Good Soil

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
07.13.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Last year, rather than continuing to mow our mostly unused back yard, I yielded to this itching vision I'd had of turning the yard into a wildflower meadow. Rather than spending twenty minutes of my life every single week spewing fumes and carbon into the air, I let the back grow. I also prepared and seeded several strategic patches with a mix of indigenous wildflowers. It was to be glorious, tall waving grass intermingled with speckles of reds and blues and golds, through which Bambi and Thumper and all their little forest friends could cavort in Technicolor splendor.

But I planted too late in the season, and the drought hit hard last year, and the whole project withered. I got maybe three flowers, two of which were clovers that would have come up anyway. Meh.

This year, I clung to that vision of our backyard as a rainbow riot of color. I didn’t want to let it go. I wanted my own little idyllic slice of springtime floral Eden. So I let it grow again. I did more research. I spent the better part of two Saturday afternoons turning the soil. I seeded earlier in the season with a selection of shade-tolerant flowers. I carefully monitored the patches to insure that they were adequately watered. I checked on the progress dotingly, looking every evening for signs of progress. And sure enough, it began. That beginning was certainly promising enough. Seedlings sprang up right on cue, a glorious splash of delicate green growth. I could see that vision of perfection rising on a thousand tiny shoots.

And then they just did nothing. They didn’t grow. They didn’t change. Weeks passed. Still just feeble looking shoots. More weeks passed. The grass grew just great, soaring up past the stalled seedlings. Eventually, four lonely little flowers blossomed, but even they quickly faded to nothing. The patches that I had cultivated and sweated over and seen in my mind's eye as lavishly painted with Columbine and Cornflower and Sweet Williams and Snapdragons and Poppies were...just...tall...grass.

Not enough sunlight, it seems. It was not to be.

Back in mid-June, I took the mower to it. I just fired up my Honda and plowed into the flowerless meadow, and the tall grass fell before me and the flowerless seedlings were churned into mulch beneath the whirling blades. It was all very satisfying. Very cathartic. I gave up on the idea of having wildflowers in the yard at all.

Earlier this month, I got ready to mow my front yard one morning. It’s a big flat patch. It gets a ton of sun. And to my great amazement and delight, I saw that under the bright light of morning it was a riot of little golden flowers and tiny white-pink clovers. All that work, all that labor, all that digging and turning and seeding and watering had yielded nothing. But where I’d put in no labor at all...and shoot, even mowing it down every week...the flowers came. Hard to understand.

Almost as hard to understand as what we hear from the lips of Christ this morning. This little teaching is called the Parable of the Sower. It involves the story of a man who goes out planting. He seems...well...a little careless with his seed. He sows it on a path, where the birds chow down on it. He sows it on rocky ground, and get blasted by the sun. He sows some among weeds, where they can’t grow. But some, seemingly at random, falls in good soil...and grows and grows into a truly impressive harvest.

Jesus delivers this message while bobbing in a little boat as a great crowd gathers to listen. We don’t hear the response of the crowds, but we do hear the response of the disciples.

In the section that has been conveniently edited out of today’s reading, the disciples come to Jesus right after he teaches, and say...um...hey...Jesus...why are you telling them stories? I’m not sure they get it. Can’t you make it a little easier for them? Can’t you make it a little easier for us? But there is a reason that Jesus does not give people five easy to understand practical lessons for their lives now. There’s a reason Jesus tells them this strange, obscure, confusing story.

That’s because Jesus views understanding as a gift from God. In order to get understanding from parables, you also need to be focused. Storytelling as a style of teaching is intentionally merciless. Rabbis and teachers of wisdom commonly used storytelling, because that way of teaching rewards good insightful students and punishes weak students. It’s not the friendliest technique for developing self-esteem...but then again, that’s not the point. If you’re perceptive and open, or care enough to ask, you might get it. If you’re lazy...well...then you won’t get it. And the rabbis didn’t care. It was your loss.

But though he was intentionally hard to understand, a significant part of the point that Jesus was making was that His teaching and the Good News it bore were not something that would be given only to a chosen few. It’s not just for those folks who are so obviously, flagrantly spiritual. It’s not for the folks who spend every waking moment in church, or every moment studying scripture. It’s right there for everyone. It’s given to the lazy. It’s given to the willfully ignorant. It’s given to the greedy. Everybody gets a shot at it.

And while ignorance or laziness or a willingness to spend more time in line for a 3G iPhone than you do trying to understand the reason for your existence can get in the way of receiving the Word, one thing that’s worth paying attention to is the “foolishness” of the sower. Who’s going to bother seeding their sidewalk? Who sows seeds on rocky ground? Who pitches seeds among weeds? Why not just plant the seeds in carefully furrowed and fertilized earth?

The answer lies, I think, in a sower who knows that sometimes the places that seem rocky and choked with dandelions can, in fact, produce. Just because something seems...at that moment...to be untenable doesn’t mean it can’t change. That it can’t become something different.