Your One Job

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday After Pentecost Yr A

July 12, 2020

St. Michael’s Episcopal Church

The Reverend Canon Michael J. Horvath

Gospel: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

One of my favorite gardening programs is called Gardener’s World, a BBC production that is hosted by Monty Don. If you’ve ever watched it or seen clips of it, you know that Monty has one of the most serene, reassuring presenter voices around. And his garden, called Longmeadow, is just as serene and lush as Monty sounds. No matter what time of the year, everything is in full bloom, rarely anything is eaten by slugs or snails, and even his dogs seem to be natural features of his garden and they show up in every episode.

It’s all enough to make the green-eyed snake of envy rise up in oneself, with feelings of gardening inadequacy washing over one. However, I noticed something that Monty does a few times during the season. About a month and a half ago, he sowed carrot seeds in his vegetable garden. A few weeks ago, his viewers were taken back to the carrot bed only to find that almost none of the seeds took, and the few that did survive were eaten by rabbits and groundhogs. I tried to avoid smirking and having a superior attitude, but I felt for him and his loss. However, Monty, being Monty, simply said with a stiff upper lip, oh well, and proceeded to sow other vegetables in the bed. Those have since grown beautifully.  

Now, I wanted to connect Monty to today’s parable of the Sower, but there’s just something that doesn’t jive. It’s not an apples to apples comparison. On its face, this parable invites us to reflect on our lives and the way we are living it. It’s always a good thing to do that and we should. But this way of thinking about this parable is a bit cliché and overdone. It might seem another parable of judgement, when, in fact, it is so much more. Because we want to know how we’re doing and we want the opportunity to judge how others are doing in their spiritual live, we reduce the parable to one obvious question. What kind of soil am I and what kind of soil are you? When we speak of ourselves, I bet we usually find ourselves being the rich, fertile soil, and others being the poor soil. But this is not, however, the only way to read this parable. We are not just the dirt.

The truth is that this parable does not make sense in our modern-day context. A farmer goes out and sows seed on a public path, on rocky ground, and amongst the thorns. Monty Don would tell you that that is poor gardening. You can’t plant seeds among the rocks and thorns or on a well-trodden path and then act surprised or complain that nothing grew. The story Jesus tells simply does not fit in our world. Once we can understand this, we can begin to make sense of the parable.

As different as the four soils are, they all hold two things in common. Seeds and the sower. The sower sows the same seeds in all four soils with equal measure and hope, and with equal generosity and abandon. The sower doesn’t care about the soil’s quality or richness. There is no soil left unsown. No ground is declared undeserving of the sower’s seeds. This is not about the quality of soil. It’s about the quality of God, the divine sower. We want to judge what kind of soil we are, but God is simply interested in sowing himself into our lives. 

God is the sower, scattering seeds liberally, everywhere. And this should give us insight into the nature of God. He sows because that’s what God does. The seeds of potential love, compassion and mercy are sown generously, abundantly. Whether on the public path, in rocky soil, among the thorny shrubs or in the best composted soil, the seeds of the Good News are sowed.

And the seeds are sowed in us, no matter what kind of soil we think we are, in the hope that we can then thrive and become sower of seeds ourselves. How we understand the Gospel, the Good News, and absorb it into our lives, how well we tune our ears to God’s message, actually determines how fruitful we become. And it takes constant sowing, and God constantly comes back to us and sows more seeds whenever the first don’t take because we are worth nurturing and the soil that we are is always worth the work.

And this example of God as the sower has to be the example by which we are called to be sowers ourselves. As we are the soil that holds the seeds, we are also the sower. It’s not an easy job. How many times have you tried to point someone towards love or justice, or peace and reconciliation and they just won’t hear any of it? Preachers know this all too well. We cast the gospel as broadly as possible, with no assurance of where it will land. When I preach about social justice or racism, I usually receive one or two emails from folks, and usually the same folks, who will say, “I’m a Christian, but…”, and attached to that email will usually be an article written by some obscure academic that supports their racist or discriminatory views. To those emails I simply send a polite, “Thank you and I look forward to reading the article.”  I know the seed of the Gospel has not germinated in their poor soil (yet), and may never do so, and I move on. 

We may be tempted to invest time, energy, and hope in trying to coax growth among people who don’t want to hear the Good News. We can waste precious effort being, anxious, angry or sad that the seeds we sow don’t take root. But God’s sowers accept the reality that many seeds will fall on bad soil and never germinate, yet we have to move on and keep sowing. We have got one job and one job only – spreading the seeds of the Good News. Remember what Jesus tells us: “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.” (Matt. 10:14) 

It’s easy to become disappointed and wonder why we should even make the effort. But simply sowing the seeds of the Good News is what it is all about. We are called to help God’s love break into this world; we are called to nurture a sense of justice in a world that constantly denies it to whole groups of people. We are called to plant the seeds of compassion and mercy in the driest, weediest and unfertile of soils. And we are called to do all of these things without regard to the harvest, because what Jesus reminds us is that the harvest is plenty, but the laborers are few.  

So let the seeds God sows in you continue to break open and become something new. Let the Good News grow within you so that you, in turn, will bear the fruit of the Good News for others. Just as Monty Don’s failed carrot crop reminds us, we can start again and again and again if only we take the time to receive the seeds God throws our way.  Amen.