A sermon preached by The Reverend Canon Dr. David Anderson at St. Jude’s Anglican Church, Oakville, on Wednesday, July 17, 2024 (feria).
I speak to you in the name God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I suspect that the parable we have just read is familiar to many of us. I don’t know about you, but when I read or hear this parable, I am trying to figure out who I am in the story. There are several possibilities. Some might see themselves as the sower, some as the seeds, but by far the most common way to read this parable is to think of ourselves as the soil.
That is certainly the way I read this parable most often. Jesus is the sower. The good news of the kingdom of God—or what we call ‘the gospel’—is the seed. We are the soil.
Then the question becomes, what kind of soil am I? Am I rocky ground? Are there birds hovering around me ready to snatch the seed away from me? Am I growing up only thorns that will choke out all else? Or, could I possibly be good soil?
It seems to me that it is really about what is going on in my life right now. I truly believe that all these soil conditions can be found in us at different times of our lives. Sometimes we completely miss what God is trying to tell us. Sometimes we hear God’s voice and act quickly, but then give up prematurely because things don’t turn out quite as we expected. We think we know what God wants. Sometimes we let things influence us to crowd out God’s voice in our lives. Sometimes we hear God’s voice and act on it and allow our actions to grow and flourish without trying to control the outcome ourselves entirely, because it is God, after all, who causes growth, and then we bear glorious fruit. Fruit contains new seeds.
So where am I? Where are you? This is the question this parable wants to ask. Or maybe this parable is not so much about our successes and failures, and about the birds and rocks and thorns that interfere. What if this parable is more about the extravagance of the sower who doesn’t seem to be concerned about the soil conditions? This sower flings the seeds even into the most unlikely places. Some would accuse the sower of wasting the seed with holy abandon, feeding the birds, whistling at the rocks, and picking his way through the thorns. We might imagine the sower shouting hallelujah at the good soil, but continuing his way, keeping on sowing, confident that there is enough seed to go around, that there is plenty, and that when the harvest comes at last, it will fill every barn in the neighbourhood to the rafters.
I suspect that if we were in charge, we would not do it this way. If we were in charge, we would likely want to devise a plan for a more efficient operation. We would prefer something neater, cleaner, and more productive, that would not waste seed on soil that we know will not be productive. We would keep the seed away from the birds and thorns and rocky ground and concentrate only on the good soil.
But this is not our parable. This is a parable that Jesus told and so it seems that Jesus is suggesting that there is another way to go about things, a way less concerned with productivity than with plenitude and abundance.
A reading from Barbara Brown Taylor.
Once upon a time a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came along and devoured them. So he put his seed pouch down and spent the next hour or so stringing aluminum foil all around his field. He put up a fake owl he ordered from a garden catalog and, as an afterthought, he hung a couple of traps for the Japanese beetles.
Then he returned to his sowing, but he noticed some of the seeds were falling on rocky ground, so he put his seed pouch down again and went to fetch his wheelbarrow and shovel. A couple of hours later he had dug up the rocks and was trying to think of something useful he could do with them when he remembered his sowing and got back to it, but as soon as he did he ran right into a briar patch that was sure to strangle his little seedlings. So he put his pouch down again and looked everywhere for the weed poison but finally decided just to pull the thorns up by hand, which meant that he had to go back inside and look everywhere for his gloves.
Now by the time he had the briars cleared it was getting dark, so the sower picked up his pouch and his tools and decided to call it a day. That night he fell asleep in his chair reading a seed catalog, and when he woke the next morning he walked out into his field and found a big crow sitting on his fake owl. He found rocks he had not found the day before and he found new little leaves on the roots of the briars that had broken off in his hands. The sower considered all of this, pushing his cap back on his head, and then he did a strange thing: he began to laugh, just a chuckle at first and then a full-fledged guffaw that turned into a wheeze at the end when his wind ran out.
Still laughing and wheezing he went after his seed pouch and began flinging seeds everywhere: into the roots of trees, onto the roof of his house, across all his fences and into his neighbors’ fields. He shook seeds at his cows and offered a handful to the dog; he even tossed a fistful into the creek, thinking they might take root downstream somewhere. The more he sowed, the more he seemed to have. None of it made any sense to him, but for once that didn’t seem to matter, and he had to admit that he had never been happier in all his life.
Let those who have ears to hear, hear. Amen. +