Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”
“Hear then the parable of the sower. 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. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. 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.”

My mother, born in the rural South, tells the story of being given a small child-size bag she could wear across her shoulder when she was 5 years old. Fitted with this she was taken into the fields with the adults in the household to pick cotton. It was all good fun, really, not done out of necessity but done as a kind of rite of initiation into the life they lived.

These were the people she was from: people who made their modest living from agriculture, who relied on the red clay of rural Alabama to give them cotton to sell and, just as importantly, tomatoes, okra and squash to put on the table along with the chicken: chicken that was raised on their land, and killed with their own hands and cooked in their own pots.

Most of us here today think of ourselves as far from that kind of world—far from that kind of intimacy with the earth and its creatures and the unpredictability that often went along with it.

But the hearers of our parable in the Gospel of Matthew were not far from that kind of world. Beleaguered common people, so great in number that Jesus takes to a boat to speak to them as they stand on the shore, many of them would have identified the with world of what we call “The Parable of the Sower” or the “The Parable of the Soils.”

They would have known what it was like to have a tiny piece of land to farm, one in which some areas were always stony and in which some areas always sprouted weeds that could choke out what they had planted. They would have known that no matter how careful you are in casting your seed, that some of that precious seed would fall on soil where it would not yield anything.

Jesus’ listeners would have been familiar with this situation—the bone-wearying year-in and year-out reality of it.

But what they would not have been familiar with, what would’ve confounded them, was Jesus’ climactic statement about the yield. In a world in which the typical yield per seed was five to ten fold, Jesus tells a story in which the yield is one hundred fold or sixty fold or thirty fold.

And so his listeners must have been confused and intrigued to have been lured into a story that knew their predicament so well and yet ended with a different, more abundant outcome.

Let anyone with ears, listen.

Today we are the listeners. And while our reasons may be different, there is much in us that wants to place ourselves in the position of the sower in this story. For the original audience of peasant people it had to do with the economic and societal box they found themselves in: lives squeezed onto a tiny, rocky lot and depending on the weather, full or empty stomachs for the season.

For us, perhaps it has to do with a yearning, sometimes good, sometimes obsessive, for productivity. For we too know what it feels like year after year to cast our precious seed onto whatever ground has been given to us, to cast our precious seed under an uncertain sky, perplexed about where it has really fallen, anxious about what it will really yield. We know what it’s like to yearn for a good yield from our rocky little lot, our weed-choked little plot, the one we have given our hearts to, hoping that we our seeds will find good soil there.

Into this reflection, a reflection about all our hard work, about what it does and doesn’t yield, comes Jesus’ explanation of the parable to the insiders, to the disciples.

I have to tell you that I don’t like it when Jesus explains things in Scripture.

I don’t like it any more than I like hearing someone explain the meaning of a poem right after reading it aloud or hearing someone explain music right after playing it.

I don’t like it when Jesus explains things or when Scripture depicts him as explaining things.

Most of us believe that he probably didn’t explain much, that he preferred telling stories and then letting them reverberate in listeners’ consciousness rather than stopping those reverberations with telling people what the story meant.

And so my Jesus is more poet than prose writer, more musician than musical educator, more living work of art than docent at an art museum.
But here it is—an explanation, or what some commentators are now calling an “application” of the parable. Such an application, by the way occurs not once but three times, each time this parable is told in each of the Synoptic Gospels.

And so let anyone with ears listen, but let us listen with an ear cocked for a broad astonishment and without grinding it too hard, too finely.

And this is what Jesus says: God is the sower, and you are the soil. God is the one who has chosen to toil in the narrow rocky plot, the weed-choked little lot. God is the one under an uncertain sky who season after season casts precious seed upon all parts of that lot, even upon those places where there will be no yield, until the seeds find their way into good soil, and an abundant yield bursts forth.

This then is the realm of God—a realm of strange inefficiency and high yield, a realm of God laboring under the same uncertain skies and through the same imperfect and unjust circumstances we inhabit to bring forth abundance.

Mark Taylor talked to me about preaching on this text one time before. He said that what he came up with was this: If you are listening to this sermon, you are good soil. He said he focused on this because the explanation or application of this parable in a sense invites us to wonder and perhaps worry about which of the soils we are.

Mark, here’s what I would say as well. If you are listening to this sermon you have been, are and will be all the different kinds of soil that the parable speaks of. You have been, are or will be the barren path, the rocky ground, the weed-choked patch, the good soil. You have been, are, or will be all these things.

But what you can count on, what we must count on is Christ Jesus the Sower, his face a human face, his glorious body strong because it was broken, his stride steady, his outstretched arm and open hand casting seed upon all of us, upon all the parts of us, and upon the huge plot that is this world. His seeds are seeds of compassion and justice, seeds of forgiveness, seeds of dignity, and seeds of hope.

And so in our tending to the little plots that have been given into our care, we are not in it by ourselves. Yes, we are asked to cast our seed, but we are also to watch for where God is raising up an abundant yield.

So I had hoped to offer you a poem or a piece of literature, something rare and musical that would somehow capture some of this idea that God’s generous presence with us in our work. And so as I often do when writing a sermon, I cast seed here and there, hoping something would sprout, but my seed feel on the barren path, on rocky soil or among choking weeds.

And then it hit me. God had already provided a vigorous plant, a mysterious and abundant yield right in front of me. The problem I was having was that the good soil that it had grown from was an entity called Pixar Animation Studios.

Yes, I’m talking about the movie Wall-E, the children’s movie in which a little robot has a mission: compacting the trash on an earth deserted because all there is is trash. While doing this, he discovers one little plant, one green, fragile sprout that has come up in good soil. The movie is about the robot’s protection of this one little plant and what happens as a result: the entire earth is put on a path toward reclamation and renewal by a human race that (quite literally) struggles to its feet again.

And so, people of God, see the movie but, more importantly, gather all you are—the barren path, the rocky soil, the weed-choked plot, the good soil—gather all you are and keep casting your precious seeds, for Christ Jesus the Sower goes before you, walks beside you and comes after you. His are the seeds; his, the world where they are cast; his, the abundant yield.

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