Scripture readings: Jeremiah
4:1-4; Matthew 13:1-23
I did most of my growing up in a small farming town.
I went to school with a number of farm kids, and I did some farm work when I
was young. That was all about orchards.
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| Pictures Around Sutter Buttes Near Live Oak CA: February 2014 |
I didn’t really know much, but I knew enough about it
to know what I would grow, if I were a farmer; and I had an idea, looking
around me, what farms were better than others. Some were good because they were
fancy. Some were good because they were big. Some were good because they were
well kept and carefully managed. You could sort of tell by looking at them.
I didn’t get to know anything about wheat farming
until I was an adult. I got that knowledge from being a pastor in wheat
country. I learned that wheat farmers had a pretty accurate notion of how good,
or not so good, their neighbors’ farms were. I got to the point where I could
look at a field, and size-up one or two things about it.
So I can size up the farms and the farmers in Matthew
chapter 13. I don’t think they were very good farmers. They were sloppy, and
wasteful, and a little bit crazy. Even in ancient times, good farmers were
smarter this.
The farming parables are dangerous as sources of
agricultural advice. Jesus must have known this and he must have meant it that
way. Jesus was pretty good at shaking people up, when he wanted to, and this is
what he is doing here. The first farmer is a sloppy farmer, who wastes good
seed in stupid places.
My first harvest in wheat country taught me about
this. I was invited to spend a day riding with a farmer in his combine, while
he harvested his fields in the Sky Rocket Hills near Waitsburg. They are called
the Sky Rocket Hills because they seem to shoot straight up into the sky. But
they have good soil and they produce well.
We stopped at midday and the farmer’s wife came out
with their young kids with lunch. We ate in the shade under the wheat truck.
The kids laughed and played in the pile of wheat that the combine had dumped in
the bed of the truck.
When we were done eating, it was time for the kids to
go home. The farmer reminded his kids to empty the wheat out of their shoes and
back into the truck. The lesson was this: you don’t waste wheat. You don’t
waste seed.
The farmer in the parable is wasteful, because he
seeds the path. This is not unavoidable. You carry your bag of seed tied around
your shoulder and you reach in and toss out the seed in a kind of waving
motion. There were paths between the fields. You could walk in the path and
toss the seed out away from the path, into the field.
Families owned their fields for generations. Good
farmers would be proactive in weedy areas, and they would weed again after the
grain started to grow.
If the ground was solid rock, with only a thin layer
of topsoil you would take your chances, or your grandfather would have planted
something else in the worst spots long ago. Sometimes you do just take your
chances, because there is only one sure thing in farming: you won’t have a
harvest if you don’t sow the seed.
In the farm of the kingdom of God
On God’s side of this story there is a promise that
God makes to us. The promise is solemnly serious and full of laughter. The seed
of the kingdom of
God
Everyone listening to Jesus knew something about
farming. They were all shocked by this story, or at least they were all
surprised that God would work this way: that God would be essentially wasteful.
This is what grace is. Grace is a love so free and
extravagant that it is beautiful: like a graceful dancer. Grace is a love that
is ridiculously full of mercy and forgiveness, and it is absurdly patient: as
if it refused to have any conditions or strings attached.
Each piece of ground in the story represents a
person. But none of them is specific enough for us to claim that we know some
people who simply don’t fit the categories. Whatever you may find to be wrong
with someone, whatever way you try to draw a circle to exclude anyone as a
target for God’s kingdom and God’s grace, the intent of this story is to
silence you and make you stop. The story tells you to willingly become an
extravagant seeder because that is what the kingdom of God
In Jesus we see the face of a wastefully gracious
God. Jesus never excluded anyone from his time and energy. People interrupted
him and his work all the time, and Jesus always stopped to give them his
attention.
He denounced the Pharisees and the self-righteous
hypocrites eloquently; but he never told them to go away and leave him alone,
and they never did. The disciples tried to make people go away, and Jesus
always stopped them from doing that.
I don’t think we should ever see anyone as a waste of
our time and effort. This is also true of our time and effort as a church, as a
mission of Jesus. I believe there is always a kind and loving way to do every
thing that really and truly and deeply needs to be done.
We do need to address what truly needs to be done. We
do also need to think about whom it might be that we have left on the outside
of our own wasteful grace.
The story of the farmer and the soils gives us words
of caution. It asks: What kind of ground are you?
The stories of Jesus give us room to play. He doesn’t
tell us what the crop will be. The seed is the message of the kingdom, but that
raises other questions. Is the message of the kingdom a matter of words? If we
bear a larger crop than others does that mean we will do more talking about the
kingdom than they do?
The kingdom
of God
He rules in Jesus because, in Jesus, he restores the
world. In Jesus, God recreates people in his image, so that they resemble
Jesus. People die to themselves because Jesus came to be a servant and die for
them on the cross. They rise to a new life because Jesus made his dying into a
new life, in the resurrection.
When Jesus told these stories, he hadn’t done all
these things yet, but he had come down from heaven to do these things for
everyone who heard him. The seed of the cross and the resurrection was standing
right in front of them telling them these stories.
When we hear words about the story of Jesus (the good
news) and when the Holy Spirit makes it come alive for us, and when we get just
enough understanding to make us open our hearts to him and surrender to him,
then it stops being a matter of words of someone words. The living Jesus is
planted in us. The work of Jesus gets planted in us.
It is not a matter of words. But Jesus used words to
communicate what he was doing. We use words to communicate what God has done
for us in Christ. We use words to explain what God wants us to become. We use
words so others can meet Jesus for themselves and find a surprising new life
because of him. But making it all real is never just a matter of words.
The crop of the kingdom of God
Look at the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters
five through seven. This tells us about a crop that Jesus wants to grow in us.
The crop is about humility, handling grief, being meek or responsive in God’s
hands. The crop is about being merciful to others and about making peace
happen.
The story of Jesus about the farmer and the soils
asks you and me to look at ourselves and see what kind of ground we are. What
kind of ground are you?
Every seed has a tiny plant within it. God gave you
the seed and the plant of the kingdom
of God
What is it that keeps the crop small? Are you hard or
trampled on like the path? Are you a mess of weeds? Are you something in
between? What stands in the way, or where are you hiding from the changes and
the new life of the
Everybody who was listening to Jesus knew something
about farming. One thing they knew was that farming takes time. Wheat has its
seasons within its given year. Orchards take many years of seasons. There are
signs of promise or danger in every season. At least there are signs that
remind you that you have to wait and watch, and be ready for whatever the
season requires of you.
There is special work to be done for every season in
the piece of ground that is your life. You are a work in process. But you need
to know that you have been seeded. What is your season and what is the work for
that season?
I only worked in one wheat harvest. It was an old
farm. The farmer told me stories about it. One was that there once were big
patches of alkali salt on parts of that farm, long ago. Nothing grew on those
pieces of ground. The farmer’s grandfather responded by plowing powdered lime
into that ground year after year. Eighty years or so later it was good ground,
as good and productive as any on the farm.
The ground of our life may have been desert ground.
But the story tells us that Jesus’ seed is a powerful, miraculous seed. I have
read that, in Jesus time, normal harvests around the Mediterranean
would bring seven, eight, or nine times the amount of grain that was seeded.
Modern hybrid wheat might yield what Jesus said:
thirty, or sixty, or maybe even a hundred times what was sown in the field.
But, in Jesus’ time, such a yield would be a miracle. It would not be normal in
any way.
What Jesus gives you is not normal. What Jesus gives
you is the seed of some miracle. You might not even be able to imagine, yet,
what that miracle is.
Jesus said (in his interpretation of the story) that
understanding is the ingredient that makes a harvest possible. In this story
the Greek word for understanding comes from a root word that means putting
things together: like adding two plus two and finding that they equal four.
You can’t understand what Jesus wants unless you add
to it Jesus himself, and what Jesus gives. Put those together and ask how you
will respond.
Your life is ground in which Jesus has planted the
seeds that contain what he has done for you and for the whole world. His cross
and his resurrection are in the seed that is in you and they have the power to
bear great fruit, if you will understand and respond.
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