Ninth Sunday After Pentecost
Year A, RCL
July 13, 2008
All Saints’, Bentonville
Gospel:
Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: "Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!"
"Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty."
I first looked at the Gospel reading for today on Sunday evening a week ago. I like to have the whole week to allow the Gospel to sink in, to turn it over in my mind, to process its meaning, and maybe permit its message to touch my heart. When I allow the process to work, the Gospel is like a seed that finds its way to fertile soil and bears fruit.
When I saw that we would be reading the parable of the sower and the four soils, I thought, “What a perfect setup for a sermon.” This is an off-speed pitch right up the middle… a meatball. I can knock this one into the bleachers. After all, I’m a church planter and a gardener to boot. I was, as the legendary baseball broadcaster, Red Barber, used to say, in the catbird seat.
And so I set about reflecting on how we at All Saints’ were bringing the Gospel to Benton County and how some of what we preach and teach and practice will make its way to the folks in the wider community… and some of it won’t. We practice a gospel of inclusion and love and acceptance, and if that seed can’t find root among the stony hearts of hide-bound fundamentalists, then we have every right to shake our heads and click our collective tongues. Well, that interpretation seems a little too simple. And our readiness to identify with the disciples in this story, could give us a sense of self congratulatory smugness – a not very becoming Episcopal trait.
This parable of the sower from Matthew 13 is part of a series of small parables, some almost too brief to be even be called parables. The lectionary, over the next few weeks, will focus on the remaining parables in this chapter. We will read that the kingdom of heaven is like weeds growing among wheat, like a mustard seed, like yeast, like hidden treasure, like a pearl of great value, and like a net that was thrown into the sea.
The truth is, I love it when Jesus speaks in parables. Parables are like Buddhist koans - the meaning is obscure, and the pleasure and reward is in the working out of it’s implications over time, teasing away the significance.
I was thinking of this parable of the sower and the soil last week when I read about a community of 4200 people who live on a small island in Denmark called Samso. Samso is in most respects a very ordinary place – rather conservative, not particularly wealthy nor well educated, and not particularly idealistic. It’s a typical a farming community. But here in Samso, a remarkable change has taken place. Until the late 1990’s the citizens of this collection of villages consumed energy in much the same way the rest of the world does. Oil tankers sailed into the misty harbors of the island carrying the heating oil they used to heat their homes. Electricity was provided by smoky, coal fired plants located on the mainland.
And then, in a very deliberate fashion, the community began holding seminars on wind power, and energy cooperatives began to spring up. Heat pumps began to replace furnaces in homes. People looked for ways to cut consumption. Eventually land based and offshore wind turbines were constructed. They built three heating plants that burn straw. Cars and tractors were converted to burn canola oil. By 2001 fossil fuel consumption was cut in half. And by 2005 Samso was producing more energy from renewable sources than it was using. The effort took considerable community organizing, and the dedication of a local high school science teacher was instrumental, but mostly the change came about because this little community had ears to hear and they listened. The news that the kingdom was threatened by global warning took root, endured, and was not choked out by the “cares of the world and the lure of wealth.”
This story of the people of Samso caught my attention, not just because I think it’s a good example of how we are called to be a part of creation, and not because I think it is the correct interpretation of the parable of the sower and the soil. Jesus, responding to the disciples’ pleas, offered them a perfectly good allegorical interpretation of the parable using the analogy of the way God’s Word is received in the world. Lack of understanding, shallowness of commitment, the cares and persecution of the world are characterized by hard and barren soil. Rich productive soil, Jesus explained, is the place where people receive the Word and understand it.
But what really intrigued me this week was the part that was left out of the lectionary reading – the verses between the parable of the sower and its explication. In those omitted verses, the disciples asked Jesus why he spoke in parables. His explanation was that the disciples had been given “the secrets of the kingdom” and that those who had not been acquainted with Jesus words and deeds would not perceive, listen, or understand.
This sounds like some sort of Gnosticism, a belief that some secret knowledge is required to fully understand what it is that Jesus is saying. I don’t think it’s really about knowledge. The knowledge is available to us all. The knowledge about global warming is as available to us as it was to the community of Danish farmers who decided to do something about it. I don’t know what compelled the citizens of Samso to take a stance – some combination of community commitment, technological innovation, and individual resolve, I suspect.
I can’t speak for these Danes, but I compelled to ask, what compels us as a Christian community to respond to the ills in the world?
In choosing to speak in parables, Jesus moves us closer to making an existential decision about how we are to live. At other times Jesus is more direct – less abstract, calling on us to befriend the poor, the outcast, and the needy -commanding us to love our neighbor as ourselves. But when the words of Jesus are clothed in parable we are called to do more than simply try to decipher an allegorical code. It’s not just a matter of intellectual inquiry, of asking ourselves “What is Jesus really saying?”
When Jesus uses parables he is shifting the emphasis of our encounter with him away from the mere transmission of knowledge or doctrinal principles or moral dictates. We are being asked to find meaning in these parables that tells us not only how we are to live, but who we are. The very act of searching out meaning in parables, the process, the self-inquiry, can reveal knowledge about us and our relationship with God that surpasses any analogy that I or any other preacher could offer.
A parable like this can move us into a completely different realm of understanding, if we aren’t satisfied with the easy answers. It is simple enough to look at this parable of the sower and stretch the agricultural analogy so we think about ways to enrich the barren soil of our existence, to eliminate the thorny weeds that choke out our potential for spiritual growth, or to find the proper balance of acidity and alkalinity in our lives. That might be a useful exercise.
But Jesus did not come merely to tinker with peoples lives, he came to transform them. And transformation occurs when we don’t take the easy way out. When you find what this parable means for you, I urge you to throw out that explanation. When you have arrived at a lesson that is satisfying, forget it and plunge back in. When you have determined that you understand this parable from the perspective of the sower, imagine that you are the seed. And when you have understood what it’s like to be a seed cast onto the pathways or choked by weeds, then learn the story from the perspective of the thorns. The transforming task, the task of becoming who we are called to be, is to continually ask, “What is it about these parables that we are unable to hear, see, or understand?”
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote, "All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are." In speaking in parables, Jesus was conveying to others what he was. And if we have ears to listen, we, as Jesus followers, can learn who we are as well.