10 July 2011 The Sower and the Seed Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

10 July 2011 The Sower and the Seed Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

It was my grandfather who showed me how to use and reuse wire, old inner tubes, various nuts and bolts, clips and pins, used boards, old car parts, discarded bits of carpet and any other used but useful piece of refuse that with a bit of luck and good old fashioned ingenuity might fix just about anything. He would not buy something new or even reconditioned until he tried to fix it or repair it or get around it or do without it.

My brother Jim and I helped on more than one occasion re-roof the house my grandfather built. We spent a fair amount of time out in the garage rooting around in a bucket or a box looking for the right thing to fix something.

Granddaddy hated waste. Like lots of people of his generation who grew up during the Great Depression, long before we became environmentally sensitive, he loved to recycle things. He lived the motto of not wanting, not wasting.

I am reminded of a poster from that time, an advertisement that was put out by the Green Giant Food Company. The poster showed a well-cleaned plate, just after someone had eaten the food on the plate and licked it clean. Over the plate were the words, “The plate of a patriotic American.” Some of you may remember it. We had a war on. There were shortages. Eat you peas. Clean your plate for the good of the war effort was the message.

My grandmother lived by that philosophy too. I moved in to live with them when I was fourteen or fifteen. We always had plenty of food, but we were expected to eat our plates clean. A clean ‘happy’ plate was a patriotic plate!

Most of us have this nature about us. We don’t like to be wasteful. When we are properly motivated we will take the time and make the effort to take care of our physical, mental, and spiritual resources. It is the faithful thing to do, to respect and use with reverence all that God has given us. Wasting just may be a sin.
Certainly, there is no eleventh commandment about being wasteful. But, how often do we find, in scripture or in life, expectations of a disciple that seem to run counter intuitive to our very sensibility? At times, we are not so naturally inclined to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Many aspects of our personality make discipleship somewhat of a reach for many of us. And this parable in Matthew’s gospel this morning of the sower speaks to one of them. We are by nature efficient. We don’t like to waste anything.

But then there is Jesus. In today’s scripture he tells the story about a man who went forth to sow. A farmer went forth to sow seed as farmers have done for centuries. But this farmer had to be one of the most inept farmers who have ever sown seed.

Jesus says the farmer goes out to his field. We know what should come next. The farmer carefully removes all the rocks and weeds. He plows the soil into neat, straight furrows. And then he puts the seed in the furrows, carefully covering up the seed with about a quarter of an inch of soil, each seed about eight inches from every other seed. Like us, the farmer deftly follows the directions on the Burpee Seed package!

Well, no, he did no such thing. Jesus says the farmer simply goes out and with no preparation or care starts slinging seed!

Once the seed germinates, and it is time for harvest, the harvest is rather disappointing. Most of the seed has been wasted. Of course, you would expect this with this kind of farmer!

Some of the seed has been thrown onto the roadside. What on earth did the farmer expect by that? Much of the seed has been eaten by birds where it was not sufficiently covered by the soil. Other seed thrown into clumps of weeds has been choked out by the weeds.
The amazing thing about this is that Jesus says there was a miraculous harvest. About ten percent of the seed actually germinated. Jesus enthusiastically calls this an amazingly rich harvest, one that brought the farmer great joy.
Don’t you find it interesting that the sort of farming we would call a failure Jesus calls a success? He sure looks at things differently than the way we look at things.
In the name of efficiency and the greatest good for the greatest number, the modern world has stacked people on top of each other, piled human beings together, forced us into large groups – the herd. Jesus appears to point to another way in which, though a minority of the seed actually germinated and bore fruit, it is considered to be a wonderful, miraculous event.

Certainly with this formula there is a great deal of waste in the kingdom of God. Our way of figuring things would surely say so. A great deal of seed is being put at risk with this sort of sowing. A lot of otherwise good seed is going to be wasted.
But then we think about how God created the world. Why didn’t God create just one species of flower, for example? That ought to be miracle enough. But God didn’t stop there. God created a lot of flowers, all different colors and sizes and shapes. Few of the world’s flowers are actually seen by many people. Why did God continue and waste so much beauty? There does seem to be a sort of extravagance built right into the grain of the universe. A great deal of waste. God is effusive, or we might say, wasteful. Jesus calls it something different; he calls it a divine wonder.

Much of the great good that this God does is unseen by the world, unacknowledged, and unnoticed. Few of us will ever read through the entire Bible; much less comprehend all of it. God has just said too much to us, on too many different subjects, on too diverse occasions. So we hire preachers, to plow through the Bible, and then reduce what we have read to four spiritual laws, or three basic principles, or six fundamentals. We human beings acts as if it is our job to comprehend all of God, but in order to do that we have to considerably reduce God, bring everything down to the lowest common denominator, something that you can put on a bumper sticker. “Jesus saves” or “My boss is a Jewish Carpenter”, or one I saw yesterday, “Real men love Jesus.”

But then we are reminded that God is bigger than all of our reductions and generalizations. There is a great deal more to be said and thought about God than we can say or think.

Sometimes people emerge from church mumbling, “I didn’t really get anything out of that service today.” It’s true, let’s be honest here.
Am I supposed to take that as a criticism? Well, usually I don’t. Perhaps the sermon was focused on people who are going through times of difficulty and trial. Maybe that person is experiencing smooth sailing right now, no problems. So naturally they “didn’t get anything out of it.”

The point is that church is not simply the efficient, individual and personal answer to “what do I get out of it?” Maybe the point of church is more often, “what does my neighbor get out of it?” In church, a great deal is wasted. More is said than we really need to hear. Many times we sing a hymn that does nothing to uplift our heart. But maybe that hymn uplifts the heart of our neighbor. And Jesus has made our neighbor, and our neighbor’s needs our problem too.

So maybe we should say that to be a good disciple we have to have training in how to sit through a lot of church, a great many worship services that are wasted.
Waste isn’t reserved just for a few. Some folks actually complain that their pastor is disorganized and the he/she doesn’t use church time well. Sometimes it is true. We are working not just for the church, but also for Jesus. When a pastor wastes an entire afternoon with a troubled person this may not be the most efficient use of the pastor’s talent, training, and time, but are these the only measures for what is at the heart of the reign of God?

In fact, I have had folk say to me, “I don’t get about 90 percent of what’s said in your sermons.”

I might be concerned about this low percentage of comprehension. But then I hear, with a twinkle in the eye, “But the 10 percent I do understand keeps me coming back, Sunday after Sunday, and gives me quite enough to chew on the rest of the week.” Sometimes only about ten percent of the seed actually germinates.
The Methodist Bishop, William Willimon tells the story of a woman, a graduate of John Hopkins University, who went on to Duke University where she earned a graduate degree in nursing. She did so well academically that the faculty asked her to stay on and be a professor of nursing.

Bishop Willimon did not meet her until she was in her 60’s. By that time she had left the nursing faculty and she was working in an inner-city health center, a volunteer, for those who had AIDS. One afternoon, talking to her and her friend, the Bishop was saying that he had so much respect for the work she was doing, for the way she was using her gifts.

Her friend said, “Do you? Frankly, I consider it a waste. When I think of all the good she could be doing and I consider the brilliant career that she simply tossed away, I consider her story to be sad, rather than inspiring.”
What a waste? That Jesus came to us reaching out to us in love. He told us the truth about ourselves and our world and the truth about God. And we responded by rejecting him, abandoning him, nailing him to a cross, where his life blood drained out of him. What a waste.

Even there, he kept reaching out to us, embracing us, forgiving us. And then when God raised him from his death, he came back to us again, back to the very people with whom he had failed so miserably. He came back to the very ones who betrayed him and promised us, “I will never leave you.” No, no matter what. No matter how you waste your life. I will never leave you.
What a waste.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen

Additional resource:
“Pulpit Resource”, Volume 36, Number 3, 2008, pages 9-12.

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