Finding Fertile Soil

“What Jesus wants of us is to live with the same reckless generosity as the sower in the parable.”

A Sermon by Jeffrey K. Krehbiel

15^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

July 13, 2008

Text: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Jesus told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow...” (vs. 3)

Church of the Pilgrims

2201 P Street NW

Washington, DC 20037

(202) 387-6612

www.ChurchOfThePilgrims.org

I ’ll let you in on a little secret. Most of the time I have no earthly idea why some people come to church and others don’t. I think we have an exciting and compelling community of faith. We put a lot of energy into planning our Sunday worship. I work a long time in preparing my sermons. Sometimes we have a Sunday service in which, it seems to me, everything just rocks. We’ll have a large number of first-time worshipers, and I think, man– what a great Sunday for them to be here! And then we never see them again. Other Sundays, often following a week filled with distractions or business, I will arrive at church feeling ill-prepared, and almost feel like I should offer an apology before standing in the pulpit. Then on that day someone will tell me how much my sermon touched them, or spoke to something they had been wrestling with all week. Go figure.

So you can imagine how even more disconcerting it was to the early Christians to make sense of the wildly divergent reactions to Jesus’ message. Why did some respond so eagerly to what they preached, while others responded with indifference or even outright hostility? By the time Matthew was writing his gospel, they were so few among so many, passionately sharing a message that seemed so often to fall on deaf ears.

In the context of his gospel, Matthew places this parable just after Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees. Watching him break their rules, they accuse him of being in league with the devil. Jesus returns the compliment by accusing them of hypocrisy. It is at this point that they being to plot Jesus’ death. Jesus refers to them as a brood of vipers. It is in response to all of this conflict that Jesus tells the parable of the sower.

On the one hand, the parable seems to suggest, how people respond to the gospel is not our responsibility. The sower scatters the seed liberally, you could even say recklessly. No farmer really farms like this. You don’t throw seeds on the path. You don’t plant on rocky ground. You determine where the fertile soil is and you plant all your seeds there. We may not know a lot about farming, but we know a lot about market segmentation in our consumer culture. You figure out what your market is, and you target all your advertising to that demographic. A smart business owner knows where to plant their seeds. Increasingly churches see their ministry in the same way. We commission demographic studies, and are encouraged to determine our target audience, all designed to help us increase our share in the consumer marketplace.

Y et that is not what Jesus advises. There is a reckless generosity to Jesus’ ministry. He spent equal time among those whom he might have expected to be receptive to his message as he did among those who were not. He reached out to those that others in his community considered untouchables, and alienated the opinion leaders and power-brokers who could have really helped him build a movement.

Bill Golderer, the organizing pastor of the Broad Street Ministry, a New Church Development in Philadelphia, calls what most churches are doing today an “acquisitional mentality.” Speaking at a Presbyterian conference last week in Montreat, he shared how denominational leaders encouraged him to do all sorts of demographic studies before he began his work in Philadelphia, and figure out who his target audience would be in this diverse area of the city, because of course, they could not be all things to all people. Golderer ignored their advice and just worked to draw in all those he met, and figure out how the church could be the church in that community. They now have 200-300 in attendance, of all ages, races, and backgrounds, nearly 20% of whom are homeless– as Golderer puts it, “the possessor of a PhD. praying alongside the summa cum laude graduate of the School of Hard Knocks.” He calls it a “post-recruitment, post-acquisitional” approach to church development. He told the folks at Montreat, “Getting people of all kinds of cultures together in worship is not fun. It is frightening.”

Or last month, a group of Presbyterians from several churches in Atlanta traveled to Iran. You can hardly imagine a more hostile environment for Christians to visit, especially American Christians. Yet the Evangelical (Presbyterian) Church of Iran is thriving, with approximately 6,000 members in six congregations. No one expects that Christians will ever dominate this overwhelmingly Muslim country, but the gospel is being proclaimed, and seeds are being planted. Are they wasting their time?

Or I think of the service we held last week for Jackie Smith’s brother, Russell, up at Ingleside Retirement Community. All his life Russell struggled with addictions and mental illnesses. He was the sort of person that most people paid very little attention to. I said in the service that I suspected that few people ever really took the time to really know Russell as a person. Then Nancy Lee Head spoke lovingly of her encounters with Russell over these past several months, forged by their common bond of struggle with schizophrenia. Several of their conversations turned to faith. Russell wondered aloud if someone like himself– someone “defective,” to use his word– could every really be loved by God. Nancy countlessly assured him that he was. Russell had a very difficult life, but he died knowing that he was loved by God, and would be grieved by family and friends. It seems to me that is precisely the sort of reckless generosity that Jesus was talking about.

L ater, when Jesus is alone with his disciples, he seem to turn the parable back on them. Don’t worry about other people, how they respond, work on yourself: What sort of soil are you? How receptive are you to the word that is proclaimed? What is it that prevents you from hearing God's word for you? Do you know the experience of having your faith trampled under foot, eroded by the first crisis that comes your way? Can you identify the rocky ground in you that keeps your faith from growing deep roots? Who are the birds in your experience that snatch the seed away? What are your thorns that work to choke out that faith within as it grows? What causes the seed to dry up in you? What is your scorching sun? What do you need in your life in order for your faith to grow deep and bear fruit in the way you live your life? Jesus wants his followers themselves to be effective sowers, to show by their own lives that the word have found deep roots that won’t wither away because of troubles or persecutions, or be choked out by the cares of the world or the lure of wealth.

For in the end what Jesus wants of us is to live with the same reckless generosity as the sower in the parable, to share our lives fully and abundantly with those around us, expecting nothing in return, giving of ourselves in the way that Jesus gave of himself, not so much speaking about the love of God as demonstrating it in our own lives. We do that as a community of faith by being a church for others, not in some calculated way to lure people in to the congregation, but because that is who we are called to be as God’s people. Some may respond, some may not. Some may stay for a while, and then disappear, and we’ll never know why. Others may find their lives turned around in ways we never could have imagined, by some small act of kindness we had not even remembered we had done.

The veteran preacher Fred Craddock tells a story about the time he got a phone call from a woman whose father had died. She had been a teenager in one of the churches he had served as pastor twenty years before, and he would have sworn that if there was ever a person who never heard a word he said, that teenage girl was it. She was always giggling with her friends in the balcony, passing notes to boys, drawing pictures on the bulletin. But when her father died, she looked up her old pastor, the Rev. Fred Craddock, and gave him a call. “I don’t know if you remember me,” she started. Oh, yes, he remembered. “When my daddy died, I thought I was going to come apart,” she continued. “I cried and cried and cried. I didn't know what to do. But then I remembered something you said in one of your sermons . . .” Craddock was stunned. She had remembered something he had said in one of his sermons?! Go figure. And all that time he thought he had been wasting seed.

I said at the beginning that sometimes I have no earthly idea why some people come to church and others don’t. I could just as well be speaking about my own life. Believe me when I say that when I was in junior high no one predicted that ministry was anywhere in my future. If it had not been for the reckless generosity of the youth leaders who served the church I grew up in, I certainly wouldn’t be standing up here today. Is that true for your life as well? Sometimes the fruit we bear in our own lives is every bit as much a mystery to us it is in the lives of others. In the end, all we can say is that we never know where the seed will fall, or where it will take root. In our lives, or in the lives of others, it is all due to the reckless generosity of God. ✞