July 16, 2023
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
The Extravagant Sower
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
Farming techniques have come a long way. To begin with, the equipment: Modern tractors are enormous. When they extend the wings on their planting apparatus, they cover a huge swath of a field in a single pass. The planters they pull are very precise, too. They inject a seed at a prescribed depth and every so many inches.
Farming is science now. They’ve figured out the optimal number of seeds per square yard, exactly how much fertilizer they need.
Jesus tells a farming parable when he sees a huge crowd of people gather to hear him preach. The crowd is so large that he has to climb in a boat, row off from shore, and preach from the lake. This was way before the days of modern sound systems. And you know how sound travels on a lake.
Jesus looks at this immense group of people who have traveled from far and wide to see and hear him. What is he to them? Is he the spectacle of the day, something to spice up their ordinary, hum-drum days? Are they skeptics, come to heckle the prophet? Are they seekers? All of the above! They’re all present and accounted for along the shores of Lake Galilee.
So Jesus tells the parable we hear today. It seems like it left everyone scratching their heads in confusion, because even Jesus’ own disciples don’t get it. Jesus is talking about how we receive God’s word. How does that word fall upon our ears, in our hearts?
How does a seed germinate and take root? Moisture enters the seed. As the seed receives the moisture, its inner germ wakes up and begins to grow. A furry, white root sinks down and the emerging green shoot grows up.
There’s a receptivity to the moisture. The hard, protective hull allows the moisture in and the germ of life within awakens.
Something similar happens as we hear God’s word. We have a hard, protective shell wrapped around our minds and hearts. When we encounter God’s word, what will happen? Will that message seep into us and bring about the beautiful transformation of our lonely soul? Will it be able to bear its precious fruit?
Jesus’ parable lists a bunch of things which can prohibit that end. Hardpacked soil, birds, stony badland, choking weeds. The little seed faces daunting circumstances.
But the sower seems unconcerned. The seed is precious. It’s expensive, even. But he distributes it extravagantly. This is broadcast sowing. He isn’t planting individual seeds under the soil. He’s tossing handfuls onto the soil and there it lays. It’s not like planting bean seeds in a garden. This is like what we do when we seed a new lawn. We pour the seed in the spreader and then we walk across the area, spraying seed everywhere.
Jesus looks out at all the people gathered along the shoreline. So many people, each one with their own history, a unique journey that led them to this very time and place. Will they hear what he has to say? Will his words take root in their hearts? It doesn’t matter. He will preach to them, he’ll minister from his bottomless compassion. Like the sower who extravagantly broadcasts his precious seed, Jesus spreads the divine kingdom absolutely everywhere, to everyone.
We are now the workers Christ has called into the field. We now are the ones called to sow the seeds of God’s divine reign. Will we be as extravagant in our calling as Jesus was? Or will we say, “well, look at that poor soil. Why bother? Let’s save these good seeds and use them where they stand a better chance?”
As Pope Francis famously said, “Who am I to judge?”
Let’s take a look at a figure from Christian history, St. Augustine of Hippo. Born in northern Africa around the year 350, Augustine would become one of the principle theologians of the early church. His theology has echoed through the centuries. His thought was instrumental in shaping Martin Luther, who was an Augustinian monk.
Augustine’s mother was Monica. She was a devout Christian woman, but her husband was a pagan man. He forbade his wife from raising their children as Christians.
Augustine received a first-class education. Despite his privilege, Augustine was wild spirited. He lived hedonistically throughout his teens and 20’s. He was a carefree party boy. Much to his mother’s chagrin, he became a follower of Manichaeanism, an ancient religion. He later became disenchanted with Manichaenism and he migrated into the philosophical school known as Skepticism.
So far, Augustine seems like rather poor soil for the word of God. But when he was 31, he fell into the doldrums of meaninglessness. One day, he heard the voice of a child at play. The child was singing, “Pick it up and read it! Pick it up and read it!”
So Augustine picked up a Bible. He randomly opened it up. The Bible fell to the book of Romans, chapter 13. His eyes fell to some verses that aren’t particularly inspiring for me, but they were life changing for Augustine:
“Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.”
Augustine reflected on this moment in his Confessions: “No further would I read, nor did I need; for instantly, as the sentence ended, - by a light, as it were, of security infused into my heart, - all the gloom of doubt vanished away.”
The seed of God’s word opened up and took root within his soul. The fruits from his life have produced hundred-fold.
So here we are now, the caretakers of God’s vineyard. How does this parable inform us as the Spirit-filled and mission guided Church of Jesus Christ? I see two aspects.
First, in regards to our outwards mission to the world, we are to be as extravagant in our sowing of the kingdom’s good news as Jesus was. We aren’t called to judge the quality of the soil. We simply distribute the word and the mercies of the kingdom as extravagantly as Jesus did in his ministry. God will take care of the seed once it’s sown.
And secondly, our internal mission. What are the soil conditions of our own heart? We can tend to our own soil.
I’ll forever remember how farmers in Malawi prepare their fields for planting. They do it all by hand. No big tractors, not even a mule. It’s all done by hand. They have a hoe with a handle about four feet in length. They begin at one end of the field and start chopping away. They break up the hard pack soil one swing at a time. It’s exhausting, almost impossible work. But they do it because the corn won’t plant itself, and it won’t grow unless the soil is broken apart.
We face equally hard work. How have our opinions become as hard-packed as trod upon soil? Opinions about others, about the world, even about the Bible?
Our Matthew passage today skipped over some middle verses. Jesus quotes Isaiah:
“You will indeed listen, but never understand,
and you will indeed look, but never perceive.
For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and their ears are hard of hearing,
and they have shut their eyes;
so that they might not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and understand with their heart and turn –
and I would heal them.”
Isaiah was addressing Israel’s hardness of heart. They’d become firmly encrusted to the point they refused to hear his prophetic message. Listening, truly listening to God’s word requires us to allow it to really sink in. We need to be humble enough that we are always at the ready to take the hoe to our own strongly held opinions and break them apart.
Next, the rocky soil. In this part of Wisconsin, you can still see some big rock piles in fields. We’ve got a lot of rocky soil here. Earlier farmers fastidiously picked rock from their fields and placed them into piles. It took a lot of work to move those rocks.
What stony monsters are lying just beneath the surface in you and me? These are the hardened emotions in which nothing can grow: bitterness, envy, callousness, chronic anger. These stones do us no good. We need to look for them, and when we see them, we dig them up and cast them out.
And we’re also called to weed.
Gardeners know how quickly weeds can take off and choke their vegetable garden. They’re always on the lookout for weeds to pull.
So spiritually, we hoe our own row. What is choking off your vibrant faith connection with God? What needs to go? There are so many varieties of weeds, and there are so many things that can choke off our spiritual connection.
In our inner mission, we’re called to break apart our hard-packed soil; we pick out the sterile rocks within, and we remove the demanding weeds choking us from the light.
These things are a call to introspection. It’s the call of our baptism, the call to daily repentance. As Luther said, our sinful self, with all its evil deeds and desires, needs to be drowned through daily repentance SO THAT, day after day, a new self may arise to live with God.
Jesus preached this parable about the extravagant sower and his seed. Jesus extravagantly shared the abundance of grace and mercy and light of God’s reign.
And like the seeds in this parable, elsewhere he mentioned that a seed must die in order to produce its yield. This is exactly what he did, too. In going to the cross, the true extent of his extravagant grace was released upon the world. He broke himself open, that we might have life.
Let’s pray:
Lord, let my heart be good soil, open to the seed of your word.
Lord, let my heart be good soil, where love can grow and peace is understood.
When my heart is hard, break the stone away.
When my heart is cold, warm it with the day.
When my heart is lost, lead me on your way.
Lord, let my heart be good soil. Amen
