It’s All Wrong, But It’s All Right

Preached at Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church on July 16, 2023.

Scripture

Matthew 13:1-23

That same day 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 a 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. If you have ears, hear!”

Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. 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.’ With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says:

‘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 hear with their ears
and understand with their heart and turn—
and I would heal them.’

“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.”

“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 this age 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.”

Sermon

Where were you just a moment ago? As the Scripture was read aloud, where were you?

Were you in a field, watching the Sower throw seeds indiscriminately, tossing fistfulls across the landscape? Or were you the Sower yourself, laboring with sore feet, wiping the sweat from your brow, knowing that your work seems endless? Maybe you were sitting next to Jesus, letting his voice wash over you while under the shade of a tree. I would guess that a lot of us also find ourselves among the seeds. Wherever you’re at this morning, know that it’s okay - there are no wrong answers, as long as you don’t see yourself as Jesus.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say we’re a seed this morning, and let’s say that Jesus is the Sower. That’s a bit literal, and a bit simplistic, but let’s start here. We’re seeds, Jesus is the Sower. Jesus, the Sower, doesn’t do a very good job, if we’re perfectly honest. He’s pretty flippant with this task, haphazardly tossing these seeds, crossing his fingers and toes that they will come to fruition. The odds are not great. Look at the person to your left. They will be pecked apart by birds. Look to the person on your right. They will be vaporized by the sun. The person behind you? Lift up a little prayer for them, too, because they’re a goner. You are the only one who made it to the good soil.

And if we hear the parable in this way–Jesus as the Sower, ourselves as seeds–then this might not be very good news. It becomes a bit of a cautionary tale, a warning that predisposes us to doom and gloom, fire and brimstone. If we pretend that there is such a thing as a “plain reading” of Scripture, and just give into our basest impulses, then this parable might get even darker. If we let shame take over, we might hear that it’s our own fault when we struggle. We might hear falsely that God threw us to the crows, or abandoned us, or let evil overcome us. And hear me loud and clear, if you hear nothing else: you are a beloved child of God. From before all time, you were planted in the love, grace, and promises of God. And salvation is already here, for you, for me, for this planet. God will never throw you to the crows.

This morning, we have to let go of whatever rigidity we carried in. It’s long time we heard Jesus’ words of blessing and let the Spirit stir up a little holy chaos. To do that, let’s emancipate the scripture from ourselves a little bit. So pull the camera back and out a little bit, and let’s get a wider view of the parable.

We hear the Gospel of Matthew tell stories with a unique bent, just like the other Gospels have their own unique ways of storytelling. We hear quotes of ancient prophecies and allusions to motifs from the Hebrew Bible. The Gospel of Matthew draws on early texts about Jesus, especially Mark and another early source of sayings and teachings. But Matthew’s authors were compiling an account for early Christian assemblies that were in trouble. The authors were addressing more than just the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. They were addressing the fear and uncertainty that gutted early Christians’ sense of meaning, purpose, and hope.

And so, the Gospel of Matthew, and especially today’s parable, aren’t meant to exhort or rebuke. We’re not listening in on some chastizing conversation, or some sort of commission to “do more.” It’s meant to help explain, to make sense of this world and what it is that is happening. The early communities who followed Jesus’ teachings were asking, “Why have our siblings not followed along with us? Why are we the only ones? Are we wrong? Did we do something wrong? Have we been abandoned?” The early followers of Jesus were not well off.

Most dishearteningly, Jesus, who was proclaimed to be the Messiah, had not ushered in a world of righteousness. The Messiah had not bent the knee of Rome or dismantled systems of economic exploitation. Hate, greed, xenophobia, violence was all rampant, and the Messiah was crucified by those things. After his resurrection, Christ left. The disciples stayed.

The Gospels had to address this and reconcile with it. And to some extent, we have to wrestle with it, too. It’s not difficult to spot hate, greed, xenophobia, and violence in Baltimore and throughout the world. Seeds of love can be ensnared by evil. Seeds of progress can be short-lived. So what does Jesus do when he tells disciples this parable? He doesn’t ask them to fix it and to make sure every seed yields a hundredfold. He asks them to listen, to dwell with it. Not to hear this parable and scare off birds. To dwell with the reality that birds come, that seeds are scattered.

At this point, Jesus makes a very particular move, a very important nuance in what we’ve heard today. He quotes the prophet Isaiah, stating that even the prophets and righteous were unable to perceive these things that Jesus is revealing. But instead of blessing the disciples for the future, he blesses them in the present. “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and blessed are you ears, for they hear.” It’s not “Blessed shall your eyes be, and blessed shall your ears be.” “Blessed are.”

We sometimes think of salvation, abundance, or deliverance as some far-off, ethereal thing that happens “one day.” Abundance happens when we all float on clouds playing harps. But “blessed are you,” Jesus says, here and now. Everything the disciples had been waiting for was already present. Deliverance had arrived in Jesus, and every abstraction about the Christ was suddenly tangible and real. The seeds of hope, salvation, and deliverance have already taken root, already burrowed into the foundations of the earth.

And that is true for us today, too. Deliverance is already here, salvation is here. And that is at the heart of this parable. We must not wait around, twiddling our thumbs for the good news of Christ Jesus. We must not wait, and wait, and wait, tormenting ourselves for things to go right. The stars aren’t going to align anytime soon for the hope, liberation, and deliverance of God, and they don’t have to. It’s all wrong and it’s alright, we don’t have to wait for our world to be rightside up. Abundance is already here. There are already sixtyfold, hundredfold yields, a life in the Spirit that is full of grace, life, energy, and peace. The abstractions we hear about good news in the scripture, on Sundays, in our Bible studies and podcasts, they’re already here.

…

When we listen to Jesus this morning, we also hear him bless the disciples before it makes total sense. He hasn’t offered an interpretation when they are blessed. In other words, the disciples are blessed not because they have pieced everything together, but when they have heard and sat with the trouble of this world. When confronted with the oddities, uncomfortability, uncertainty, and pain of things, they don’t run away. They tolerate those feelings of worry, fear, and apprehension about birds and evil powers, and walk away blessed as a result. We see this elsewhere, like in the story of Jacob wrestling with God in the Hebrew Bible. Jacob engages in a struggle, an all-out brawl with God. He refuses to let go until he is blessed.

The Christian life is not about winning, or figuring everything out, or gaining victory. But it does demand that we see others clearly, we gaze upon the image of God in them, and do not avert our eyes at the things plundering abundance. We are called to look at crows and wilting crops. Jesus blesses the disciples when they hear this parable, when they listen to the sorrow and discouragement it elicits. They hear about birds. Evil. A destructive climate. And they tolerate the discomfort.

When we see the inequities around us in Baltimore, of food insecurity, of wealth imbalance, of unaffordable healthcare, will we avert our gaze? Or will we risk peering into the realities of race, of policing, of the intergenerational trauma that is in the water, even when it might implicate ourselves?

Jesus blesses the disciples for sitting with those parables of suffering, tolerating the likelihood that they will not be the heroes of the story, that they will not be the ones who fix everything. We can trust God with those feelings. We might discover that when we sit with these feelings, God is willing to set up tent with us. We might be blessed in that place of uncertainty, complexity, self-interrogation, even though we don’t always understand it, and can’t fix this world on our own.

…

After Jesus blesses his disciples, after they have sat with these feelings of disappointment and discouragement, after they have perceived this parable, Jesus extends another invitation. “With this trouble that you have found, understand it. Examine it, inquire about it. There is deep wisdom here.” From the disciples’ unfulfilled expectations, Jesus invites them to make meaning from their disappointments. What does this reveal about God’s love, nurture, and protection? What do these seeds and sower mean about the way things are? What does it mean about who we are as humans?

The early communities of faith, who are asking questions about the Messiah, accept this invitation. They start piecing together what might be happening and who God might be. Letters by Paul and early Christians start circulating. Texts like the gnostic Gospels start being written and sent across the Roman empire. When the church starts making meaning, it unleashes this odd, mystic time where there are no clear answers, but there are lots of different ideas about what has happened and what might happen.

Our own Reformed faith is built upon this invitation to build meaning and listen for the Word of God. We believe that God speaks to us in our particularities. We believe that the proclamation of God’s Word must always speak to the nuances, present corners of our lives, and that the Spirit of God is calling us to something particular today. The revelation of God is not stuck in some immobile, fixed book. It emerges from the Spirit’s movement, breathing life into the furthest, most unique corners of our lives.

The parable of the Sower is inviting us to participate, to form new meaning! The pain of our lives, the difficulties and disappointments that have seeped into our souls must be rooted out and supplanted by the love, nurture, hope of God. When congregations close in our Presbytery, what do we make of it? When evictions and utility shutoffs choke our neighbors, what is God’s command? When heart attacks or cancer diagnoses happen, where and who is God? That is meaning making.

And so, the question we started with this morning–where you find yourself in this parable–may not be the most important one. Instead, through the grace of God and movement of the Holy Spirit, the most important thing may be to start telling a story. To start making meaning from the discouragement and disappointments of our lives, when the world was all wrong. And to do this in a way that tells of God’s love, protection, and providence. We are invited to tell a story about how God’s presence and grace made things alright, even when they were all wrong. We may be able to start interpreting things with a new lens, start re-telling a parable in a way that stirs up hope and acceptance for ourselves or for others. Even if we can’t, and we can only muster up the strength to sit with these feelings of disappointment and discouragement, that’s okay, too. Because God might cozy up next to us, and maybe even offer a little blessing.

Please friends, hear the good news of the Gospel: the seed is sown. The soil is rich. Thirty, sixty, hundredfold abundance is here. All that’s left is to make sense of it, to accept it, to receive it, to reap meaning from it. Today, all that’s left is the harvest.

Sources

Davies, W. D., and Dale C. Allison, Jr. "XXVII The Parable Of The Sower And Its Interpretation." A Critical And Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew. London: A Continuum, 1991. 373–406. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 4 Jul. 2023. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472556264.0022>.