July 16, 2023 + Lectionary 15 + Seventh Sunday After Pentecost + Pr. Michelle Sevig
This spring, for the first time in a long time, I decided to plant some flowers to have on our back porch. Usually, I don’t plant my own stuff, I just buy a ready-made planter at Costco. It's easier and likely cheaper. But this year as I walked past Gethsemane Garden in my neighborhood I couldn’t help but be drawn into the beautiful, colorful flowers on full display.
I decided to give it a try. First, we picked out the flowers, thankfully already blooming; I was not starting from seeds. Then I made sure I had some good soil, Organic, moisture control potting mix made with compost. I bought fertilizer to add to the water and I’ve made sure to tend them by faithfully watering them every day.
And still, even with all this care and attention to detail, only some of the plants have flourished, one got too scorched by the sun, and one died because it was being overtaken (choked) by the bigger flower planted next to it.
The parable we read today is not about a gardener, who carefully tends to their flowers; or a farmer, who meticulously plans for a fertile crop ensuring the right soil, the best seed, and the most precise and productive way to plant the seeds. A good farmer would have been more careful. Instead, we get the parable of the extravagant sower, or some might call him the wasteful sower.
It's not at all surprising that most of the seeds didn’t grow. What’s surprising is that the farmer chose to sow it there. A farmer goes out and sows seed on a public pathway, on rocky ground, and amongst the thorns. That is simply wasteful, inefficient, and ineffective. It’s bad farming. You can’t plant seeds among the rocks and thorns or along a path and then act surprised or complain when nothing grows. The story Jesus tells simply does not fit in our world.
Parables offer a different perspective, a new worldview. They give us a glimpse into God’s world and what God is like. They are windows into God’s grace, and invite us to surrender to the surprising generosity of God. And this parable, about the sower and his seed throwing, shows the very nature and character of God: extravagant, generous, abundant in sowing love for all of us, not just the ones who are “good soil.”
One of my favorite biblical interpreters, Debi Thomas, writes about this parable and gives a refreshing image about the sower who goes out to sow and “as he sows the seeds fall everywhere. Everywhere! Imagine it — a sower blissfully walking across the fields and meadows, the back alleys and sidewalks, the playgrounds and parking lots of this world, fistfuls of seed in his quick-to-open hands. There is no way to contain that much seed. No way to sort or save it.” It scatters wistfully in every direction.
The sower sows the same seed in all four soils, with equal toil, equal hope, and equal generosity. He does so without evaluation of the soil's quality or potential. There is no soil left unsown. No ground declared undeserving. This parable is not about the quality of the dirt, it's about the quality of God, the divine sower. We want to judge what kind of dirt we are. God simply wants to sow their life in ours.
And here’s the kicker, this farmer's “crop” is blessed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. This foolish farmer who, in a world of scarcity, casts his seed on soil everyone knows is worthless, is blessed in shocking abundance: a harvest of 30, 60, or 100-fold.
Maybe the parable should be named The Hundredfold Harvest. Even if the harvest were only 30 fold this story would end with a miracle. Sevenfold meant a good year for a farmer and tenfold meant true abundance. But a hundredfold? Unheard of!
But God’s harvest is plentiful and the kin-dom of God is breaking in the among us now. God has blessed us richly. We have been entrusted with God’s word, God's love, God’s forgiveness; and these gifts increase a hundredfold when God’s people scatter them absolutely heedless of who is worthy to receive them. We are called to treat God’s love, God’s justice, and God’s blessing, precious as these gifts are, as if they were absolutely limitless in supply. Because they are.
Imagine if Christians were known for their absurd generosity, instead of being gardeners trying to discern who is good soil, worthy of Christ’s compassion and forgiveness. What would it be like if people could see a quiet, gentle confidence in us when we tend to the hard, rocky, thorny places in our communities instead of finding us abrasive and judgmental? What would it be like if the seeds of love, forgiveness, humility, and justice fell through our fingers in appalling quantities? I bet we would see a hundredfold harvest of love, forgiveness, humility, and justice.
We are called to receive these seeds sown in extravagance and then bear the fruit of these gifts to the world. May Jesus, the Word living among us, empower us to live joyfully in the abundance of God’s grace. And may he enliven our own sowing of love, forgiveness, humility, and justice, for the whole world.