July 16, 2023, Be the Good Earth, Matthew 13:1-23 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ July 16, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to this sermon, click the link above. And outline of the sermon is given below:

The experts on the Scriptures in Jesus’s day were the Scribes and the Lawyers and the Pharisees. They pored over the writings of Moses and the Prophets, diligently, laboriously, committing every word to memory, every rule, every regulation, along with all the commentaries of the learned Rabbis who had pored over the Scriptures before them. That’s not a bad thing. Knowing the Bible is a wonderful thing; Scripture memory is a great thing to do.

But Jesus didn’t tell any stories about diligent scholars bent over their books, absorbed in study, as a good example to us. He told stories about farming, and baking, and fishing, and business. He painted pictures, in words, of everyday life. In today’s parable, a farmer goes out into his fields and he broadcasts his seeds, maybe barley or wheat, something everyone was familiar with. But this farmer seems to be strangely careless with his precious seed. And that’s another thing Jesus likes to do in his parables – he tells a story about familiar, everyday settings and situations, and then he throws in a surprise, a twist, something unexpected. Because the purpose of the parables isn’t to leave you with a nice tidy moral, like Aesop’s fables. The purpose of the parables is to change the way you think.

So this careless farmer walks along, broadcasting his grain, tossing it willy-nilly as he goes. Some of it falls on the hard, well-trampled pathway, and some of it falls into a bunch of thornbushes, and somehow, a bunch of the seeds end up falling on the part of the field where the bedrock is just beneath the level of the soil, that place the farmer always has to avoid when he’s plowing so he won’t break the blade of his plow.

And what happens – is exactly what everyone knows would happen to the seeds of such a careless farmer. The seeds on the path make a free lunch for the crows. The seeds in the thorn bushes make a valiant effort to grow before they are inevitably choked out. And the poor little sprouts on top of the bedrock pop up in brief splendor – and get fried to a crisp on the first hot, sunny day. But the seeds that fall where they’re supposed to, the seeds that fall onto what Jesus calls the good earth: the cool, soft, dark earth of the plowed field – they put down roots and they grow like nobody’s business, and in the harvest season they are heavy with ripe, golden grain.

We’ve heard the story so many times that maybe the meaning just seems obvious to us. But clearly it wasn’t so obvious to those first listeners, because Jesus turns around and he has to explain it to his disciples. This is a story, he told them, about how the message of the kingdom of God is sown in the world.

But we are not the farmer in the story. And we are not the seeds, diligently trying to make something of themselves. As it happens, we are the dirt. It’s a humble part we play, you might think. Not very important, it seems. But that’s not really true – because the kind of dirt we are makes all the difference in what happens to the seeds.

The seeds, Jesus told his disciples, the seeds are the message that God sows in our hearts. God plants a lot of seeds. And the story of the sower tells us that we have a part to play in what happens to the seeds when they plop into the soil of our hearts. Because the truth about seeds is that every seed contains life. Every seed has the power to grow and flourish and reproduce. But not every seed makes it.

The first problem that the seed in the story encounters is that it falls on the path and gets gobbled up by hungry birds. That seed, Jesus told his disciples, is the message that people hear but don’t understand. Like seed that falls on the hard-packed soil of a path, when the message falls where there is no understanding it is soon snatched away, as if it had never been sown.

But, notice that Jesus is explaining the meaning of this parable to his disciples because they don‘t understand. Without his explanation, this could have been a nice story soon forgotten. Jesus was doing a little cultivation himself, to make sure they understood his message, to make sure it didn’t just get snatched up.

So one of the very first points of the story is that dirt doesn’t just cultivate itself. Our first responsibility of being good dirt, we might say, is humility. We won’t do very well trying to hear God if we rely solely on our own power; we need the Holy Spirit to shine a little light on things, to be our teacher. Otherwise, no matter how smart or well-read or studious we are we don’t have very much hope – really, none at all – that his message will put down roots and make any kind of a decent crop. God is speaking to all of us, all the time, in all of his works, if we only are willing to be still, and remember to listen, and not just keep tramping the soil of our hearts hard in all our rush and bother and self-righteousness.

The second kind of dirt in the story is hard, too, but it’s hard because it’s full of rocks. I don’t know if you have ever tried to garden in rocky soil but there is pretty much no sound that is more disheartening than the sound of your shovel hitting a big rock. Carroll can vouch for that personally, especially this year. This rocky dirt is the person, Jesus says, who hears the word with joy, but there’s nowhere for the seed to put down roots. It starts to grow, but as soon as there’s any difficulty or persecution he just falls away.

Sometimes we’re listening to God on the surface; we’re wearing our faith like we wear our Sunday-best clothes, but underneath, our hearts are just rock hard with bitterness or fear or unforgiveness. And then we are just as impenetrable as that stony ground that makes that horrible, jarring “thunk” when the shovel tries to go in. If any roots grow at all, they are going nowhere, and as soon as the sun gets hot; as soon as we face any kind of opposition, God’s message will shrivel and die.

The third kind of dirt has a little more depth, but there’s a lot growing there already. Too much, in fact. The seed sown among thorns, Jesus said, is the one who hears the message, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke it out. This is when we love God, and we really believe what he says, but our calendar is really full, and we also really need our stuff, and our good insurance, and our car, and a vacation once in a while. And there’s nothing wrong with any of those things except that we all know that the more stuff we own the likelier we are to end up being owned by all that stuff. How easy it is for us – especially us Americans, who live with more wealth than anybody else on this planet, even those of us who don’t think of ourselves as wealthy – how easy it is for us to let our lives be utterly consumed by the care and feeding of our “blessings”. Most of us could use to do quite a bit of weeding in our lives, of both our time and our possessions.

You know the story of the rich young man who met Jesus. He led a virtuous life, keeping all of God’s commands rigorously. And Jesus told him, “You only need to fix one thing.” (Which is pretty impressive, I always think, because most of us would need to fix more than one thing to get our lives in order) But Jesus told him, “Just one thing – go, and sell all your stuff, and follow me.” But he couldn’t do it, and he went away, sad. Preachers are usually careful to point out that Jesus wasn’t saying that we ALL need to sell everything in order to follow him; it wasn’t a general command to everybody everywhere. And that is clearly true. But for many of us, that story makes us a little uncomfortable. And that, it seems to me, is probably a sign that our lives need some weeding.

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When we were little and our parents told us stories, I imagine most of us wanted to be the good guy. Even now, we like to identify with the one who does what is right and good and heroic. And when we hear this story about the sower and the seed and the dirt, that means we want to be the really good dirt: the good earth that is rich and deep and soft and fertile. We want to be the one who hears with humility and good understanding, the one whose heart isn’t hardened by fear or hatred, the one whose affections aren’t being strangled and choked out by all our things, and all our worries about losing them, and our desire for more. Because when Jesus told this parable, he was planting in us that desire, the longing, to be that good, soft, rich dirt. And if we seek to be that good earth, letting the Holy Spirit guide and cultivate us along the way, then this story will bear fruit in our lives, thirty or sixty or a hundred times more than we put into it, abundant fruit for God’s kingdom. We can be sure of that. Because God is the Master Gardener. +