4The “Jesus Seminar” is also known as the Westar Institute: http://www.westarinstitute.org/index.html.
5As I’ve learned, the Greek phrase pistis tou Iesou – for far too long only translated as “faith in Jesus” (as with the fervor of an evangelical fundamentalist exclaiming “You’ve just got to believe in Jesus!”) – may just as well be translated as “faith with Jesus.”