This morning’s parable is a bit of a mix of metaphors, or maybe even mixed-up metaphors – not quite as clean-cut as, say, the parable of the mustard seed, or the prodigal son, or the lost sheep. Not even Jesus seems to get the story quite right – first, he says, the seeds are the word of God – and then he says the seeds are the people who are waiting to receive it – as Presbyterian theologian Thomas Long points out – and then he describes the heart as being like soil, where the seed falls and may be snatched away. A lot of images, conflicting and overlapping and coming together in this parable.
And I expect that most farmers and gardeners today would tell you that one thing today’s Gospel parable is not is a lesson on how to plant.
Theologians and preachers ponder whether this morning’s story should be called the Parable of the Sower, as we often hear it titled, or the Parable of the Seeds, or the Parable of the Soil, or the Parable of the Miraculous Yields.
United Methodist theologian Gary Peluso-Verdend suggests that the we will harvest even more meaning – get it? Harvest? Ok… from the story if we think of it as the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Seeds and the Parable of the Soil and the Parable of the Miraculous Yields. It can be read as all of these things – a parable that grows a little bit like a weed, or a wildflower.
And that allows us to think about why Jesus saw this idea of planting, cultivating, harvesting, as a powerful image when we think about faith – and when we think about our shared faith, as a community.
The sower goes out to sow seeds, hoping for a crop that is reasonable, if not plentiful. The sower scatters the seed seemingly without plan or strategy, throwing it out and letting it land where it will. Some of it lands on the path, and the birds eat it up. Some of it lands on rocky ground, and the seedlings grow up quickly, but wither quickly because they can’t put their roots down deep enough. Some of the seed lands in thorns, which grow up and suffocate them. Some seeds, I can tell you, landed in the potting soil on my mother’s back deck, were carefully watered and placed in the sun and grew into green tomatoes, and the squirrels found them and had a lovely summer brunch.
Some of the seeds, though, land on soil that is rich and healthy and free of thorns and birds and rocks and squirrels, and they don’t just take root and grow reasonably – they take root and they thrive – more than the sower could have ever asked or imagined – bringing forth grain thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold – far, far more than a farmer in the first-century Middle East would have ever seen from one planting. The sower tosses seeds into the air to land where they will – letting the wind catch them and seeing what the Creator has in mind. The sower shows faith, and generosity, and a kind of grace-filled joy. And the result is miracles.
One thing this parable does, because it is so multilayered, is that it invites questions – it gives us ways to think about the sower, the seeds, the soil, the miracles, and our place in the parable. Where do we see in our context, in our landscape, the hope of the sower? What kind of soil do we find ourselves being scattered in? What seeds can we plant that will grow into glorious flower, rich fruit, towering tree?
This parable is probably familiar to most of us. And this time around – as is often the case often with parables, we hear something each time that we perhaps didn’t notice before. The thing that I had not noticed before was one word – as Jesus is explaining the parable to his disciples, that second half of the reading, he says, “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom” – the word of the kingdom. Not the word of God, or the word of the Lord, but the word of the kingdom. The word that the sower is scattering is not one voice, not just words from on high, but words that create and describe kingdom, community – a community of faith – words that speak of a joy to come, where God has gathered God’s sheep and the prodigal son has returned and the mustard seed has grown into a bush that protects and nurtures everyone in its branches – to borrow from a few other parables.
The sower wasn’t spreading seeds around randomly because he didn’t know how to grow crops – he was spreading seeds far and wide because that’s what God’s love is about. That’s what the kingdom is about. The path, and the thorn bushes, and the rocky soil, and the good soil – and my mother’s tomato pots – are all places where God’s love travels, sometimes landing in spots where it is harder to take root, harder to bear fruit, harder to grow and find the sunlight and not be crowded out by the cares and worries and dangers and thorns of the world.
What if the parable of the sower, and the soil, and the seed. and the miracles, is already showing us a picture of what the kingdom is and will be?
A kingdom that is open and welcoming – that is not walled off and defensive. The word of the kingdom is not bound in a book and finished and done. The word of the kingdom is the seeds we plant – and the word of the kingdom is what grows from the seeds, it is the soil the seeds are planted in and the water and sun that nourish the seeds. The kingdom is the thorns and the birds and the squirrels – because the word of God’s kingdom is generous and unending, and holds everyone and everything together in it – the kingdom is the wind and the birds that carry the seeds away from where they were originally sown to sprout up in unexpected places, and it is the rocks that make the journey more challenging, the shared journey. The word of the kingdom is God’s grace and love and constant presence that binds all of it together.
So how can the word of the kingdom, as a seed, take root in a world of thorns? How can the kingdom, the beloved community, take shape on rocky ground?
Mary Oliver, in one of her poems on prayer, ponders something like this question – she writes that prayer “doesn’t have to be / the blue iris, it could be / weeds in a vacant lot.” In the way that prayer lives even, and perhaps especially, amidst rocks and thorns, the rocks and thorns of our world and our lives, so does the hope and grace of the kingdom: Prayer plants seeds, and waters them, and warms them, and protects them – prayers is the language, is the word of the kingdom.
The word of the kingdom is the stubbornness of seeds, the weed or the wildflower that grows up between sidewalk cracks. We are, a little bit, the kingdom here and now, and we are also the kingdom that is to come – the kingdom that breaks into our present, and the kingdom that we wait for and walk toward and pray into eventual blossoming.
So, together, let’s be the sower, generous and full of grace, scattering the good news of the kingdom into the rockiest, thorniest places of the world – because the world feels like rocks and thorns more often than we would like it to right now. Let’s be the soil, providing good ground for the planting of hope. Let’s be the seed, ready to bear the fruit of faith, hope and love, finding other way of being neighbors to one another, first in these church walls, and then out there, when we are scattered back out into the world like the seeds. What soil will we cultivate? What fruits will we offer? What can we, as the Church, sow in the world?
In words attributed to St. Francis, we pray:
Where there is hatred, let us sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope…
Grant that we may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
Amen.
