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When I was a teenager, I loved reading magazines. Each month I would get Tiger Beat, and Teen, and Seventeen, and Young Miss, and Mademoiselle…some of you might remember those. I would pore over them. You could tear out some of the pages and they’d unfold into one big poster. I had this ritual. I’d wait until the weekend, and I’d put up those posters in my room – on this wall posters of my celebrity crush, on that wall, I’d tape up outfits that I really liked and would try to imitate and wear myself. Then, I’d pick out a specific sparkly pen or colored pencil, and I’d sit down with the quizzes. I could not wait to do those quizzes.
They told you everything about yourself: from what celebrity would be the perfect date for you to what your perfume revealed about your personality.
But a quiz is never just a quiz.
And you don’t have to be a teenager to know this.
Quizzes carry meaning.
They tell us what groups we belong to; they reveal what we value and they expose our patterns.
But quizzes have a shadow side.
They can reveal limits: by slotting us into categories that sometimes do not allow for the fluid movement of a person’s arc deeper into their humanity.
You might think that you cannot change.
Today’s story, the parable of the sower, is often talked about like it’s a quiz. It’d sound like this: “Is your heart a) an empty path where God’s word does not grow at all, or b) do you have a heart with rocky ground with shallow soil and no depth where you’re blown about willy nilly…or c) are you thorny, where the word of God is choked by bristles of life…or the coveted d) is your heart prepared and primed to receive and understand Jesus’s teachings?”
It may seem easy to plug ourselves into those different soils like it’s an Enneagram or the Myers Briggs personality test or a Buzzfeed quiz, or like choosing an Instagram filter or a personal aesthetic, like clean girl or soft life.
We’re called to answer “d”, but sometimes it is hard to do that.
I think the parable of the sower shows us this:
We will experience each of those different soils at various points in our lives.
We’re never just one of them.
Wounds of the world may numb us, so that all we can do is go through the motions. It can be hard to have hope.
We may have thorny complications in a relationship that obscures the glimmers of God trying to come through the cracks.
Rocks in our past may blind us from seeing where God’s word is taking root.
I think the parable of the sower grounds us in this truth: Sometimes it’s not about seeing yourself in the Bible, it’s about seeing God in the Bible.
In this parable, God is the sower.
I wonder if you and I, together, might come closer to the Gospel of Matthew’s intent with God as the sower.
At this point in Matthew, we’re about to embark on a parable extravaganza. Today we’d call it parable-maaxxing! These parables carry Jesus’s reality and his hopes. He uses descriptions of the everyday world right in front of him, to help the disciples and crowds envision the Kingdom world that’s right in front of God. Jesus’ parables told the Kingdom story through everyday life: there’s the ground, the wheat, the field, a mustard seed, yeast, grain, harvest, shrubs, trees, nest, soil and seeds.
In 1st century Palestine, seeds were valuable. They were priceless. Farmers had to be precise when planting them. To be a credible farmer then and now, you don’t plant willy nilly. They don’t scatter seeds with abandon. There’s a science to it.
But the Bible tells us a different story.
God does scatter seeds willy nilly. God is always sowing.
That is the extravagant, relentless love of God. You might even say it’s reckless.
God throws seeds all over! Without worrying if the soil is perfect.
When you’re on a bare path or feel closed off, God loves you.
When you don’t know what you believe, God will not abandon you.
When you’ve done all the right things and life doesn’t turn out the way you planned, God will not replace you.
When the world is so thorny and rocky that think your prayers don’t make a difference, God really really loves you.
When it’s smooth sailing, or life is mostly good, but then your world is rocked by a diagnosis or grief or heartbreak, God reaches for you and pours perpetual love.
This is the nature of God: that God sows even in rocky soil. Which tells us Nothing can separate you from the love of God.
Now, what if Jesus is offering us a different reading? What if Jesus is saying that We are the sower.
Even when you don’t know what the outcome will be, you are called to be the sower too.
But there’s a tension that makes me squirmy. These two lines: “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path.” And also, “But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”
We could read this as Jesus saying that you have to understand every word of his teachings or else you’re doomed! That our hearts have to be perfectly prepared all the time? That could make people want to stop their spiritual journey!
But I don’t think Jesus is saying that.
I think the hinge point is the word “understand.”
The deeper meaning of the Hebrew root of “understand” can be found in a related verbal root, which means to build. To look closely, to see beneath the surface. The Greek origin literally translates to mentally putting pieces together, to send or bring together. And in Old English . . . the word “understand” implies an insight that goes beyond intellectual knowledge, it’s to be between, in the midst of.
Did you catch all that? In this context, “understand” means build, send, bring together, be in the midst of.
That sounds like the giving and receiving within relationship.
I think Jesus is saying, Listen to me, be with me and with other people, be in the midst of my words and God’s love, and together lets go and build God’s kingdom.
We see examples of this all over the Bible! The disciples often didn’t understand that Jesus was the Messiah, nor the deeper meaning behind some of what he said nor how they could be healers too. They might not have intellectually grasped it all, but Jesus still sent for them, and they followed him, and they were open to receiving his guidance. That is how we till the soil so that it’s good.
We’re doing that here on Sundays through worship and prayer. We do it when we ask for help and when we offer it to others.
I can think of a time when it was hard for me to do that.
In the first couple years of my time at Epiphany I was intimidated to go to Bible study. I wanted to go, but I thought I had to know the Bible inside and out and be able to recite passages from memory. I thought everyone in the class did that! When I shared that with a former parishioner she told me that No, most people in that class don’t know the Bible inside and out, they ask questions and they just want to listen and learn and be with the people in this community.
I was letting my lack of “understanding” close me off from being drawn into the presence of God.
Finally, I went to Bible study. I still go all these years later. I don’t have all the answers but I’ve built friendships there and learned about the depths of God’s love. That’s the context of my life and it’ll look different in yours. The point is: don’t let the bigness of God keep you from planting small actions of love.
Jesus doesn’t expect us to understand everything. Jesus wants our openness, not our obligation. Jesus wants us to be receptive to his word, not only to recite it.
Be the sower, because that can help someone else grow.
It’s like we heard in Isaiah: what comes from God, rains on us and does not stop. It is sustenance, and our purpose is to give and receive it, person to person, over and over again.
That is us sharing the lavish love of our generous God.
Matthew shows us something deeper, another revelation:
if we are called to sow, what seeds are you planting?
We live in a culture and a city that prizes efficiency. That can often lead to transactional responses and fractured relationships.
This parable takes us to a different place. And when we arrive there we can see…
that these seeds are not fairy dust; they are not just any old seeds.
God’s seeds are particular. God made us in the image and likeness of God and so God’s seeds are ours too.
Seeds of healing the wounded, of challenging oppression when we see it, of including the outcast and
stranger, and of resisting the fragmentation of society in whatever way you can. Of love and compassion, and caring action toward the person right in front of you. Seeds of tending to your relationships and your callings.
That shower of seeds from God – I can imagine it ~ a waterfall unharnessing itself, a mighty flood of love, a vast shimmer of divine, cosmic sweetness and grace, plunging down uninterrupted into a crystal sea . . . and we can stand in the midst of it. Let it saturate your heart until you live and give from that very place.
God may be reckless with love but God is not reckless with you.
Let the good soil of Jesus take root in you, and then, please, share it with others.