Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

[To the children:] This story Jesus tells is called a parable. A parable is a simple story about everyday things that teaches us a lesson. Jesus liked to use parables to help people understand what he called the Kingdom of God. That’s kind of a hard thing to understand, not just for children, but for grown-ups, too. Jesus knew that, so he told a lot of stories that started out, “The kingdom of God is like….” This parable about the different kinds of soil is more about how we receive the good news. And it would be easy to think that it’s really a story about us. But what you have to remember whenever Jesus tells a story is this: it’s always about God. So when you hear a parable, especially if it seems to make things more confusing than easy to understand, look for what the story says about God, and it might make more sense. Let’s pray.
Jesus, thank you for teaching us about God. Help us to listen with our hearts as well as our minds, so that we can know God better. Amen.

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[To the congregation:] Matthew 13 is full of parables. I like to call them “Stories that Read Us” because taken together, they show why Jesus used parables to teach in the first place. In the verses we skipped in today’s reading, Jesus gives this explanation:

“The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ …But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it. (Matthew 13:13, 16-17)

The way we hear these stories tells us how receptive we really are to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus uses this first parable to set us up for the seven parables that will follow. They will be all about the Kingdom of God. This one is about the character of God, and how God reveals that character to those who recognize it. It shows how parables reflect back to us our ability to understand them.

Throughout this 13th chapter of Matthew, Jesus keeps saying, “those who have ears, let them hear; anyone with ears, listen!” In other words, these stories will find the ones who can understand them.

As you listen to the story, it will “read” you, and identify which kind of recipient you are by the way you hear it. The depth of our understanding depends on our willingness to be changed by what we hear.

For example, you can take the story at face value: seeds get sown, and where they land determines how well they will grow. Or, you can try to assign meaning to the parts of the parable, treating it strictly as an allegory. The Sower is God, the Word is the gospel of Jesus Christ, the soil is our hearts.

Using this interpretation, and the explanation Jesus gives of this story, we might think the point is to do everything we can to become good soil. But there’s a problem with this approach: we can’t change the kind of soil we are – only God can do that. The bigger problem with this kind of interpretation is that it makes the story be about us, about the soil. But the story is not about you; the story is for you.

This parable, like all scripture, is really about God and God’s extravagant generosity. God is the Sower, scattering seed liberally, even wastefully, everywhere.

God sows.

It’s what God does. It’s what God keeps on doing. God keeps throwing seeds, regardless of where the seed might land.

God is love, and love is generous, lavish, abundant, eager to share what is good. God will not withhold the Word from anyone. God will not deny anyone access to the Good News.

God sows liberally, even wastefully.

This parable tells of “a sower who is ridiculously generous with the amount of seed he scatters, throwing it not only on the good soil but on soil that even non-farmers … can recognize weren’t good bets: thorny soil, [rocks,] … and even a beaten path. I mean, what are the chances the seed is going to take root in that?” (David Lose)

God doesn’t use a computer-driven tractor to plot out perfectly spaced rows, carefully inserting each seed at the exact depth of carefully prepared soil for optimum germination. God scatters the Good News of the Kingdom of God liberally, even in places where it is not likely to grow or bear fruit.

God sows everywhere.

Whether on the path, on rocky soil, among thorns, or in the good dirt, the Good News cannot be contained. God does not discriminate between good soil and bad soil. God throws the seed of the Kingdom everywhere! It goes out into all the world, to transform any who will accept it. And that’s the whole point of seed – transformation. You see, seed can only become fruitful when it stops being a seed.

A seed must die to become a plant. It breaks open, just as God has broken into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. As it grows, it becomes something that is not a seed anymore – it becomes a plant that bears more seed!

The parables read us – how well our ears are tuned to listen to the Word and absorb it into our lives – that’s what determines the extent to which the Word can make our lives abundantly fruitful.

Each Sunday, preachers cast the gospel as broadly as possible, with no assurance of where or how it will land.

• It might be heard by newcomers to the community, who are looking for a place to call their spiritual home.
• It might be heard by people experiencing crisis in their lives.
• The word might land among those who think of church as their social network, a way to connect with friends.
• It might even be heard by those who are hungry for God’s Word; who are eager to worship the Lord in the spirit of holiness.

But every preacher knows that no matter how carefully crafted the sermon may be, no matter how much prayer and study have been poured into sharing the Word of the Lord, the chances of something taking root are no better than the chances Jesus describes in the parable of the sower.

Yet we all have been called to sow the seed of the gospel. “Go into all the world, making disciples” Jesus will say in the Great Commission near the end of Matthew’s gospel. Go into all the world sowing the Good News, no matter how it lands. But be ready to bear the heartache and frustration when it falls on rocky, weed-infested ground. And I’m sure you’ve been there, friends! Each of you have experienced the hard truths of this parable on some level.

• Every parent whose words of loving concern have fallen on a teenager’s deaf ears knows hard-packed ground.
• Everyone who has operated a business with integrity, only to see clients go where prices are cheaper, understands shallow roots. 
• Every person who has been overwhelmed with worry, or the desire for wealth, has experienced the chokehold of thorny weeds.

This parable reminds us that we are not alone in these struggles.

The parable also reminds us where to keep our focus. As a church, we may be tempted to invest time, energy, and hope in trying to coax growth among people who don’t want to grow. We can waste precious effort despairing when the seeds we sow do not take root.

The Sower does not do that. The Sower accepts the reality that a good quantity of seed will fall on bad soil. Yet the Sower keeps sowing. Jesus keeps spreading the word, and he calls us to do the same. But Jesus calls us to something even more in this parable. He calls us to hope.

Jesus challenges us to believe in God’s abundance. See, the story could have ended with a normal harvest from good soil. And a normal harvest would still be reason to give thanks. There’s a song sung at Passover that goes, “Dayenu: that would have been enough.” And we would be happy with just enough most of the time, wouldn’t we? But this story is filled with the promise of lavish abundance, even in the face of rejection and the hard realities of living in this world.

Some of you may have come to expect scarcity instead of abundance. Your experiences have taught you to assume that there is not enough – not enough love, not enough joy, not enough grace – and you’ve come to expect that you are always going to get the short end of the stick, that someone is going to do you wrong, that you will always come out behind instead of ahead of the game. You’ve come to expect that you have to settle for less, scrape by the best you can. But God is a God of extravagance!

Our God does not hold anything back. God doesn’t worry if there will be enough to go around. God wants our hearts to be good soil, but as David Lose puts it, God “hurls a ridiculous amount of seed even on dry, thorny, or beaten soil. Goodness, but you get the feeling this God would probably scatter seed-love-mercy-grace on a parking lot! Why, because there is enough!”

See, this story is not about the dirt. The Sower is going to keep sowing extravagantly, no matter what kind of soil our hearts might be. The story is about God’s abundant generosity, and God’s desire to draw us into the kind of transformation that bears abundantly more than a “normal” crop could possibly bear.

Hear God’s love for you and be broken like the shell of a seed, to become something new, as part of God’s story. Let the Word of God grow in you, and produce an abundance in you! Let this parable read you, and change you. All who have ears, listen!

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