Sunday, July 16, 2017 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Sown Freely

Matt Helms
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 65:1–8
Isaiah 55:10–13
Matthew 13:1–9, 18–23

Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can.
In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can.
As long as you ever can.

John Wesley

This parable of the sower is among Jesus’ best known parables—well-attested in the Gospels and still included in most Sunday School curricula today—but its agrarian metaphor can be hard for some of us to relate to, particularly those of us who do not have a green thumb. So speaking as someone who decidedly does not have a green thumb—as someone who has seen jade plants and other supposedly easy to care for succulents die on his watch and as someone who somehow killed a cactus and strictly tries to purchase fake plants for his home—I’m grateful that Jesus takes the time to explain this parable to his disciples.

The seed is God’s word—the word of the kingdom—and God’s people are the soil, Jesus goes on to explain to the disciples. Some types of soil are hospitable to growth; others are not (I mean, even a novice gardener like me knows all about poor soil and poor growth). But curiously, after explaining the joy of the good soil—people who not only hear and understand God’s word but who bear fruit and yield—Jesus’ explanation of the parable ends.

Many scholars read Matthew’s inclusion of this parable as an explanation to his community about why much of Israel has not accepted Jesus as Messiah and Lord. The hearts and minds of many people are not open, the parable seems to assert, but we—the hearers of this parable—are among the good soil, the ones who hear, understand, and bear the fruits of God’s kingdom.

The truth is that many of us have that immediate reaction upon hearing this parable: we attempt to self-measure and categorize what type of soil we are, because all of us want to be among the good soil. We hear of God’s word being scattered on the rocky ground—springing up quickly with joy, but not having the roots to last—and we think, “surely not I, Lord.” We hear of God’s word being scattered among the thorns—growing among the lure of wealth and the cares of the world and eventually being taken in by them—and we think, “Surely not I, Lord.” We can think of examples of other Christians we’ve known who might be like that, but surely we belong under the category of good soil.

In this year when we are remembering the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and thinking back to some of the forefathers of our denomination, it’s not hard to hear echoes of Calvin’s language of the elect in this parable: God’s chosen people who are called to bear fruit. In fact, Calvin himself cited this parable in his Institutes as he developed his understanding of what it meant to be among God’s elect, informed further by his understanding of irresistible grace. But while this parable certainly speaks to how God’s word is received in the world, we make a mistake if we view the lesson of this parable solely through the lens of what type of soil we and others belong to. We have to ignore that impulse within us that seeks to categorize ourselves safely among the good soil and then to move on. Instead, I believe that this season of our church year invites us to explore this parable through a different point of view.

We are in the longest season of our church calendar at the moment, a time of year that can be boringly referred to as “Ordinary Time,” but it is also known in the lectionary as the Season after Pentecost. The Day of Pentecost is seen as the birth of the church, as Jesus’ disciples both received and were empowered by the Holy Spirit to continue Jesus’ earthly mission of sharing God’s love, grace, and the gift of new life. So if we approach our parable from a Season after Pentecost mindset, one in which we are charged with carrying out Jesus’ earthly mission, we can see an important shift in identification taking place: we are no longer the soil in this parable; we are instead the sower, spreading God’s word as best we can.

This is not how we typically approach this parable. After all, when Jesus delivered it to the disciples, there was no doubt that he was the sower, the teacher of God’s word. But in this post-Pentecost season, we are asked to change our mindset. If we as followers of Jesus are not the soil but are instead the sower, it can bring out new meanings and lessons from this familiar text.

One of the first things that we notice is how undiscerning the sower is about where he or she is throwing seed. There does not appear to be any sort of plan. Seeds are tossed everywhere, regardless of the terrain. As I made clear at the start, I’m not an expert gardener, but it seems clear that this type of distribution is a pretty bad strategy, and perhaps it is even downright wasteful. We are far more used to what I would call transactional sowing. What I mean by that is that we plant only where we might expect growth to occur; we invest only in what we deem to be good soil; we give in the expectation that it will lead to us getting something in return. That is just wise practice, most of us would say, because few of us want to invest time and energy in things we determine to be lost causes.

But this parable isn’t just about planting crops. It’s about expanding our way of being, challenging us to grow beyond merely living and giving prudently. Sowing seed freely, even on ground where we don’t think it will survive, may sound like bad business and a waste of effort. But sharing God’s word as individuals and as the church is not the same as following a business plan or increasing the efficiency of our efforts; it is a call into places we might not expect. In the words of Theodore Wardlaw, president of Austin Theological Seminary, “The sower throws seed not only on good soil, but also amid the rocky, barren, broken places, in order to suggest that God’s vision for the world is itself often apprehended in strange and broken places.”

If we read this parable through the lens of being the sower, we notice that there is no mention of the sower regretting sowing seeds onto the other types of ground. It is stating matter-of-factly that God’s word won’t always be heard, but that doesn’t change our charge. Our job as sowers isn’t to determine when and where we are called to spread the seeds of God’s love, prejudging how they will land and grow. It is to sow freely, trusting that God’s word will be at work. Jesus modeled that behavior throughout his ministry—spending his time with the tax collectors, outcasts, lepers, sinners, and anyone else whom society viewed as being on the margins. Jesus did not share his message of transformative love and grace with only a select few. Jesus’ good news was a gift that was freely given to all, and in this post-Pentecost reality, we are expected to spread that same message freely and as best we can, even in places that we might not expect it to be received.

Sadly, I cannot claim to have consistently lived up to those lofty expectations in my life, but I will never forget a particular experience that I had while serving as a hospital chaplain one summer during seminary. I, along with several others in my chaplaincy cohort, would occasionally be assigned to an overnight on-call shift, meaning that if a patient or family member asked to see the staff chaplain sometime during the night, I’d be paged and would then head over to their room. This was not an overly common thing, typically only happening once or twice a night, but it definitely gave me all the respect in the world for the doctors and nurses who somehow keep lucid minds during the marathon shifts that they routinely endure. I often would awake in a fog when I was paged, and on this particular occasion I remember still being groggy as I made my way across the hospital after being paged to a room in another wing. But when I arrived at the room, I was jolted awake by the sight of an armed police officer standing outside the room. I double-checked the room number I had been given to make sure that I wasn’t making a mistake, but the officer beckoned me over. “He wanted to see a priest,” the officer said. “Don’t know what for.”

With a deep breath and not really knowing what to expect, I entered the room to find a man not much older than myself handcuffed to the bed. More than a little fearful, I shut the door and pulled a chair over to the bed—out of arm’s reach, I’m embarrassed to say—and asked him what had brought him here. He’d had a heart scare in prison, he shared, but that wasn’t actually why he had asked for someone to talk to. He’d grown up in a rough neighborhood here in Chicago, he explained, and by the time he was in middle school he was recruited into his neighborhood’s gang. The gang was his family—there was a sense of belonging and protection—but it also asked him to do things that filled him deeply with guilt and regret. He talked about times that he stole, dealt drugs, and, tearing up, he talked about a night when his gang opened fire on someone, a dispute over something that he didn’t even remember, but what he did remember was firing a bullet that struck this person. He and everyone he was with turned and ran after that happened, and he had no idea what that person’s name was or if he lived or died. The memory haunted him to this day. “Do you think it’s possible for a person to change?” he asked me pointedly. “Do you think that God can forgive someone like me?”

Looking back, I wish I had had a more eloquent speech prepared for him, but doing the best I could, I told him that, yes, it is definitely possible for a person to change and that I believed that God was always ready to forgive us and make us anew. The actions of our past don’t need to define our future. When he asked for a Bible verse about God’s forgiveness, my mind turned to mush, and chapters and verses blurred together. After leaving his room I thought of the parable of the prodigal son or that we could have said the Lord’s Prayer together or any number of other things, but in that moment I relayed the story of Jonah, a prophet from God who ran away, only to brought back, and a city that was transformed and made anew. He gave me a funny look, but I think he understood what I was going for, and after reading part of it together, I said a prayer with him and left the room, hoping that he felt a sense of God’s love and grace.

The truth is that I’ll probably never know the impact of my imperfect proclamations about God’s love and forgiveness, but as I replayed that conversation in my head that night and thought of things that I wish I said—and even as I replay it now—the thing that I most regretted about our interaction was the way that I prejudged that man before entering the room. I never would have thought that this prisoner, someone whom both I and our culture unconsciously and automatically categorize as rocky soil, could potentially be such fertile ground for God’s transformative love, and that is an indictment of me, as someone who is called to freely sow the message of God’s love and grace.

That is why this parable is such an important reminder: we are called to give wholeheartedly, no matter what, to spread God’s good news—even in those times when we might be filled with cynicism about its efficacy or doubt our own ability to sow it properly. If we are each called to be sowers of God’s love and grace, we cannot pick and choose with whom we share that love and grace. It is meant for everyone, with no exceptions. God’s love and grace can break through even when we might least expect it, and as such we must move beyond only caring for those whom we have deemed to be good soil, because that is still transactional sowing. We must move beyond investing our efforts only in the lives of those close to us, our family and friends. Those efforts are important and vital, absolutely, but they can’t be the only places where we give and then expect to see a change in the world.

Instead, we are called to sow unconditionally—not seeing people outside our circles as others or strangers, but as brothers and sisters in Christ. We are called to give, not expecting to receive but out of gratitude to the God who has given us so much.

That sort of unconditional sowing is hard to wrap our minds around, and it will require us breaking outside of our habits and routines and on to different paths and types of ground. But knowing that we have been entrusted in this season after Pentecost with the responsibility of sowing God’s word in this world, we go forth—volunteering, advocating, giving, and serving in all the ways that we can, in all the places we can, to all the people that we can—seeking new ways to share God’s love.

Friends, where is God calling you to sow that message of grace and love with people or places you might usually avoid? How is God calling you to invest in new ways in our city, country, or world—investing not just for you or your family’s sake, but for the sake of all people?

I am asking myself those same questions as well, because this parable is not one of comfort. It is a challenge to each of us to be unconditional sowers of God’s love and grace on whatever ground we might find ourselves.

So may God’s love and grace indeed be sown freely by each of us. Amen.