Planting Seeds Of Wisdom: Exploring The Parables Of Jesus For Personal And Community Growth Transcript

Jesus talked and taught in parables. Mark says Jesus only taught in parables, but we have other teachings in the gospels that say otherwise. But the parable was Jesus's primary way. When he wasn't talking with the disciples, when he wasn't in private, when he was talking to crowds of people, he taught in parables. Now, one way of looking at this, one way of thinking about this, and one way that I was taught as a kid was the parables, which were these simple stories that Jesus used so that you could understand what he was trying to say. 

And in some ways, there's some truth to that. When Jesus is describing the kingdom of heaven and how it is taking root in the world, how transformation happens, and how he will be the redemption of the world, that's a lot of complexity to try to explain just forthright, and people still wouldn't get it. So he taught in parables, trying to convey complex truths so people would understand them. But he also recognized that most people listening would need help understanding the parables themselves. So whether he was teaching directly or whether he was teaching in parables, the people who were listening, the crowds of people, only some would fully understand. In the Gospel of Mark, we get the sense that people don't understand who Jesus is or his teaching until after the resurrection. It's only after Jesus has died on the cross that Jesus rises again after evil has been conquered. After all, it is clear that Jesus' teaching would even make full sense. And so we're reading these parables after the fact, after the revealing of Christ himself and his redemption. 

And yet many of us, myself included, can read these parables and say I have no idea what this is about. And if that's you today, if you ever read the scripture, you're in good company. If we had it all figured out and could explain it in simple terms, there would be no need for gathering in the community if we had ways of conveying the information. If you could download it all and read it all and fully understand it, there would be no need to come together to struggle with the scriptures, to dive into them, to understand them, to challenge each other and say what are you seeing in these and either agree or disagree and have the conversation. If scripture were easy to understand, it would not convey the complexity of who God is and what God has done. And so it's okay if we don't understand the other beauty of the parables because of their nature and the variety of ways that you could read them and understand them because they can mean various things, and we struggle with that. We can find God's truth in different ways. God's spirit and word can speak to us differently when we read each passage and parable because we find different details that stand out from one time to the next. 

Now, some would be uncomfortable with this ambiguity. Scripture should be scripture should mean this. This is what the parable says: what these things mean, what the seed is, what the sower is, what the field is, what the grain is, and all of that. And there should be only one meaning, or how do we prevent it from meaning whatever we want? It's a valid criticism, though the answer is not to say that each parable only has one meaning and one way of understanding it. Still, the answer is that we check our readings, we check our interpretations, and we check our applications against one another. It prevents us from running wild with an interpretation of scripture that ultimately contradicts who God is and God's nature when somebody else begins to call us on that. So again, the reading of the scriptures, the understanding of the parables amid the crowd themselves, in struggling with the understanding and the meaning, the answer is community. The answer is learning together. The answer is growing together. 

So, many of you may have heard this particular parable, the parable of the sower, before. You might have heard sermons like the one I'm giving now. The interpretations and the readings of it I'm giving now. Maybe you haven't; maybe you've heard other ones and said, well, that's what it meant. What is he talking about? But as I read this parable, I came up with this repeatedly. That's the beauty of the story. 

We talk about the sower. Jesus was talking to an agrarian society, a group of farmers. They would know how to prepare the soil. They would know how to mark their fields away from the thorny ground and remove thorns. They would get rid of rocks so the soil would be ready to receive the seed. They would have a part. They would have pads marked well. They wouldn't just scatter seeds in whatever place that they could. 

The reason is that in most years, the average harvest would produce about four times as much seed as was planted. The return would be fourfold on average; on good years, eightfold. So, eight times the amount of seed on a good year versus what was put in. The seed that didn't have to be kept for the next year to set aside from that next year would be used to feed their family or sell so that they could feed their families and live. The seed was precious. The seed was held onto, it was treated right, and it was kept from year to year so that the new harvest would come, knowing that if the seed failed, if the harvest failed, if it didn't produce as much as the harvest would have if it didn't produce as much as they could, they could go hungry, they could lose income and things would be hard for the following year. 

So farmers like this who would hear of this sower carelessly throwing the seed, carelessly chucking it among the path, among rocks, among thorns, would be appalled by it. They'd at least be surprised by it. Yet here the sower is Carelessly casting the seed to places that the average farmer would know won't grow well, but he did it anyway. And they're already questioning this, as they're hearing the story, they're hearing the parable, things are starting to raise questions, to raise objections, and that's where the parables start to work. When you hear the parable, when you hear it with knowledge and understanding of how the world works or how it usually works, and that switch from this is how it works typically to wait, that's not quite right. That's the catch. That's what's meant to grab you. That's what's to say here. 

Please pay attention to this, because something is going on and they've caught the people's attention. Jesus has caught the people's attention about the sower sowing the seed and what they think is an average seed, to begin with, in unusual places. As they're questioning that, the parable talks about how the seeds would grow and the expected things happen On the path. Nothing grows because the crows can eat it immediately In the rocky soil. They've seen it before. The seeds sprout. The seeds look like they're growing and growing new life, but when the sun comes, they wither because there's no depth among the thorns. The thorns crowd the seeds out, so they cannot grow; they cannot out-compete the thorns for sunlight and nutrients, so they grow, die, and fail to grow into the harvest. So all that is normal, normal, normal, average, standard. And then in the field, in the place that has been prepared, in the place that is ready to receive the seed, the unexpected happens. The seed cast in all these other places and failed as expected produces a bumper crop, not four-fold like an average year, not eight-fold like a good year, but 60-fold, 80-fold, 100-fold. 

The unusual thing is the seed. You have an unusual sower who's sowing indiscriminately. You have an unusual seed that produces abundant growth and new yield. And these things would catch people's eyes or ears and imaginations. They would question, well, what is it that is this seed? What is it about this seed that makes it grow so much? And what is it about this farmer that would cast indiscriminately and not pay attention to where the seed is growing? And these are the questions that they're left with at the end of the parable. They're left with these things. They're left with soil that usually behaves. They're left with seeds and seeds in a farmer that behaves abnormally. And that's all they get when you read the Gospels. That's all the crowd gets. Now, the part we skipped over was a little bit of Jesus explaining to the disciples. They come to him and say what in the world does this parable mean? And Jesus tells them, "This is this, and this is that. But the crowd gets the story. 

One thing that kept popping into my mind is that sometimes we think, when we think about the story, we lose sight of the ground and the various parts and ways the earth is prepared. We have the path, the stones, the rocky ground, the thorny ground, and then we have the field, and we think there's only a path, and the path is always the path. The rocky ground is always the rocky ground, the thorny ground is always the thorny ground, and the field is always the field. But here, too, we know that is not true. I was thinking of when I was in college. I know I'm going back. 

There were paths that usually students walked, and they were paved, and that's usually where students walked, except one thing happened roughly my junior year. They built a new building. They built a new building, and all of a sudden, what? Students started taking a different pathway than they used to. They would start cutting across what was once a green area with grass, and they would cut through that. They tried to put pathways where they wanted students to walk to get to this new building and construction. But students, being what they are, on the way to class as late as they usually are or as quickly as we usually were, would make our own paths. You wanted the shortest route between two buildings because you were usually late wherever you needed to go, and so, as the fall semester began with this new building and as the students were cutting their own path, what once was green and grassy is now hardened and is turned into a footpath. 

So the ground doesn't stay the same. A farmer preparing a brand new field begins with rocky soil, begins with thorny soil, with soil full of trees and down trees and stumps and rocks, and through hard work and care and through all of this transformation over time, through fertilization and care, what once was thorny ground and rocky ground becomes a verdant field ready for the seed. Weeds only sometimes stay where they grow. Now, when I was a kid and I was helping my grandmother with her garden if she dared ask me to help her because I really couldn't tell the difference between a weed, a flower, or a plant that she wanted to be there, and so if she wanted what she planted to stay there. Sometimes, asking me to help her weed wasn't safe, but the thorns don't stay where they're unwanted. They can be removed. The things that would crowd out the seed and prevent it from taking root can be removed. 

So what if? What if we focused on the ground this time? What would it mean to look at the ground, not as something static? Oh, there are bad people, evil people, people that sprout quickly but are shallow and have no depth. Then, some really good people receive the word and grow, and that's how the parable is meant to be read. Those people stay in the lanes that they're in. That's how it's been decided from the beginning, and that's how it'll be. But instead, what if we saw ourselves as the ground? 

Can you imagine or remember a time in your life when you were the pathway hardened, unable to receive the seed or what has been cast, and so it just whilers? Can you remember a time when you received it? You received the good news; you heard it almost for the first time, but other things were in the way. The ground needed to be prepared. It may have grown for a little while you started reading your Bibles more. You started saying, oh, I really like this. 

You started diving in initially, but everything stayed the same after a while. You didn't grow roots. You tried to do it all yourself. You didn't connect or go deep, so the growth you saw at first withered away and disappeared. Maybe you were among the thorns of life's worries, life's challenges, too many competing ideas or too many competing attentions pulling you from side to side, crowding out, taking what nutrients you had available to you, time and energy, and taking all of those things pulling you away so that there was absolutely nothing left for the seed to grow. And maybe there were times when you were the field, you had taken care to remove the thorns, you had taken care to remove the rocks, you had taken care to till the soil, so that wasn't this hardened, compact earth where nothing could grow, and the seed fell. The seed took root, it grew, and out of that abundance, out of that growth within you, the harvest grew fourfold, eightfold, 60fold, 80fold, 100fold. 

The ripples of your actions, the ripples of your words, the ripples of your transformation could spread, and you could see it. Now again, you didn't stay in any one of those ways. The soil transformed. There may have been a time when you were producing that growth and transformation, and somebody came through and began to walk on the field, trample on it, and harden it. Life happened to take what once was fertile, what once was soft and life-giving, and through the actions of others, through their words, through their deeds, what once was soft and malleable became hardened again, just like that grassy area that students would walk across, that as it got walked on and trampled on and stepped on so many times throughout the day by so many people, hardened to the point where grass would no longer grow. It was no longer green and life-given but a hardened path. The soil changes, life changes it, we change it, prepare ourselves, help prepare others, and live it out. 

Life can trample us and tread hard on us, and it's easy to think that if you had it. You lost it, you're never getting it back, or you've never had the growth or the transformation, that you're stuck as a path or stony ground. You grow in spurts, and then it dies. And you grow in spurts, and then it dies, and then you grow in spurts, and then it dies. It's easy to think that that's how it will always be, but we know the seed is plentiful. There is nothing wrong with the seed. It grows to a harvest of a hundredfold. The sower is plentiful. The sower scatters the seed on all of the soil types. The sower scatters the seed, not caring where it will grow or where it won't grow, not keeping it only for the select few, but casts it everywhere. 

What we need to focus on now is trust in the seed and trust in the sower, but focus on the type of soil that we're creating and that we are. Are we beating people down and beating ourselves down and trotting on ourselves so much that the soil is ground and the seed fails? Do we do things spuriously so that new life begins but ultimately remains shallow because it's not enough to sustain it? Do we need to clean out some thorns competing for our attention, time, and energy? So, we need to make a space for the seed to be planted and to grow. Are we ultimately transforming ourselves? This place are ministries and helping other people become the soil ready to receive the seed. That's ultimately what I want to leave you with today. 

Where are you? Where have you been? Have you been to those different types of soil at different times? Where would you place yourself if you looked at yourself now and were honest with yourself? Have you been one of the others before, and what would it take? What changes, what transformation, what new way of living or an old way of living Would it take to go from where you are to where you want to be, and how can we help each other on that path? As you think about that this week, as you grab some coffee before you head back out into the cold air again, get warm, enjoy, get warm by the coffee, get tea or each other's company, maybe talk about a few of those things and begin to till the soil and prepare it for new growth and transformation and, ultimately, new life. Amen.