By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
Mark 4: 1-20
September 30, 2012
The most bizarre thing about the farmer in the parable of the sower is that she throws the seeds anywhere, just willy-nilly, like she doesn’t care where they land. So some seeds land on the path, some in rocky soil, some in thorns. And of course, some lands in good soil, and thrives.
We generally think of the seeds as symbolizing the Word of God, and the soil symbolizes our hearts, so then the parable’s is about how readily and well each of us receives the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the Good News of the Gospel. In fact, that’s how Jesus teaches it. But parables are subject to multiple interpretations, and that’s one reason Jesus teaches from them. So I’d like to beg your indulgence a bit.
What if the seeds are children, and the soil is the environment in which the children find themselves? Because, after all, that is how it works. Children are born into all sorts of families.
Some are born into “hard path” families, families that are following a hard road, families with tensions and difficulties, moving from one crisis to another, and the children are pretty much left on their own to fend for themselves. And when the “Angry birds” of life come along, the people who tempt them and say, “Stick with us and we’ll take care of you!” but really want just to chew them up and spit them out, those children easily fall prey to them.
Some are born into pretty rocky families, families with little depth. There’s no real spiritual insight. They may even go to church, but that doesn’t make them deep. They get taught simple answers to the difficult questions of life, and then, when the inevitable evils of life assail them, when the unbearable Texas summer sun beats down on them, these children just don’t have the coping skills, and they wither in the heat.
Some are born into thorny families. Their families make them suffer. They treat them like dirt. They manipulate and use them. And so they choke joy and hope and anything good entirely out of them.
And some are born into good families, where they thrive and grow, where they are loved and supported and challenged and encouraged, and as a result these children thrive, and the fact that they thrive means that they produce fruit, that others are blessed because these kids are raised in a loving, happy family.
By now you’ve probably decided which family you hope you are, and which family you fear that you are. So let’s be clear, life is never as simple as a parable. And Jesus knew that when He used parables. Life isn’t this simple.
You can be a good family, but be on a hard path right now—unemployed, going through tensions with your spouse or partner, maybe even divorced or broken up, having a hard time with money or health—but those things don’t make you bad parents or a bad family.
You could lack depth. You could be going through a spiritual crisis, and no longer certain of all the answers that faith used to give you. Or, on the other hand, you could have a pretty shallow faith, you don’t really think much about the hard questions of life or you only like the easy answers—that doesn’t make you a bad family or bad people.
You could be a thorny family. It could be that there are times when you have manipulated your children or even caused them to suffer. Here’s a tough reality. Sometimes we all do stupid or selfish or manipulative or even harmful things to our children or to the people we love. Sometimes we do it out of ignorance, sometimes meanness, sometimes because we are hurting ourselves and so we want to cause hurt to someone else. It’s awful. But unless it’s an ongoing pattern of behavior, it doesn’t make you a bad parent or friend or lover. Your family can recover from it.
And you could be a good soil family, but still have times when you’re on the hard path, times you have no depth, times you’re a thorn in the side of the people you love.
And what kind of church are we? Are we a good soil church or a bad soil church? Churches can be alternative families for children who have difficult lives, or they can be a support system for families that are going through hard times, or they can be a backup system for families that basically have it together—or they can be an added strain on an already burdened family or child.
There are churches that are on the path to big growth and big money, and they look at families with young children and they think, “that’s where the money and the success is,” and so they draw them in, but feed them spiritual baby food, so that what little faith these kids develop can’t stand the strain of the problems of real life.
There are churches that have lost, or never developed, their sense of responsibility for their children, “the least of these,” but are always concerned with pleasing the adults by keeping the kids in line, and taking care of the adults because that’s where the money is, and they believe and practice that “children should be seen and not heard,” and so they don’t develop children’s programs.
And there are even churches that spiritually abuse children in the name of Christ. They teach children that their natural curiosity is wrong, that being different is sinful, and that God is a cruel, heartless taskmaster very like an abusive parent. They choke the hope and joy and life out the kids, and out of families, too, and they do it in the name of God.
That’s not how God is. Jesus gave us plenty of parables about who God is, and many of them were about God as parent. God is the loving Father of the Prodigal Son, who gives the Son freedom to make bad choices, but welcomes him with open arms and big party when he comes back. In another place, Jesus says, ““Which of you fathers, if your son asks for[f] a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!(Luke 11: 11-13)”
Jesus says God is like many things and the thing God is like in the Parable of the Sower is a farmer. Or a gardener. Most farmers and gardeners who heard this parable then—or now—would have shaken their heads at this story, because it’s such a waste of good seed to throw it so indiscriminately, so randomly.
But ask that same farmer then—or now—what you are to do when you have to make a living farming but three-fourths of your farmland is unusable and they would say, You have to change the soil. That was one of the great lessons of the ancient world, the lesson learned that finally allowed nomadic peoples to settle down and allowed civilization itself to flourish. People used to move from place to place because they couldn’t find good soil or because they’d deplete the soil they had. But then they began to figure out how to replenish soil, how to make bad soil good. And that changed everything.
Margaret and I have certainly learned that over years of gardening. We’ve always tried to have a vegetable garden or flower gardens wherever we’ve lived. When we came to Texas we were stymied by this thick black claylike Texas soil. We could barely even dig into it—how were we going to plant anything? So we did what any gardener does when bad soil’s all you’ve got to work with—you start to change the soil. Bring in some fertilizer, some good soil from other places, break up the thick clay and mix it with good stuff. Sometimes you have to do it over and over again. But eventually, with patience, you get good soil. And with good soil, your seeds thrive.
And that is the work of the good gardener God. God takes our bad soil and breaks it down and mixes in fertilizer and turns our bad soil to good soil. If we’re talking about a family, God the gardener has the ability to change families, to make them, often through adversity, into places that really are healthy and loving places for children to grow up.
Or if we’re talking about a church, God’s careful gardening makes us soil that is fit for our children, and our visitors and new members. In fact, the constant planting of visitors, children, and new members is a big part of the process of breaking down whatever bad soil we might have and making it good soil.
God the Gardener can and does do that kind of soil-changing. But we, the soil, have to do our part. Our part is simple. Be humble. Be humble as dirt. Be humble as soil. Don’t assume that you’re the best family in the world, because even the best family has its flaws, and the worst mistake you can make is to think you don’t. And don’t assume we’re the best church in the world, because even the best church has its flaws and the worst mistake we can make is to think we don’t. We have to be humble because we’re the soil and it’s not about us. We aren’t what’s important. The seeds are what’s important. We exist for the seeds. And if we get it wrong, and think we exist for ourselves, well—“Dust we are and to dust shall we return.” If we don’t see we’re just the soil the seed is planted in, then the consequences are devastating. The seeds die. The crops fail. The Kingdom doesn’t flourish. And the church will die, too.
God the gardener can change all of that. Its good news that we are dirt, because that means that God can change us, reshape us, make us better than we are. It means that we can become the soil of the future for our children and for generations to come. It means that we can contribute to a bright future for our church, our community, our nation, and the world.
All we have to do is remember that we are dirt—and we, and God’s seeds, will flourish.