Matthew 13: 1-9, 13-16
July 10, 2011
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher
When we lived in rural Virginia, when Margaret was pregnant with our first child Sara Caitlin, we decided to plant a vegetable garden across the street from the manse, right next to a cow pasture. We planted watermelon, cantelope, tomatoes, squash, beans, lettuce, and corn. We’d climb over the barbed wire fence and get cow pies to fertilize it. We were especially proud of our corn, because all the corn farmers around us told us we’d never grow any. The problem, they said, was that we’d planted one row of corn, and you need two rows to cross-pollinate. So when we grew a row of healthy, juicy corn, they were a bit put off. But in reality, we grew that corn because of them. A quarter mile away in any direction there were acres and acres of corn. The wind blew, the bees buzzed between rows of corn. And ultimately our little row of corn was the beneficiary. So really, our row of corn was growing thanks to all those farmers who told us the corn would never grow. They were pollinating our corn but they didn’t know it.
Sara Caitlin was born, then Bennie. When Sara Caitlin was in 5th Grade, her Sunday school teacher was Fran Bisselle. We lived in Bethesda, Maryland, by then, and Fran was a Washington socialite now in her late seventies. She was attractive, unpretentiously aristocratic, gracious, and kind; and she loved children. Our church was too small for there to be many children, so Fran was able to give the ones she had intense personal attention. I don’t’ think Fran was a great teacher but she was and is a wonderful human being, and that’s what our daughter remembers about her to this day. Her love, her attention, the way she treated each child special. A seed planted, and who knows what fruit it will bear, has borne already?
Now our son Bennie is in youth group with Beth and all these other wonderful kids and they’re about to go off to Chicago together to do mission among a bunch of really needy kids living in a scary place. This is the result of seeds planted by people in this church who perhaps didn’t realize that it would result in kids reaching out to Southside Chicago, and maybe it even scares us a little bit. Maybe we’re having second thoughts: “Wait, when we told you to love the least of these, we didn’t really mean for you to take such a terrible, terrible risk!” I know I’ve had those thoughts. I’ll say, first, that I completely trust Beth and the youth leaders or I wouldn’t let Bennie go; and second—once those seeds get planted, we can’t predict the way they go. They are out of our control. They’re in the hands of God.
And that’s a good thing. Because we farmers are apt to predict doom and gloom. There’s gonna be a drought, the market’s not gonna be there, the corn won’t cross-pollinate, the crops will fail. That’s not necessarily a lack of faith, that’s just preparing for the worst case scenario. That’s just being realistic. Any farmer will tell you the risks outweigh the benefits. Even the farmer in Jesus’ parable—God, as it happens—has a 3/4ths failure rate!
But farmers keep on farming. I suppose you could call that a lot of things, but one thing to call it is FAITH.
Jesus—and all of scripture—use the example of seeds planted to talk about God’s work in the world. Which is also our work in the world, the work of the church. It’s an unpredictable business, and uncontrollable past a certain point. Once the seed gets planted, even the most experienced farmer can be surprised by the result. That’s part of the reason it’s such a great analogy for God’s work in the world. We baptize three people today, one adult and two children. What fruit will this field of God’s dreams, St. Stephen Presbyterian Church, bear in the lives of these three?
We can’t predict. It’s in the hands of God. What we hope and what we believe is that God’s seed planted never returns to God empty. It bears fruit in people’s lives. It bears fruit in the world around us. It even cross-pollinates in the most surprising and unpredictable ways. Our youth go to Chicago to teach little inner-city kids Bible school. What an unpredictable cross-pollination—and cross-pollination, remember, goes both ways. Who knows what seeds our youth will plant, or what seeds the Chicago kids will plant in our youth?
We can’t predict. We needn’t bother. God will prosper the seeds that God has planted. The other reason that Jesus and the prophets and so many Biblical writers talk about seeds is because it is so immensely hopeful. When we’re looking that the terrain of the world today it’s far too easy to see the path where the birds can eat away our children’s hopes; or the rocks where our children’s roots will never have any depths; or the thorns that will grow up and choke them. What the parable of the seeds reminds us of is that there’s also good soil in the world, and that good soil is so fertile and so blessed by God that it can produce a crop thirty, sixty or a hundredfold times more than the seeds it started with; and they in turn will produce more seeds that can be blown nearby or far away and into unexpected and unpredictable places and produce still more crops in just the places we’d never expect it in a million years to do so.
Talking about seeds always reminds me of a song from Godspell, a song that’s actually just a reworking of one of our great hymns. “We thank thee then our Father, for all things bright and good/ the seedtime and the harvest/ our life our health our food./ No gifts have we to offer/ for all thy love imparts/ but that which thou desirest/our humble thankful hearts./ All good gifts around us/are sent from heaven above. So thank the Lord, oh thank the Lord for all His love.”
We really want to thank you, Lord. Amen.