"Radical Stories, Radical Christianity:
The Parable of the Sower"
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
January 7, 2006
First Sunday of Epiphany
Year C

I want to begin today’s sermon and this sermon series with this question: have you ever
given up on someone or something?  Have you ever come to a point where you just
didn’t see the light at the end of tunnel, in your own life or maybe the life of a friend who
just seemed to be hell-bent on going down a road that everyone knew would lead them
to nowhere?  You know, I think it’s a common experience—its almost as if you are
watching a car accident in slow motion and you just feel helpless as you see it
happening.   I know I have certainly been there before, maybe on both sides of the
fence, actually, watching the accident and being the accident, but I think most of us
have been there before—watching a friend or even an acquaintance self-destruct in
front of our eyes, and feeling helpless as they careen out of control.  When I was in
Spokane, Washington, I worked a couple of other jobs to supplement my part-time
income as a pastor, and one of those jobs was working as the Assistant Resident
Manager of the small 22-unit complex that I actually lived in.  Now, this set of
apartments wasn’t the best in town—actually, it could be a pretty tough place to live,
and some that had to do with the fact that it was section 8 housing.  We had a few
practicing alcoholics in the complex, and we had a few folks in recovery, and we also
had people like the woman who set her apartment on fire deliberately because she didn’
t feel as if I and others weren’t paying her enough attention—the apartment she set fire
to was completely gutted and was only two or three doors down from me! And we also
had some ex-prostitutes, and a few practicing prostitutes, depending on where they
were in their lives at that particular moment.  

In fact, there was a woman in the complex that had been a prostitute for many years,
someone who had been exploited by pretty much all the men in her life, but at that time
it seemed as if she was finally kicking the drugs and had extracted her fragile life out of
the grip of her pimp, a man who had basically enslaved her for so long.  Susan, as I’ll
call her, was one of those people who showed the wear and tear of the life she had
been living—she always seemed as if she would have broken into a thousand pieces if
you had touched her, her eyes never quite seemed to be focused on you or anything
else in particular.  She had been a former resident of my apartment complex, and we
were one of the few places that would take her back when she finally seemed to get
clean and sober.  But sadly, the sobriety didn’t last long, and her old pimp found his
way back into her life, and all of sudden the apartment complex erupted with activity,
with men arriving and leaving at odd times, or the sound of screams and shouting
always seeming to emanate from her apartment, because of fights with her pimp.  
Dennis, who was the actual resident manager of the complex and my boss finally came
to a difficult decision—he finally decided to evict her, though I could see how much it
hurt him to do it, because he had been the one to give her a second chance by letting
her come back to this complex after she already been kicked out once before for the
same problems.  

Dennis was always giving people second chances and I think he had hoped she had “it”
beat this time out, but it wasn’t meant to be.  I always felt like he was more of a social
worker than he was a Resident Manger, and he genuinely cared for the misfits that
somehow found their way to his apartment building.  I remember saying to him, in that
moment after we had delivered the bad news to her about her eviction—which was
drama unto itself—I remember saying to him that it seemed as if some people never
quite recover, that some people don’t ever seem to be ever able to recover from the
deep wounds inflicted upon them, that some people are just hopeless, often caught in a
nightmare that was never of their own making.  And yet, I also remember almost
immediately being horrified that I, as a minister, would say such a thing—I mean, we
ministers are supposed to be in the hope business, and it sure sounded as if I had
given up hope for her.  In retrospect, I think my instincts were right, my horror at my
words, because more than me being in the hope business, I don’t think what I said was
quite true, though I do think I understand where it came from: it just simply came from
that place of frustration in trying to help someone who refused to be helped, that
frustration that comes seeing someone drive their own life into the ground, and feeling
helpless, feeling like you can’t do anything about it.   

I’ll return to this moment, but now I want us to look at this text, the one you heard
moments ago.   The Parable of the Sower, as it commonly called, is one of those
familiar parables that we all think we know what it means, and so we lose how radical its
message really is.  Indeed, this one of the few parables Jesus actually fully explains
himself—he even uses it as an example on how to interpret these things called
parables, these short stories Jesus often told, these radical stories with so much
meaning, with many layers of meanings, these parables that are meant to challenge
our preconceptions of who God is and who we are.  He told these stories to confound
and confuse his listeners, to challenge what they thought they knew about God.  But
the problem is that most of us who have heard this story year after year is that we think
we get it and the reality is that we probably don’t get it—it is sometimes as confusing
and confounding as it was 2000 years ago!  In this case, I think we tend to focus on the
wrong part of the parable, and we even tend to focus on the wrong part of Jesus’
explanation of it.  Despite our instincts to look at the obvious parallels, despite our
desire to center on the seed and the ground, the soil, so that we can figure on what
kind of soil we personally might be, I just want us to remember that this is not a parable
about seeds—this is a parable about the throwing the seed, the farmer casting the
seed—this is really NOT a parable about us and what kind of soil we may or may not
be..  There is a reason it is called the Parable of the Sower, rather than the Parable of
the Seeds, or the Parable of The Soil—this is a parable about the sower, more than it is
anything else.

In your bulletin today, you’ll find Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting, Sower with the
Setting Sun, though I know that you can’t fully appreciate the beautiful color in this
painting because, of course, we could only reproduce it in black and white.  But if you
were to see it in color, one of the things you would instantly notice is that these colors
seem to jump off the painting, with that yellow emanating from the sun being particularly
spectacular.  It is a very typical Van Gogh painting in that it reflects his deep love of
powerful color.  And yet, despite the brilliance of the vibrant color Van Gogh infuses
into the piece, I think it’s the figure of the sower on the right side of the painting that
catches the eye, even though he is shrouded in less vibrant, less beautiful color.  I
think Van Gogh avoids the temptation we often fall to when listening to the Parable of
the Sower and that is to forget that the parable is about the sower, not the seed or the
ground the seed falls in, good soil or bad soil.   It is the deep outline of the one in the
painting who sows the seed that I think becomes the center of this piece, and how this
sower is seemingly reckless, almost careless and irresponsible, extravagant with the
seed he has been entrusted to sow, to plant, to cast into the ground.  

Whoever this planter is, one thing for sure is that he doesn’t seem to know how to seed
the ground he has been entrusted with—why in the world would you plant so carelessly
and thoughtlessly, throwing your seed in places that are sure bets not to yield much of
a harvest?  Seeds aren’t free, you know, not now and not in the ancient world!  The
seeds are being thrown all over the place—he throws the seeds on the path, where the
birds will come and eat it up; he throws the seeds on the rocky ground where the soil is
not good and has no depth; and he even throws the seeds in a place where the seeds
are bound to grow only to a point that the thorns will allow, and then that will be it for
those poor seeds.  It’s as if the sower has no aim, no rhyme or reason to why or how he
sows, why or how he plants his seed on his farm.

But, of course, that recklessness, that seeming disregard for not planting well and
thoughtfully, it all seems to be THE POINT, after all.  If this story is not the parable of
the seeds, or the parable of the soil, and if it is indeed the parable of the sower, then
maybe we should pay attention to the sower first and foremost.  Maybe we should focus
on the actions of the sower to see how we should live our lives, rather than focusing on
what type of soil we or someone else happens to be—goodness knows, we’ve all been
the different types of soil mentioned here at different points in our lives—good soil, bad
soil, distracted soil, shallow soil.  All of those types of soil describe us at one time or
another in our lives.  And in all these different type of soils, in their different states of
readiness for that seed to be planted in them, this sower, this reckless planter,
continues to sow, to plant, carelessly, wildly.  We have a tendency to focus on
ourselves when we look at this parable, but we really aren’t being asked to figure out
what kind of soil we are—again, we are different kinds at different points in our lives—
we are being asked to identify with the sower, to be like the one casting the seed, and
not to spend too much time worrying about what kind of soil we are or even what kind of
seed is being thrown in our particular soil, which could be all sorts of gifts God often
gives to us, like grace, like hope, like love, and a million other wonderful things God
seems to throw our way.  

And so maybe for us, the message is that we need to continue to sow recklessly, that
we need to continue planting things like hope and love in all the unexpected places,
that we need to be kind when kindness is not warranted, or to love when love is not
deserved.  Other people’s soil, their souls, their lives, these are not our responsibility—
it is not our garden, our farm, and we cannot be the gardener, the farmer—that is God’
s work.  What we are responsible for is being reckless in our lives, reckless with our
own seeds of love, of hope, of forgiveness, of generosity, because those acts may one
day fall upon soil that is ready to receive them, soil that can produce 30, 60, and 100
fold, seed that will help change a person’s life, and that will begin the transformation of
the world, one person at a time.  God has been so generous in sending those seeds of
grace our way, even in those places in our lives when we weren’t ready to receive them
or even acknowledge that they existed.  Christ is asking us to be bad farmers, with poor
aim, who don’t seem to quite know where the good soil is, and where the bad soil
happens to be. That’s actually good news—we don’t have to be agricultural scientist,
spiritual scientists, determing whether or not its worth farming this or that particular
piece of land—we don’t have the burden of having to decide whether it worth being
kind or graceful to this person or to that person—we are asked, instead, to recklessly
be kind and loving and graceful and let God decide tend to the garden of that person’s
heart.  Our job is to plant God into this world, and then to let God take care of the
garden, the fields—one day we will reap, but now, at this moment, we are simply to
seed the world with God’s incredible presence.    

So, if I had to do it over again, I think I would have been more generous with my words
about Susan, the woman in my apartment complex in Spokane.  No, I don’t mean I
would have supported her continued presence in the complex—her presence was
putting everyone else in danger, with the drugs and the johns going in and out of the
building.  But I do wish I had not have given up hope on her, as I did in that moment
with Dennis, the resident manager, when I said those words.  Even my little seed of
hope, my hope that, maybe, one day she could overcome her lifetime of pain, chaos,
and abuse, and maybe my hope could have meant something in that moment, even
though, of course,  she would no nothing about that hope I still had in her.  Certainly I
failed her, and I even failed Dennis in that moment, uttering those words, doubting
whether she was the kind of soil worth wasting precious seed on.  She was and is a
precious person, in God’s sight, and even in my sight, in my better moments, and
certainly in Dennis’ sight.  Our love, our hope in others and for others, is never wasted,
it is never thrown on soil that is not worthy of that hope and grace and love, even if we
know that it is a garden and a seed we cannot tend to, even if we need to set the
boundaries that are healthy and whole for others and ourselves to grow in.  Our hope
in others is never wasted, even when it is sown, planted in soil that seems unfruitful,
that seems stripped of possibilities, and even when we know we cannot nurture life out
what seems to be lifeless—remember, that was never our job, to be the gardener, to be
the life bringer.  Still, the Sower asks us to be reckless, careless even, with our love
and our hope, because there will be times when the ground is ready for our belief in
others, for our hope in others, and the ground that was once shallow or surrounded by
weeds will be prepared for new life, and what will be needed in those moments is
people like us who are willing to believe in others, just one more time, just as God
believes in us, always, one more time.  If God is willing to be reckless with love and
hope and grace, then maybe we too need to be reckless with our love, and our hope,
and our grace.  Amen.