Sowing Recklessly

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Sowing Recklessly

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
July 10, 2011

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such
great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there,
while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in
parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some
seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell
on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up
quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were
scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell
among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell
on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty,
some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”

“Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the
kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away
what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what
was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and
immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures
only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the
word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among
thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and
the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was
sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it,
who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another
sixty, and in another thirty.”

I want to begin today’s sermon 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 apartment 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 weret 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 anyone
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 again, 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 our 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, at least not this
time. 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 in this
world never quite recover, that some people don’t ever seem to be 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 any hope I
had 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 from 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 thrower of 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.

To illustrate this, on 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—instead, 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, and to be loving when love is not deserved. 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 be recklessly kind and loving and graceful and let God
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
may reap, they may 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 for 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, maybe my hope could have meant something in that moment, even
though, of course, she would know 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 personally, 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 personally nurture life out what seems to be
lifeless—remember, that was never our job, to be the gardener, to be the life
bringer—we are just asked to cast the seed. 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.