Something Worth Sharing

Something Worth Sharing    

Matthew 13:1-9, 15-23

5th Sunday after Pentecost Year A

July 13, 2014

First Presbyterian Church, Clarksville

and

Harmony Presbyterian Church

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

            There are two common mistakes speakers at youth ministry events generally make.

            First, middle aged pastors who were never cool in high school cannot, under any circumstances or in any remotely reasonable way, act cool in adulthood.  There is not much in this life as sad as a staggeringly uncool preacher trying to pull off hipster glasses and pop music lyrics in an effort to connect with youth.

            Second, they fall into the trap of thinking that the only way to get through to a teenager is through the door marked “fear.”  This is the school of thought that says you had better scare them straight while they are still in the church or lose them forever.

            The speaker at the Jr. High youth event when I was in the 7^th grade managed to hit those and every other possible pot hole on the road.

            The theme of the weekend was the parable we heard this morning;  the parable of the sower from Matthew 13.

            After impressing us with his grasp of Michael Jackson and Men at Work lyrics which had nothing at all to do with the point he was trying to make, he began the stern warnings against drifting away from the life of the Christian faith. 

            For the most part his talk walked a pretty familiar interpretive path through this text.  The sower, God in the person of Jesus Christ, graciously spreads seed on the ground in the hopes that something will grow.  The seed, of course, is the word of God revealed, and the soil, our lives.  Some seed falls in good places other seed falls on less hospitable ground; the good soil representing faithfulness and rest of the soil varying degrees sinfulness.

After painting the ominous picture of what would happen to us if we failed to live up to our spiritual potential- bad grades, bad lives, bad futures, bad luck, even bad skin (I actually think he even blamed acne on sin!)-  he asked us the question he obviously hoped would spark in us a lifetime of faith in God or at least scare us away from lives of sin:

            What kind of soil are YOU?

            Now it is important to say here that I was a child of Second Presbyterian Church and the pastor there over most of my lifetime was J. Allen Smith.  Allen was known to be many things, fire and brimstone throwing was not one of them.  Allen was a great gentle preacher who managed week after week to take the words of scripture and paint a vivid picture with God’s word.  So when the keynote speaker up on the stage asked us “what kind of soil we were” in the most menacing tone he could manage, it was unusual and it did scare me a little. 

            What kind of soil are you?

            Well, I certainly didn’t want to be the soil on the path.  After generations of feet stomp along, that soil is compacted and as hard as concrete.  Jesus tells us in the parable that the seed that falls there is eaten up by the birds.  

            Didn’t want to be the rocky ground either.  Better than the bare road, but still shallow and rootless.  The seed that falls there fares better than the seed on the road, but it still burns up in the sun as soon as it sprouts.

            Not much more luck with the thorny plants.  The soil there is better and the seeds the sower throws are able to find some purchase, but so are the weeds and the thorny plants.  I guess that is the ancient near eastern version of kudzu growing up trees and over fields.  If you have ever tried to fight back that unholy weed, you know that the seeds cast on that soil don’t have a chance.

            When faced with the choice, there is really only one soil you would want to be in this story- the good soil.  That is the soil that managed to produce 30, 60, even 100 to 1 yield on the crops.  It bore fruit and then some.  That is good, rich, delta soil. 

            That is the soil I want to be.  I want to be the good soil- the soil that bears fruit and makes the story work.

            What kind of soil are you?

            Hopefully I am the good soil.

            I am pretty sure that is the answer the speaker at that youth retreat wanted to hear.

            It is the answer that this parable seems to point us toward giving.

            It is the answer that we long to give.

            And it is a good answer.

            Except for one thing.

            It misses the point of the parable.

            For whatever reason, this parable, which for centuries has been called the parable of the sower, has for centuries been interpreted as a parable about the soil.

            So we ask, what kind of soil are you?

            We worry that though we want to be the fertile soil we will be found wanting and trodden and packed down too hard like the soil of the path.

            We worry about being the right kind of soil, but the parable is not about the soil.

            It is a parable about the sower.

            And this is where our shared interpretive task gets tricky. 

            Making this parable about the soil is uncomfortable, after all we all have those days when our hearts are as hardened as the dirt of a well walked road, but in the end the soil is something that we can at least control.  Whether it means tilling up the hardened earth or throwing away the rocks that litter the ground or pulling the weeds that choke the fruits of the spirit seeking to grow in our hearts, we have some control over the state of the soil when the soil is our own hearts and spirits. 

            If this was the parable about the state of the soil in our hearts, it would be an easy parable.

            Then if it was an EASY parable, it would not be a parable of Jesus. 

            Jesus always has something extra for us; and added layer of complexity, an unexpected lesson, a spiritual word lurking, not in secret, but in plain sight among the parabolic images.

            Yes, the state of the soil in our souls is part of this parable, however what makes it a parable of Jesus worth the retelling is not the admonition to get your soil right nor is it the allegory of the seed as the word of God.  It is instead the word it has to speak about the sower. 

            This is the parable of the sower.

            It is a parable about God.

We may ask, what kind of soil are you, but the parable answers with a question if it's own…

What kind of sower is this?

It is a parable about God; a parable about the sower. 

            As I was working on this sermon, I stumbled upon a passage in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics that has been turning over in my head all week.  As a matter of fact, I was still mulling it last night around 11.

            Barth wrote about this parable from Matthew;

“For this Sower there are not four different fields in which to sow but only one...To the one field traversed by the Sower belong alike the path, the stony ground, the thorny ground, and the good ground. [Men] constitute a homogeneous community in relation to the Word of the kingdom addressed to them.”

While so many of us try to take this parable and navigate the twin rocky shoals of judgment and moral categorization, Barth points us back to the underlying reality that the sower is far less concerned with what kind of soil is under foot than that the seed- the word- falls on it all.

I wish that speaker so long ago had read this passage from Barth before he got up there on stage in front of that room full of impressionable middle schoolers.  Had he, he might have avoided the interpretive cul-de-sac that comes when we make the parable of the sower the parable of the soil.

If the soil is the point, we are left with two less than helpful choices in understanding the sower.  Either the sower is careless- constantly wasting precious seed on unfertile and useless ground- or the sower simply doesn’t care- and the seed, the word of God, can be wasted as long as some of it gets in the right places the rest can go ahead and be eaten, burned up in the sun or tangled in the thorns.

So is it the parable of the careless sower or the parable of the parable of the sower who just doesn’t care?

Neither, Barth reminds us.

This is the story of a sower who, owning the whole field, traverses it end to end and refuses to give up on one square inch. 

He traverses it all because he realizes that each of us wanders from beaten path to fertile soil.  God knows that none of us is ever always good fertile soil- we are all sinners and fall short of the glory of God, Paul reminds us.  The sower who shares the seed, the savior who shares the word, knows that the soil that is one day hardened by the stomping feet of experience or pocked by stones that prevent them taking root, may yet one day be rich and fertile and support new growth so the sower continues to plant it.

This is a parable about the relentless, hopeful, generous sower; the sower who deems each and every square inch of ground worthy of planting.

And that is where we find the good news in this story. 

Not in the adolescent scare tactic to be good soil or else, but in the truth that whether our hearts are as hard as a well-travelled road or as fertile and rich as good delta soil, God continues day after day and year after year to plant seeds of the spirit in us in the eternal knowledge that in God’s good time our soil- our souls- will be ready for that word to grow.

I suppose we could still ask the question, what kind of soil are you?  As long as we remember that this parable gives us only one answer:

We are God’s soil- the medium in which the word of God grows in this world. 

            And God is our sower- always and in every way planting seeds of the spirit in our hearts and lives- never deterred by one unsuccessful harvest, God comes back time and time again, sharing the seeds of the spirit, until each and every heart produces a harvest of 30, 60, even 100 to 1.

            And that, my friends, is good news!

            And in a world with plenty of beaten paths, rocky ground, and thorny fields, it is good news worth sharing.

            Sola deo Gloria!  To God alone be the glory! Amen