O
Lord, forgive the sins of the preacher, that only your Word may be preached and
only your Word be heard ☩ in the name of the Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
You’ve heard the phrase “Good things come in small packages.” Well, the same might be said for wisdom – that it often comes in small packages. Most wisdom sayings are pithy statements that are chock full of meaning: “the early bird catches the worm,” for example. That simple phrase conveys so much meaning and actually makes the point better than if we tried to explain it by saying “Sometimes in life, there are opportunities that are only available if you are early and follow the natural order of things.” That’s clunky and not at all memorable. But, “the early bird catches the worm”? As they say, that’ll preach.
Jesus
was many things – a savior, a prophet, a priest, a king. Today we’re entering
into a series of readings that will unfold over the next several weeks that
show us that Jesus is also an outstanding wisdom teacher. And Jesus does this
with small packages of wisdom called the parables. The word “parable” comes
from Greek and is made up of two words: para,
meaning “beside” and ballo, meaning “to
throw.” Parables, literally, are words that are thrown beside something. You’re
trying to describe one thing, so you use a parable to come alongside it in
meaning. Parables were commonplace among Jewish rabbis, they were known as a mashal, in Hebrew, which is something
like a riddle. So a parable, like a riddle, is intended to make us think and
requires us to change our perspective.
Parables
though are not analogies – they don’t have a special key that unlocks the
meaning if we just knew how to decipher the symbols. Yes, parables have objects
in them that stand in for something else, but a parable is so much more than
the sum of its parts. Even if we understood all the different symbols in a
parable, as we do in today’s parable when Jesus tells us what the different soils
represent, that still doesn’t get us to the full meaning of the parable.
As wisdom literature,
parables are also intended to lead us to action. The parables convey truths
that we align ourselves with. But more than being just wisdom about daily
living, like “the early bird catches the worm,” the parables of Jesus are
revealed truths to us about the nature of the Kingdom of God. So we do well to
listen deeply to the parables of Jesus as they are revealing to us the deepest
truths of our faith.
The
parables are also subversive and surprising stories. Yes, the parables can
teach and entertain, but more than anything, the parables implicate. Anytime we
come away from a parable thinking “Yea, that’s what I already thought,” then we
haven’t thoroughly grappled with the parable. Afterall, it was the parables
that got Jesus killed. If Jesus had just been a nice guy who helped people to
become more spiritual, he would not have been a threat to the Temple, he would
not have become an enemy of the empire, and we would not be talking about him
this morning. But Jesus is an antagonist to the status quo and his parables
disrupt the way we live and move in the
world.
And
this helps us to understand why Jesus told parables. As we’ve already seen, the
parables pack more punch than just the words on the page, so the parables can
have a multiplicity and depth of meanings. As stories, they point to truth
rather than defining truth, which means the parables can actually read us more
than we read them. The parables can be a mirror of sorts that allows us to see
ourselves in the story. And where we see ourselves can teach us a lot, even things
we don’t want to learn. But perhaps the most obvious reason for using parables
is that they, using a phrase from Emily Dickinson, “tell all the truth, but
tell it slant.” Parables have, embedded within them, plausible deniability.
Jesus tells some parables directly against the religious and political leaders –
but if he had delivered these invectives directly, his crucifixion would have
come much earlier. The parables allow Jesus to deliver the telling blow of
truth all in the guise of a simple story.
Over
the next few weeks, we’ll be hearing parables in readings from Matthew, so bear
in mind that parables help us to enter into the subversive, challenging, and
transforming Kingdom of God.
Today, we have the
well-known parable about a sower who scatters seed. One of the things we have
to do when we read the parables is to try to understand the world in which
Jesus told these parables. St. Luke’s has a few farmers among our members, but
most of us aren’t in the business of scattering seeds. One of these families at
St. Luke’s, the Downings, had us out to their farm a few years. We saw where
they raise the chickens and grow the crops – all of which are great and
available at the local farmer’s market. And though I’m not a farmer, I could
tell that they didn’t just throw seed around, hoping it would yield crops. No,
they had an organized system in place.
The
parable’s method of sowing seed doesn’t make sense today, and it didn’t make
sense in Jesus’ time. That’s the first head-scratching moment in this parable. What
kind of sower is this? Not a very good one. It would be like an investment
banker who invested stocks without doing any research, but just randomly put
money into the stock market. It’s like a doctor who prescribes a couple of
dozen medicines without first looking at your test results, hoping that one of
them will fix whatever problem you’re dealing with. This sower is wasting seed
and doesn’t seem to be very careful about where the seed is being thrown.
And
so, as we’d expect, this sower’s failure rate is around 75%. Some of the seeds
fell on a path where birds just ate them up. Sure, some of those seeds might
get a second chance at some point with natural fertilizer added, but that’s not
the most effective way to sow seeds. Jesus tells us that this is like the sort
of people who hear the Gospel, but then are swept up by false and evil
narratives that carry them away from the love of God. Other seeds fall on rocky
ground where the roots cannot go deep, and so they abandon the faith when they
might need to change their worldviews or they experience suffering. Still other
seeds grow up surrounded by thorns and get distracted by power and wealth and
ignore the Kingdom. And then there are those seeds that fell into good soil and
brought forth good fruit.
The
parables point us towards grace – so this isn’t a parable about you deciding
which kind of soil you are. That’s not the point of this parable, and actually
takes us in the wrong direction, though many people misinterpret it this way. It’s
not surprising or challenging. And if that were the point – you can’t really
change something like soil. You can’t control the weeds and thorns that grow up
around you. You can’t change the fact that birds come and pick up the seed.
Please, don’t read this as a parable about trying to be good soil. That isn’t
the point and there’s not a shred of grace in such a reading.
Instead,
where the surprise comes is the harvest – a hundredfold, sixtyfold, and thirtyfold.
The idea of a “fold” is how many grains you get for each seed planted. Scholars
tell us that an average harvest would be something like fivefold. A really good
harvest would be something like tenfold. So thirtyfold is unprecedented – you’d
be amazed by such a once-in-a-lifetime harvest. Sixtyfold is double that – it’s
not even really possible. A hundredfold might as well be infinity – it’s beyond
imaginable.
Even
if this sower was a Master Gardener and did everything exactly right and had
lots of luck, the thirtyfold return would have made the original hearers of
this parable roll their eyes for being unrealistic. Instead of being a parable
about works righteousness or the “Protestant work ethic,” which runs contrary
to the Gospel, this is a parable about God’s super-abundance that is given
graciously. The Kingdom is the sort of place where you don’t get what you
deserve, thanks be to God.
This
sower deserved to be fired by the landowner. He deserved to not have enough
food on his table for planting so haphazardly. But, by God’s grace, we don’t
get what we deserve. Instead, we get God’s love. It’s one of the foundational
aspects of our identity at St. Luke’s, right there in our identity statement – abundant
grace. We strive to remember that we are given abundant grace, which means we
don’t have to prove ourselves, we don’t have to posture for position over and
against others, we don’t have judge ourselves or others harshly for our
shortcomings, we don’t to worry about whether or not we are worthy of love,
dignity, or respect because we are, we don’t have to worry about whether or not
there is enough, and we don’t have to worry about the risk involved with loving God
or loving our neighbor as ourselves. Abundant grace is what enables God to transform
of our lives, it is what allows us to experience, here and now, the abundant life
that Jesus came to bring us.
And
this abundant grace comes because God is loving and gracious, not because we
are the right kind of soil, not because we water the seeds of faith that we are
given, not because we happen to be lucky enough to have been planted in a place
without thorns growing up all around us. No, God gives the growth and the
harvest is going to be amazing.
A
way of understanding this abundance is to see the sower as the Father and Jesus
as the seed. God the sower isn’t much interested in finding the best places to
scatter the love of Jesus but just throws that seed into every nook and cranny
of our lives and our world. Jesus is everywhere. Yes, there are places where
the Gospel doesn’t always take root for various reasons. But the harvest is
going to be beyond what we could ever anticipate or imagine. This is a parable
that gives us hope in the midst of difficult times. Though the sower had few
prospects for a good harvest, though we might have reasons to be hopeless,
uncertain, and frustrated, though we all make mistakes and experience failure, the
harvest is in God’s hands. That’s the Good News of this parable.
Can the church fulfill its mission when our doors are closed and we can’t gather? Can we overcome the sins of this nation’s past? Can we rectify the failures of our political system and social structures? Can you and I be forgiven for the sins that we have committed? This parable tells us that the harvest of Resurrection life will be abundant – some thirtyfold, some sixtyfold, some a hundredfold. Because of Jesus Christ, there is abundant grace for all. Let anyone with ears listen!
