Sermon — July 16, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
From time to time in my ministry, I’ve had a certain kind of conversation with a parent who’s concerned about their child’s spiritual life. It’s usually about how they wish their kids found the same joy and peace in a church community or practice of prayer like the parent did. I’ve never had a conversation like this about a young child, by the way; occasionally about teenagers, sometimes about young adults. But the overwhelming majority of these conversations have been parents in their 70s and 80s, even 90s, who wish their sweet little middle-aged children would go to church. Marion Wood, for example, once promised me $10 if I could get any of her kids to come to church.
In every one of these conversations, I’ve found myself offering some variation on these words: You know, they’re still young. They’ve got plenty of time. You’ve planted the seed of faith; there’s no way to know if or when it’s going to sprout.
It’s the Parable of the Sower, over and over again.
Parables are an interesting literary genre. They’re not fables, with talking animals acting out a folk tale that ends with the moral of the story, tied up in a bow. They’re not allegories, where each character is a thinly-veiled reference to someone else, like the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm who each stand for a different figure in 1930s Soviet politics. The question of a parable is not, “Okay, who’s the sower? Is it me? Is it God?” That’s the question of an allegory. And the question of the parable isn’t “So what’s the moral of the story? What’s the bottom line?” That’s the question of a fable. A parable simply tells a story in a mostly-realistic way. It points out something that’s true about the way the world works. And then it invites you to grapple with the question of what it actually means in your situation.
Jesus doesn’t always explain his parables, at least not to the general public. In fact, if you look at the verse numbers for our Gospel reading today, you’ll notice there’s a jump, from verse 9 to verse 18. And we skip some important narration. Jesus tells the parable, the story itself, to the crowd, and ends with the enigmatic phrase, “Let anyone with ears listen!” (Matthew 13:9) In other words: “Now think about that for yourself.” Then, in verse 10, his inner circle of disciples come to him and ask, “Why do you speak in parables?” Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah to the effect that he’s destined to teach in a way that people will hear, but not understand. And then he interprets the parable in the second half of our reading, not to the whole crowd who heard it, but just to that inner circle. The rest of them are left sitting by the sea, wondering: “Huh. What was that all about?”
In the parable itself, Jesus doesn’t even give us a clue. Some of the parables begin with something like, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” But no. Here, Jesus simply says, “Listen! A sower went out to sow.” (Matt. 13:3) There’s no allegorical meaning. There’s no fable with a neat moral. There’s just an observation about agricultural: Here’s what it’s like when someone is sowing seeds. Sometimes birds eat them up. Sometimes the soil is too shallow. Sometimes there are weeds. Now think about that. And then he sits down.
I’d like to think that some of them spent their whole lives thinking about that story, especially after Jesus died and his fame and glory, paradoxically, grew. A fable gets boiled down to its moral and then forgotten. An allegory is decoded once, and understood. But a parable is never over. From time to time it floats back into memory, and you have to think to yourself: Huh. I wonder what this parable means today. Because that’s the key: not to try to figure out “what the parable means,” as if a parable only ever meant one thing, but to use it to make meaning of the situation at hand.
There are a few things I notice whenever the Parable of the Sower comes back into my mind.
The first thing I notice about this parable is that there’s a big difference between the most meaningful change and the most obvious change. Every new gardener planting their first vegetables wants to see something sprout up, as quick as it can. But the more experienced gardener knows this isn’t always a good sign. Sometimes, as Jesus says, seeds fall on rocky ground, and spring up, and look amazing at first—but when the sun comes out, they shrivel up and die, because they have “no depth of soil.” (Matthew 13:5) It’s the kind of thing we sometimes call a “flash in the pan”: something that flares into sudden brilliance, and just as quickly fades away. And you’ve probably seen this before: The new road bike or home gym equipment bought in a burst of enthusiasm that soon lies forgotten somewhere in the basement or garage. The new member who joins a church or a book club or a community group, full of energy and opinions only to burn out or leave in a huff after their first year. Literally every mid-life crisis, in which that which is shiny and new seems fantastic compared to the hard work of the long term.
In fact, if you think back to the reading from Isaiah, you can take this observation a step further, because the deeper the soil, the slower the cycles of change and growth seem to be. I think of Isaiah’s description of what my middle-school science classes called “the water cycle.” The prophet is right. The rain and the snow fall from the heavens, and they do, actually, return again. But not until they’ve watered the earth. Water falls from the sky, and sinks into the earth, and then it does one of two things. It drains down through the soil and out into rivers, lakes, and seas, where it evaporates and rises back into the air. Or it’s sucked up by the plants, which use it to live but also breathe it back out, like we do. When rain falls on asphalt, it either evaporates quickly or causes flash floods. But when rain falls on deep soil, it’s forgotten, but present; unseen, unnoticed, but making the earth “bring forth and sprout.” (Isaiah 55:10) The less visible the water is from the outside, the more work it’s doing within.
And this leads me to the third thing I notice about this parable: if you took a snapshot, at any instant, you wouldn’t know which seeds were going to thrive. Maybe you could guess that the seeds lying out on the road were sitting ducks for the birds. But how could you know which were the seeds that had fallen on too-shallow, rocky soil? They look so good, sprouting up so soon! How could you know which seeds were about to be choked out by weeds? That’s the whole problem with weeds—you never know where exactly they’ll appear. There’s no way of knowing, at any given moment, which seeds are which. You don’t know whether the incredible excitement you’re feeling for something right now has any depth of soil. You don’t know whether your attention is going to be choked up by the cares of the world. You don’t know if the seeds you’ve planted over a lifetime in the world around you will one day bear fruit. All you can do is hope and trust and pray.
It’s the perfect parable for the rector’s last Sunday before a couple weeks’ vacation. Ministers all across the country are having existential crises in the pulpit this week as they realize that they’ve been scattering seed, preaching good news to their people, week after week after week, and they’re not sure if it’s going to bear fruit. But it’s also the perfect parable for the parent who wonders whether the love of God and neighbor they’ve tried to plant over six or sixteen or sixty years will grow into a child’s living faith. And in fact, it’s a parable for every one of us.
Every one of us walks through the world, scattering seeds. Every conversation we have, with a stranger or with a friend, every chance encounter and every life-long relationship, bears within in the potential for joy and love to grow. If you’re like me, you probably remember things a teacher or a mentor said to you, long after they’ve forgotten. They never knew that that little patch of soil would turn out to be so deep. And neither did we. Only God knows. But it’s God who is the Sower, in the end. It’s God whose word of love is the seed from which our love grows. Every day, all around us, God’s word goes forth, God sows the seeds of hope in us and through us; and some of those seeds will bear fruit— who knows which ones, and who knows when—but they will bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.
Amen.