Grace United Methodist Church
Corpus Christi, TX
pastorwillrice@gmail.com
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
As a young child, I thought a lot about space. It may be less about my peculiar brain and more about the culture of the time. If you think about it, I am of the generation that was born after we had landed on the moon. In my worldview, people could and did travel in space. I grew up with endless thoughts of space travel surrounding me. During my childhood the Americans and Russians were going into space on a regular basis. They even launched a couple of space stations. I remember staring into the sky in 1979 waiting to see if Skylab would come crashing down into my yard when it fell out of orbit. The big screen and small screen filled my imagination with Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica
As a child, I used to try to understand the limits and boundaries of the universe. Someone introduced me to the idea as a child that the universe was limitless. I asked, Where does it end? Someone answered, it doesn’t. I was an odd child, so instead of leaving it at that and going to play, I sat alone for seemingly endless hours trying to wrap my brain around the fact that something never ends. I still don’t get it.
How could something not end? Limitless is not a concept that a 5 year old, a 12 year old, a thirty-three year old, can understand. Unlimited for us, really means, more than we need or more than we want. But even unlimited has limits.
I realized at some point this past year that I am sort of funny about food. Although I love food and I love to eat almost any kind of food, I am sometimes unlikely to accept food offered to me. This is especially true at any sort of group gathering when there is a certain amount of food to be shared by many. If you were to invite me to your house for dinner, no problem. But, if I were to stop by the fellowship hall one day, and you and your Bible study group were just sitting down to eat, and you asked me to join you, I would likely decline, unless it was very obvious that you had more than you needed. I realized this year why that is. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I think there will not be enough food for everybody. I am fighting the internal perception that if I have some, there might not be enough for you. I lack a sense of abundance where it comes to food.
I realized this year that this comes from my childhood. Don’t get me wrong, in my house growing up, we always had enough to eat, but we rarely had extra. For example, on the occasion we would splurge for pizza, my family, six of us, would get one pizza. So, the idea of eating four or five slices was not an option, there wouldn’t be enough.
It is amazing how the ways we view things like space and food can begin to shape our view of the world and our view of God.
Today we are looking at the parable of the sower. This is one of the richest parables in scripture. Unfortunately, much of its richness is lost due to the fact that we tend to pull it out of its context and read it all by itself. The word God speaks to us in this parable is shaped and amplified by what comes before it.
I don’t have time to read you all of chapter 12, but let me hit the highlights. First, Jesus’ disciples were accused of breaking the law of God after plucking heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath. Never mind they were hungry, the law comes first and the law said no work on the Sabbath and plucking grain is work. Second, Jesus angered the religious elite by healing a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath. Forget compassion, the law says no work on the Sabbath. Third, Jesus healed a man who was said to have a demon within him that had caused him to be blind and mute. Jesus cured him and then was accused of being in cahoots with evil forces from which they say he received his power.
You see, it is in the context of this tension with the religious authorities that Jesus, on the same day, tells this parable of the sower.
‘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!’
I used to work on a farm in the summer when I lived back in Eden, New York. I worked for Mr. Henry and he can tell you, I make a lousy farmer. To my defense, I can tell you, Mr. Henry wasn’t the greatest boss. He came from the great management tradition of motivating and correcting employee behavior by yelling. If you have an employee that seems to have trouble understanding the yelling method, yell louder.
I liked the grunt work on the farm, picking and bagging corn, cutting cabbage, moving irrigation pipe. I hated the more precision jobs like driving the harvesting machines and especially seeding and planting. I hated them because I was pretty likely to mess up and Mr. Henry was certain to yell at me.
Whenever I hear this parable, I can’t help but think of Mr. Henry, very precise, very frugal, very easily angered. I think of him coming out to the field to see that I had dumped some very expensive seed on the path, on the rocky ground, in the thorns and a few seeds on the well prepared, plowed, fertile soil. Mr. Henry, when especially angry would turn red and then lose his capacity to form sentences and sometimes even words. It would sound something like, “wha? uh? eh?”
Now I have to admit that farming methods were not as precise around 0 a.d. as they are now, but the point is still the same, the sower is throwing seed around like he is never going to run out. The sower is wasting seed.
We talk a lot about wasting things. We need to not let our sprinkler water the sidewalk lest we waste water. We need to be organized lest we waste time. We need to watch our spending lest we waste money. We need to think about what we buy at the grocery store so we don’t end up wasting food.
If you think about is, the whole idea of wasting something implies that there is a limited amount of that thing, a scarcity.
Think about this. If there were an unlimited amount of something, could you waste it? Maybe you could, but would it matter? Think about how our attitudes about things change when we reconsider the amount of something we have. At one point in time, we thought we had basically unlimited amounts of fossil fuels to make gasoline. Back then cars just got bigger and bigger until, at one point, in the seventies there was a little thing known as the gas crises. We suddenly realized there was a limit to this stuff. Cars started getting smaller. At some point in the last few years, we began getting a bit overconfident in the amount of fossil fuels we had and cars starting getting bigger again. But some, still see the limitations of fossil fuels and have been buying gas/electric hybrid cars.
Back when I was a kid, living on a large freshwater lake, people spoke much less about wasting water. Here I, Texas, where there are more and more people and less and less water, people talk about it all the time, though I have never heard of wasting salt water.
Thinking about wasting something implies a scarcity of it. We should worry about wasting our natural resources. They are abundant, but not abundant enough to waste. We should think about wasting money. Even if we are rich there is a limit, and that which we waste cannot be used for better purposes.
But there are some things that never run out. There are some things that although we are able to make poor decisions about, we technically can’t waste because there will always be more.
To get at what I am talking about, let’s look back at the parable.
18‘Hear then the parable of the sower. 19When 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.
I sort of like the way Mark’s gospel puts this. It is a little bit more clear about what the sower is sowing. In Mark 4:14 it reads:
14The sower sows the word.
It is important to note that the sower doesn’t sow the words (plural) but the word (singular). A very subtle difference, but I think important. You see, this passage is often preached, and I have preached it this way myself as though it says words (plural). That subtle difference can somewhat limit the scope of the message here. It can be seen as simply a message about hearing. I might be the sower and I stand up here and sow the words of God. In this picture, you all become the soil. Some of you may not hear the words at all, some of you may hear them and react but quickly fall away, some of you may hear the words, but they may get lost in the things of the world and some of you may hear the words and take them in and engage them and produce much fruit.
Now this is a good message, and I think definitely part of the message Jesus is trying to deliver here, but it is about more than words, it is about the word. As Matthew says:
19When anyone hears the word of the kingdom
That is what the sower is sowing, the word of the kingdom. We are not just talking about words, we are talking about the word. And what is the word? John 1:1 reads:
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God.
In the words of the author of John’s Gospel, the word is God and the word came to us in Jesus. You see, if you follow this thinking, the whole parable becomes not about simply the words of God, but the word of God, the breaking of things of God into this world.
You see then the seed becomes God, not just words, but the knowledge of God, it becomes that outpouring of God, that boundless love that we can only describe in our limited speech as grace.
And the sower is throwing grace around like he is never going to run out.
You see it is important to think about what kind of soil we are, how open we are to the love and word of God, but it is more important to realize no matter how bad of soil we are, God will keep throwing seed on us.
And if we are good soil and we know someone else that is bad soil, God is pouring just as much seed on them as on us. And that is perfectly alright, because God is never going to run out.
I can say that and say that and say that and most people have so much trouble getting it because there is just nothing else we can comprehend that is limitless. It is easy to say that God’s grace is limitless, but our way of living out of that often reflects a scarcity. Our actions betray our words as we live our lives with an understanding of God’s love that is more like my understanding of food than my understanding of the universe.
This really affects how we live, how we see God and how we see each other. If our lives betray our words and, and at some level, we perceive a scarcity, we will look at this parable just like Mr. Henry would have. Why is the sower throwing perfectly good seed onto the path, the rocky ground and into the weeds. Why is God wasting seed?
We may even try to start helping God by creating rules that we think will limit who God loves. Think about what was going on in chapter 12. Jesus was trying to share the love and compassion of God and the religious elite were saying, “No! Stop! You are breaking the rules we use to conserve the love of God.”
We, like the religious elite of this story, might start spending our energies on figuring out who is worthy and deserving of God’s love. We might come up with divisions and labels and categories to help God better understand where God should spread seed. Because if everybody gets it, God might not have enough for those who deserve it. And if we do by chance understand the unmerited nature of Grace, we might at least say God might not have enough for those who would use it properly.
But if we were to truly grasp the completely unlimited nature of the love of God, we could truly allow God to be extravagant, and then and only then, could we be extravagantly loving. If we could be completely confident that God would always have enough love for us, we would finally be free to love extravagantly.[1]
If we assume a scarcity of God’s affection, we will limit who we can be. If we see the extravagance of God’s love and grace, we will live generously.
I am reading now from The Message paraphrase of Matthew, chapter 10, verse 6. Jesus is sending his disciples out into the world for a while and he says:
6Go to the lost, confused people right here in the neighborhood. 7Tell them that the kingdom is here. 8Bring health to the sick. Raise the dead. Touch the untouchables. Kick out the demons. You have been treated generously, so live generously.
God is giving us an unlimited supply of love, compassion, and mercy. Even if God chooses to lavish this upon people who don’t hear, don’t respond, don’t live out of it, don’t even care, God will still have plenty for you.
We shouldn’t be worried about who God loves, but rather we should be scattering seeds of God’s love everywhere, knowing that the one thing we will never run out of is the love of God.
What blows my mind more than the endless nature of the universe is the common scientific wisdom that the endless universe is expanding.
The only thing more amazing than that is the fact that so is God’s unconditional love we call grace. God lavishes that love on every creature, those that are like the path, those that are like the rocky ground, those overgrown with thorns, and those who are the fertile soil. If we are going to truly respond to that kind of love, we must keep at the top of our thoughts, the extravagantly loving, endlessly abundant seed spreading God.
Amen.
[1] Philip Gulley and James Mulholland, If God is Love, Rediscovering Grace in an Ungracious World, (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004)34
