My great-grandfather, Charles Scott, was a farmer in southern Illinois. I have only a few memories of him. In my mind, he’s always wearing overalls, slightly hunched over, his hands big and gnarled. When he’d come to visit us, he would sit out on my grandparents’ back patio, seeming to prefer the out-of-doors to the confines of the house. Or maybe he was out there because he rolled his own cigarettes and my grandmother had banished him from the living room. I don’t really know.
Grandpa Scott was a kind man. He didn’t talk much. He seemed to know the land better than people. He planted his fields by the phases of the moon and he could predict the weather far more accurately than any experts today with all their fancy technological contraptions.
I thought about him a lot this summer at Annual Conference when Bishop Hope Morgan Ward preached on the Parable of the Sower, this passage from Matthew’s gospel that we hear this morning. She described her own growing up on a farm in North Carolina and how her dad would organize her and her siblings into something of a planting machine. When it was time for the seed to go into the ground, he would send his children out along the rows of freshly tilled soil. The oldest had a stick just the right size for making a hole in the ground. The middle child would follow along, putting a seed into each hole and covering it over, and little Hope, the youngest, would follow along behind and step on each one, the weight of her little body just right for tamping it down, not too light, not too heavy, just about the size of little Willa whom we baptized this morning.
I don’t know if the good bishop’s dad rolled his own cigarettes, but it was North Carolina, so maybe I’ll have to ask her about that some time.
In my great-grandfather and in Bishop Ward’s father, there was something profoundly economical and frugal, the waste-not-want-not generations of farmers, good stewards who lived simply and with great care so that the blessings of God in nature were used wisely and well.
Did you notice that farming is done rather differently in the parable Jesus tells? You’ve seen this sower, no doubt, in countless paintings. There’s a famous and beautiful one painted by Vincent Van Gogh. This sower goes out into his field alone, with a big, heavy sack of seed draped over one shoulder. And as he walks his field, he reaches in and scoops out handfuls of seed to fling over the land in a beautiful arc. And some of the seed falls on top of the beaten path and eager birds swoop down to eat it up. Other seed falls on rocky ground. They grow up quickly but because they can’t put down good, deep roots, they are soon scorched in the heat of the sun.
And some of the seed falls among thorns and the thorns choke the life right out of them. And still other seed falls on good ground and brings forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
Now, all those of us with ancestral memories like mine and those of Bishop Ward might be tempted to think that this sower was wasteful or careless or just in too much of a hurry to take the time needed to properly plant his fields. But that would not be a fair assessment of him. This Palestinian farmer of 2000 years ago did not live in the rich farmlands of southern Illinois or North Carolina. This farmer lived in a place where there was very little agricultural land available at all. A very small field would have been all he had, so small that the hard paths and thorns around the circumference were within the arc of his throw. This farmer had to plant and grow food as best he could, even knowing that his small field was full of rocky ground and places where the seed would not take root.
You see, Jesus is not passing judgment on the sower’s farming technique in this story. He’s just describing how it was, how it worked, the point being how wondrous it was that from such pitiful soil, from such meager conditions, God could even so raise up a crop a hundredfold or sixty or thirty. Thanks be to God!
“Baruch atta adonai elohenu melech ha-olam …blessed art Thou o Lord our God, creator of the fruit of the earth. Let us bless the source of life who brings forth bread from the earth.”
Or in the words of the beautiful prayer our choir sang just after the Gospel reading this morning, music written by Jim Smith, words written by his father, Rev. Fred M. Smith: “May the Gospel seed reach to our deepest need and bring forth blessed deed a hundredfold.”
It’s really important that Jesus gives us this farmer as our role model for what it means to sow the Word of God in today’s world, as Bishop Ward so wondrously reminded us. Nothing against my great-grandfather Scott or her own Dad, but the church has all too often modeled itself after their careful and prudent farming methods, examining the soil, deciding where the good soil is, avoiding the thorns and the rocky ground, the hard places, focusing all our efforts on the good soil. And putting ourselves in the position of deciding where our efforts might bear fruit and where we just ought not bother.
“Be the sower,” she said. “Fling it out! Let it grow where it will.” Because sometimes we’ll be surprised at how the seed of God’s Word takes root in places we thought impossible.
Many years ago, I was pastor of a small congregation adjacent to USC. Our location brought with it all the benefits and richness of that University and as well as the poverty and urban despair of downtown LA. Our congregation had the same “All Are Welcome” theology as do we here, and sometime the wideness of that “all” stretched us beyond our comfort zone. For a couple years, a homeless guy with pretty severe mental illness worshipped as part of that congregation. We called him “August” because that’s what he called himself sometimes, though I doubt that was his given name. You never knew what shape he’d be in on a Sunday morning. Sometimes he’d be muttering to himself, sometimes pretty angry, sometimes just hungry, and sometimes fully participating in the service—in the singing and in the Prayers of the People which we opened up for everyone to speak aloud. August’s prayers were sometimes incoherent and sometimes so plain and clear that they’d break your heart wide open.
During one period of time when he was doing fairly well, August even served as Lay Lector a couple times and something about the raw authenticity of his faith opened the Word in powerful ways of which I think Jesus would have surely approved.
And then he was gone. I thought I saw him around campus one day months later, though I wasn’t really sure. There’s no way to know all of what that time as a full participant in the life of the church meant to him or how the Word took root within him or how God’s grace and the hospitality of the congregation touched his heart with love. I do know how his presence among us touched us and opened us up to the wideness of God’s mercy and the sometimes smallness of our ways.
Our job, church, is not to be the arbitrator of good and bad soil, in others or even in ourselves. Our job, like that of the sower, is simply to sow the seed, in as wide an arc as the wind will carry. It will fall to the ground and it will bear fruit and God will bring forth life far beyond our planning and plotting. We cannot possibly know what needs and longings people are bringing to the worship of God this day. We cannot tell by looking who is hurting, who is lonely, who is feeling guilty or deeply sad. We cannot judge in advance where there might be fertile soil eager for God’s healing touch.
If we’re honest, are there not places within all of us this morning, that we might call rocky or hardened? Are there not places in us where the top soil is thin and the nutrients scarce and we’re hanging on by our fingernails? Are there not ways in which we have fallen far short of the glory of God, ways in which we ourselves do not feel worthy of God’s love? How many of us could possible say, if asked to account for ourselves this morning, could honestly say: Yes, Lord, I am the good soil, completely prepped and ready and worthy of your grace?
God does not ask that of us. God does not ask us to predetermine the worthiness of the recipient, including ourselves. God showers grace upon us. Prevenient, assuring, sanctifying, perfecting grace. God, the sower, scatters the seed of life in a wide, wide arc, embracing us all, our newest little sister, baptized into the family of God this day. Embracing all those in the middle, those in the back, those in the front, those on the edges, and those who are traveling, those confined to home by illness, those just taking a day off because it’s summer, those over in Simkins Hall with one ear pressed to the wall, all just hoping that some seed is going to land in their heart this morning with the gift of life. The gift of forgiveness. The gift of assurance. The gift of love. The gift of peace.
And then God sows us to be sowers ourselves. God sows us to be light for the kingdom, to be hope for the hopeless, to act with justice, to love tenderly, to serve one another.
May the Gospel seed reach to our deepest need and bring forth blessed deed a hundredfold. AMEN.
© Patricia Farris, 2008. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
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"The Wide Arc of the Sower"