Sunday, July 13, 2014 | 4:00 p.m.

Anywhere and Everywhere

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 119:105–112
Matthew 13:1–9, 18–23

On my walk to church this morning, I noticed an unusually high number of black birds landing in the little park across from the Ritz-Carlton hotel. I wondered what that was all about until I saw yellow tape hung along the sidewalks and signs that said “Please stay off the grass—aerating and seeding.” You can try to keep the people out, but there is no stopping the birds from having a field day consuming lots of seeds. Anyone who plants seeds knows there is at least a fraction of them that will not take root and grow. That’s just life; it is beyond our control.

Jesus’ listeners were very familiar with this phenomenon. Now farming in the United States is done by large agri-corporations using genetically modified seeds, big machines, and huge amounts of acreage. In our time the land is plowed first before seeds are planted, prepared with the right amount of ph balance, with much science and planning to efficiently produce the highest yield.

Not so for first-century traditional farming. In Jesus’ day it was typical for a single farmer to walk his field and sow seeds by hand, first flinging the seeds on the ground and then plowing the land afterwards. Jesus describes a method of planting in which there were many seeds that didn’t bear fruit. Some seeds fell among shallow soil, so they sprang up quickly but just as quickly were scorched by the sun. Some seeds fell onto the pathways where the birds ate them. Other seeds fell among thorns that eventually grew up and choked them out. And, thank God, some seed fell on good soil and produced a very bountiful harvest.

Most parables Jesus taught are not later followed by an explanation on their meaning. We don’t know whether it was Jesus or the Gospel writers who provided their own interpretation. We do know that the early church struggled with the fact that only a portion of people who heard God’s Word became Christ’s followers who dedicated their lives to serve God.

We may ask the same question. The number of people who are devoted disciples of Christ is but a fraction of the total population. This has always been the case. In an article in the most recent issue of the Christian Century, Ted A. Campbell lifts up a corrective to the view that old-line denominations were once the powerhouse center of U.S. religion. Figures for nine denominations and their predecessors show that they “never accounted for more than 16.8 percent of the U.S. population for the period for which we have statistics.” Campbell adds, “Even if you were to add some more groups and presuppose that the percentage was higher before 1925, I doubt that the membership of old-line churches ever accounted for more than a quarter of the population in the twentieth century” (Ted A. Campbell, “Glory Days?” Christian Century, 9 July 2014, p. 12).

What does Jesus’ parable have to say to all this? Ted Wardlaw, president of Austin Seminary, wrote that this parable is not so much about good soil as it is about a good sower. “This sower is not so cautious and strategic as to throw the seed in only those places where the chances for growth are best. No, this sower is a high-risk sower, relentless in indiscriminately throwing seed on all soil—as if it were all potentially good soil . . . which leaves us to wonder if there is any place or circumstance in which God’s seed cannot sprout and take root” (Theodore J. Wardlaw, Feasting on the Word, Year A, vol. 3,p. 241). Anywhere and everywhere, God generously flings seed. Anywhere and everywhere, God seeks to bear fruit.

The work of the sower culminates with an amazing harvest—even a hundredfold! This is not even a normal harvest from good soil, which could have been thirty-, sixty-, or seventyfold. This harvest is beyond sufficient and encouraging. It is abundant, revealing an extravagant God of abundance. It also reveals the importance of our own work as sowers.

The seeds are all your efforts to live a faithful and meaningful life in this world. The seeds represent your hard labor to raise a loving family, to do something to make this world a better place, to use the gifts God has given you for the sake of others. Sometimes the seeds we sow fall on good ground. Sometimes they fall amidst rocks or thorns or get picked off by the birds. That’s just life. You can’t control the results of your efforts. But you can make the effort to keep on sowing—and leave the results to God.

In our own lives, we may be more aware of our efforts that didn’t bear fruit or seemed a waste of time than we are of how seeds we have planted have borne fruit. Parents fear that their guidance and compassion for their teenage children falls on deaf ears. Ethical employers who pay a living wage with benefits see clients go elsewhere where things are cheaper. Activists for social justice see the same issues they fought for in the past not improving and sometimes getting worse. It is easy to become discouraged or overwhelmed by the scale of problems and our own smallness.

It is also likely that we don’t, and never will, fully know the extent to which seeds that we have sown have borne fruit. Think of all the people who have touched your life in a positive way, whether through something they wrote or a brief encounter or an ongoing influence. With how many of them have you ever expressed the impact they had on you or thanked them for their love and support of you? If you are like me, there may be many, many such people, yet I have not let them know in most cases. And you are likely such a person in many others’ lives, too.

Members of our Poverty and Hunger mission group are reading a book called Exodus from Hunger by David Beckmann. Beckmann is President of Bread for the World and makes a persuasive case that we have the ability to eradicate hunger in the United States. Many of us have shrugged our shoulders about this issue and assumed it is a problem that will always be with us. But not Beckmann, who believes this is merely a matter of political will. He cites progress that has been made over the past few decades, both in the U.S. and other countries, and profiles individuals whose efforts made the difference. I was particularly struck by his story of how the United States government decided to join other countries in the Jubilee Campaign in the year 2000 to cancel the debts of poor countries. Since that time, debt obligations of thirty relatively well-governed poor countries have been reduced by $78 billion. President Bill Clinton told Representative Spencer Bachus, a conservative Republican from Alabama, that the U.S. would never have signed onto this without Bacahus’s effort. Bachus was initially an unlikely champion. How was his heart moved to be a key supporter?

It can be traced back to a small group of church members in Birmingham, Alabama. Pat Pelham was a young mother who was moved during her morning prayers to do something for people in Africa. Her husband’s job and their two small children meant going to Africa was out of the question. Her minister of Independent Presbyterian Church suggested she get them involved in Bread for the World. She and her friend Elaine organized a hunger committee in their church and invited their member of Congress, Spencer Bachus, to attend one of their events. Several years later, Bachus was appointed chair of the international subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee. If Congress was going to approve debt relief for poor countries, it would have to start in Bachus’s subcommittee. Pat, Elaine, and two more members of their church flew to Washington at their own expense with a petition signed by members of nearby Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church to talk with Representative Bachus. Elaine told him, “I don’t know much about economics or international finance. But I do know that tens of thousands of children die every day from hunger and other preventable causes. As a mother, that really bothers me. Most of the time, I think there is nothing we can do about it. But it would help a lot if you would sponsor this Jubilee legislation.”

Bachus became Congress’s most effective advocate for debt relief for the world’s poorest countries. A number of other people and pressures moved President Clinton and the G8 Summit to make reforms at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Tens of thousands of Christians across the United States urged their Congressional representatives to support the Jubilee legislation of 1999 and 2000. Yet Beckmann is particularly struck by the pivotal role played by two Presbyterians, Pat and Elaine. He said, “It is hard to imagine how the debts of poor countries would have been reduced if Pat hadn’t been moved by her prayers to push for an unlikely change in U.S. policies” (David Beckmann, Exodus from Hunger, pp. 94–100). Small seeds, scattered even in unpromising places, bore much fruit.

Abundant fruitfulness goes on in nature all the time. Seeds are scattered by farmers, by the winds, by birds and animals, anywhere and everywhere. Plants produce many, many seeds, perhaps precisely because only a portion of them take root and grow.

Author Annie Dillard commented on such fecundity in her book, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. She wrote:

After the flood last year I found a big tulip-tree limb that had been wind-blown into Tinker Creek. The current dragged it up on some rocks on the bank, where receding waters stranded it. A month after the flood I discovered that it was growing new leaves. I was amazed. It was like the old fable about the corpse’s growing a beard; it was as if the woodpile in my garage were suddenly to burst greenly into leaf. The way plants persevere in the bitterest of circumstances is utterly heartening. I can barely keep from ascribing a will to these plants, a do-or-die courage, and I have to remind myself that coded cells and mute water pressure have no idea how grandly they are flying in the teeth of it all. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 165)

Seeds and plants may have no consciousness of their own strength to persevere against the odds. But Jesus calls us to be aware of the fact that, in spite of what appears to be inefficient, unproductive, or wasteful, God’s purposes will not be thwarted. God is a generous, risk-taking, persistent sower. We are called to be the same.

I have found much comfort in the thoughts of Thomas Merton who wrote “About Results.” He said,

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. . . .

The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

. . . If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments.

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do [God’s] will, we will be helping in this process.

Let us be carefree, dedicated, generous sowers, doing what’s right simply because it is the right thing to do. Do your best, and leave the rest to God. Trust in God’s goodness, God’s abundance, and God’s persistence. For the harvest will be thirty-, sixty-, even one-hundredfold.