Mark 4:1-20 "Sacred Seeds"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!

         It was a gorgeous autumn Saturday.  It was the kind where the air is crisp, and the sky is ever so blue, and the leaves have turned their brilliant shades of yellow, red, and orange.  When you have a day in the fall like that here in Maine, it is not rocket science to know intuitively that it is also deer season.

         On this particular day, three men – friends they were - were going hunting together.  One was a doctor, one was a lawyer, and one was a preacher. They had not ventured far into the woods when an enormous and well-fed 12-point buck came into view, looked directly at them, and seemed to position itself for a perfect shot – its side exposed, and its head held high and still. 

         Each of the hunters took aim and fired at the big buck at exactly the same time. The deer fell to the ground like a stone – instantly dead.  Within a few minutes, the men had surrounded the carcass and were in the midst of a heated debate about whose shot actually had killed the deer.

        It was not long before a game warden came by and asked what the three men were arguing about.  The game warden listened carefully, took a look at the buck, and confidently announced that he knew whose shot had killed the animal.

         “It was the preacher who got the buck!” the game warden declared.

         “What? How do you know?!” the other two demanded.  

         The officer replied, “Easy. The bullet went in one ear and out the other.”

         “Listen!”  Jesus said.  “Those who have ears, let them hear.  Do not let what I am teaching you go ‘in one ear and out the other’.”

         That is how Jesus would often start his lesson.  “Listen!  Those who have ears, let them hear.” And then he would, as the Gospel writer tells us, speak to the crowds in parables – in those little stories that always had big points. 

         Now, the word, “parable,” comes from a Greek word meaning “to throw or cast alongside.”  As Episcopal pastor Steve Pankey writes, “Parables are helpful because they take a hard-to-understand concept like the Kingdom of God and lay down alongside it something that is easily relatable from real life.  

Sometimes a parable is simply a simile, “the Kingdom of God is like…” Other times they are long, drawn out metaphors.”

         In other words, the parables Jesus told were supposed to help his listeners – the disciples, the crowds, or even us today – get a better handle on what the Kingdom of God was all about and, as a result, what was in fact the nature of the Almighty.  Not that the parables were always straightforward and easy to understand at first glance, however. 

         It is like in the movie “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”.  Lutheran pastor Luke Bouman notes that “Whoopie Goldberg’s character must solve a riddle to help a spy to come in. In order to communicate with the spy, she has to figure out a ‘code key’ in the Rolling Stones song, which gives the title to the movie. The problem is that she doesn’t have an internet search engine to direct her to the lyrics of the song. She listens in vain to try to figure out the words. At one point, exasperated, she cries, “Mick, Mick, speak English!” But to no avail. Mick Jagger’s words elude her.” 

         How like Jesus’ parables! Sometimes we just want to cry out:  “Speak plainly, Jesus. Give us some indication of what the ‘ kingdom of God’ is about. Don’t keep speaking in circles.”

         However, those “circles” we accuse Jesus of speaking in were always grounded in ordinary, everyday pictures of life as his listeners would have experienced it.  For example, Jesus frequently used images from agriculture to describe the kingdom of God – wine grapes, mustard seeds, and, as in today’s parable, a sower – a farmer – scattering seed across the far reaches of his field.  Everyone would have understood the imagery.  That is a given. 

         You see, the peasants to whom he spoke – if they were not fishermen – were farmers.  After all, this was Galilee, and rising up from the shore of the Se of Galilee were fields stretching as far as the eye could take in.  The people who gathered about Jesus knew about productive land.  They knew about hard soil and rocky soil and weedy ground and the good earth.  They could all picture the farmer on the hillside, a heavy seed bag draped around his shoulder, walking up and down the length of the field, tossing handfuls of seed as he walked, ensuring that the entire acreage would be covered by the day’s end. 

         In this parable, Jesus tells us that there are four kinds of ground on which the farmer’s seed might fall.  There is hard ground – like the path circumnavigating the field – trampled on by countless feet over the ages.  Even the best of seeds could not possibly find a home there. Those seeds would go to the birds. 

         Then there was the rocky ground – like many a farmer’s field here in Maine.  In making our vegetable garden plot, we dug up more cobble – hen and goose egg sized rocks – wagon loads full that we hauled off – along with a couple of good-sized boulders as well.  Though seeds might sprout in rocky ground, in the long run, the soil is not deep enough to sustain them.  And with a dry start to the growing season, those seeds will soon shrivel up and die.

         And soil infested with weeds?  Do not tell me about weeds!  We have a constant battle with them!  They can overtake a garden row in no time flat.  They spread their leaves and dig in with their roots and seem to multiply overnight – depriving many a tiny beet or cucumber plant of needed sunlight and over time choking them out.

        What you need, Jesus teaches, is good soil, fertile soil – soil that is well-composted with lots of worms to break it down.  You need soil with the rocks removed, and the weeds overcome.  When you have that kind of soil, he says, your harvest will be thirty-fold, sixty-fold, a hundred-fold.

         Imagine a harvest like that!  What an unbelievable statement Jesus was making.  Surely it is the climax of the parable – the “Wow!” factor that would make everyone really listen up.  As the research of Church of Christ pastor John Marks Hicks indicates, “It is a bountiful, unexpected and wondrous harvest. Thirtyfold, sixtyfold and hundredfold yields are beyond the imagination of first century farmers. Yields of five or six were typical in Italy; Nile-irrigated fields in Egypt typically yielded seven. Yields of four or fivefold, however, were typical in Palestine; (in fact,) thirtyfold has only been achieved in modern Israel with good weather and improved technology.”

         Pretty impressive!  And, or course, following the logic that Jesus offers in his explanation of this parable, the hearts of people are like those different kinds of soil:  the hard hearts, the shallow hearts, the crowded hearts, and the good hearts. It sounds so neat and simple – little boxes – a place for everyone and everyone in his or her place. 

         And we generally put ourselves in the good soil category because it would be more than we could stomach to put ourselves anywhere else.  And other folks we divide between the other three boxes because there would be hardly room enough in the good soil box because we are already there.

         However, if we choose to interpret the parable only in that narrow way, we are selling both it and Jesus short.  In addition, we are making highly inappropriate and inaccurate assumptions about those farmers who first listened to Jesus telling this little story.  As Steve Pankey writes, “Any farmer worth his salt would know that you don’t turn on the seed spreader when you leave the barn and let it just fling seed all down the road, onto the shoulder, and into the drainage ditches.”  Surely Jesus knew more about farming than that.

         And I think he does – because I do not think he meant for this parable to be about the soil – or even about the seed.  If it was, then Jesus becomes the moral arbiter, expecting us to categorize ourselves as hard, rocky, weedy, or good soil. However, we cannot do that – and Jesus knows it too.  We cannot pigeon-hole ourselves as having hard, shallow, crowded, or good hearts – because none of us is one kind of soil.  None of us has exclusively one kind of heart.  Sometimes we are one, and sometimes another.

         So, you see, this parable is not about us.  It is not about dirt.  This parable is about the one who extravagantly throws the seed everywhere.  This parable is about the sower, and that is why it is titled such. 

         This parable is about a God who surely knows it is foolish to throw seeds on questionable soil but does it anyway.  There are no soil analysis tests done beforehand.  The Sower does not sit down ahead of time and figure out how to avoid the rocky places, how to tell where the soil is too hard for anything to take root, or how to anticipate where the weeds will be.  The Sower just flings the seed.

         I like to think that the Sower knows as well  that there is enough seed to go around – to fill all the nooks and crannies.  And if some is “wasted”?  Well, who is to say what waste is anyway? After all, even the birds feast off some of the seed.

         With reckless abandon, then, God throws the seeds of justice and peace and love on hearts that often refuse them or crowd them out - and only once in a while nurture them until glimmers of hope, glimpses of the kingdom, are revealed.  Just as Jesus throws seeds at the disciples time and time again in spite of their stubbornness and dim-wittedness, so God continues to work with us so we can see what the Almighty is up to in this jaded and cynical world we live in. 

         God is still speaking.  God is still recklessly spreading seeds.  As Steve Pankey notes, “The good news is: God continues to throw seed at us. (God) pours out (her) love upon us relentlessly. And when he finds even the smallest patch of good soil in our hearts, God nurtures the Kingdom within us, producing an abundant harvest: 30, 60, even 100 fold.”

         The story is not about dirt.  It is not about the soil.  It is not about us.  It is about the sower and the extravagant and generous way the seed is spread – over and over again, with reckless abandon, with no sense of what soil is worthy to receive it. 

        No matter who we are or where we are on our life journey, the seeds of justice and compassion have been sown – and will continue to be sown - in our less-than-perfect hearts.  But we have to nurture those seeds, be the soil they need to grow.Surely that is worth remembering as we become engaged in the risky business of being followers of Jesus, of doing our part to usher in God’s kingdom. 

         The seeds are there.  We are in possession of them.  They have been sown in us.  And so it is up to us – and even more so up to the church – to nurture those seeds of justice and compassion and ensure that they sprout and grow.  That is the risky business we say we will engage in.  The Sower does not do it alone.  The Sower only sows the seeds.  We nurture them.  We take action.  We serve.  We bind up the broken-hearted, heal the sick, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger.  We grow the seeds of justice and compassion.

         And because that sort of business is risky, it is so worth remembering that, we are in partnership with the sower.  Like the Sower, we do do it alone. We cannot. And if you remember nothing else from this sermon and this worship service, remember that.  We are in partnership with the sower.  We depend on the Sower, and the Sower depends on us.  Not cause the Sower has to, but because the Sower has chosen to.  We cannot do it alone.

         The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, said this to her superiors as she began her first orphanage:  "I have three pennies and a dream from God to build an orphanage."

         A dream and three pennies – not much!

         And so it was that her superiors chided her gently. "Mother Teresa," they said.  “You cannot build an orphanage with three pennies...with three pennies you can't do a thing."

         "I know," Mother Theresa said, smiling, "but with God and three pennies, I can do anything."

         With God and those sacred seeds sown in our hearts, we can engage in the risky business of being followers of Jesus. With God and the seeds, we can do anything.   
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church, U.C.C., Raymond, Maine