Matthew 13:1-23 In one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.

O God of grace, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

There is an old Jewish wisdom teaching that God created humans because God loves stories. It follows that God is the Word – we make the narratives with the Word. Two of our three readings this morning are stories – we have the story of Esau and Jacob and the most expensive bowl of red lentil soup there ever was in the history of the world. Our Gospel story is famously known as the Parable of the Sower. I so often wonder if the Apostle Paul’s letters might have been more comprehensible and, thus persuasive, as folk stories rather than high rhetoric – elegant as it is.

You might already know that when a Gospel passage is prepared for use in a worship service, a whole schedule of reading portions is assigned – today Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23. Because lectionary portions are plucked out of a larger narrative context (each Gospel was written to be told as one continuous story) – the lectionary portions often start with words that connect them to what has gone before: Eight days later, or the next day, or after they finished, etc. When you pick up in the middle of the story, you don’t necessarily remember what just happened. The lectionary takes care of this potential distraction by deleting the words. So verse 1 of our reading actually says in the Bible, “That same day.”

That same day as what? Well I’ll tell you. That same day as the Sabbath when Jesus’ disciples, walking through grain fields were so hungry that they began to pluck heads of grain off and eat and then there is some debate between Jesus and other community leaders who have reported the violation of what is permissible on the Sabbath. Jesus contends that rescue work is always permissible on the Sabbath – including rescue from hunger. To drive home his point he heals a man with a withered hand and another man who was blind and mute. Then he’s in a house and someone comes to tell him that his mother and brothers are standing outside wanting to speak to him. Jesus replied, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And pointing to his disciples, he said, “here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” [1] Then that same day Jesus went out of the house, down to the shore of Lake Genesseret, also known as the Sea of Galilee, and pressed by the crowds, used a boat for a pulpit and said, “listen! A sower went out to sow.”

There’s a helpful note in the Jewish Annotated New Testament of the number of Hebrew Bible references to sowing as doing the work of God, [2] and of the metaphor of seeds for God’s Word in the Talmud. The good seeds of God’s Word are scattered everywhere – with extravagance – on the beaten path (where birds eat, carry and deliver far away with a ready to plant manure packet), on rocks where their lives are joyful but short, among the thorns which prevent any yield at all, and on good soil which produces varying levels of abundant fruit. Bearing fruit is the desired outcome right? (Everyone knows that) This is how it is, Jesus is saying.

This is where I always stop to wonder about my own ecosystem. I wonder, for example, where is the good fertile soil in me? Where are the well-worn paths – and are they in fact ruts? Where are the rocks? Where are the thorns? What seeds of the Word of God have a chance of sustainable growth in me? I wonder about us as a parish. Where in this parish are the thorns? Where are the rocks? Where are the well-worn paths where nothing new is going to grow? Where’s the deep fertile soil where new growth can bear fruit? If we scatter seed, what’s likely to grow – and where? I think a lot about the best use of resources, given the limitations of time, money, people. You know, it’s easy for me to slip into thinking of resources as scarce, and to start thinking of myself as the sower who is so much more careful than the sower in this story.

How many of you have ever bought seeds to plant to grow food? Now I know that different kinds of seeds require different kinds of sowing methods, and the method in this story was probably broadcast sowing – throwing seed across the ground — but how many of you would scatter some of the seeds you bought on rocks? How many of you would scatter some of the seeds in the thorns? How many of you would scatter some of the seeds on a walkway or a road? While I was preparing to preach, I kept having this fantasy about buying a bucket-full worth of valuable seeds to toss around inside the church as my opening illustration of this parable. They’d land on the floor, on your clothes, in your hair, all over the place. That would be a sermon illustration that you wouldn’t soon forget!

I think that Jesus is telling a story that would make his disciples laugh about a sower who is crazy extravagant with the seeds and a shockingly huge harvest that is between thirty and one-hundred times the amount of seed scattered – even counting the seeds that the birds ate, the seeds that the sun scorched, the seeds that the thorns choked. If we understand the parable to tell us something about the realm of God, here we have a picture or a song about extravagant generosity and abundance even when the planting conditions are far from ideal. It seems to me that Jesus’ intent here was to encourage his troubled disciples and troubled religious and community leaders with a hopeful vision – to encourage them to stop wringing their hands about seeds scattered where they will not optimally grow, to encourage them to harvest God’s abundance where the seeds are bearing fruit!

Parables are like musical compositions or paintings – you can’t really separate form from meaning and there’s never just one meaning or one interpretation, even if the composer or painter had just one in mind. [3] But one thing that all of Jesus’ parables teachings have in common is this: they are each surprising – even disturbing – every single one. They’re about disrupting the order or the framework that the hearer takes for granted. They are designed to disrupt the way we think things are (or the way we think they should be).

Listen to this story from the novel, The Art of Arranging Flowers, by Lynne Branard [4] :

“The day my sister died, that cold gray day when I withdrew into myself, that day I cleaned the house from top to bottom, wiped down every wall, emptied every trash can and discarded most of my clothes, that day when I scrubbed and mopped and threw away the things of no matter, closed the curtains in the front room, unplugged all the clocks and disconnected my phone, put on my grandmother’s only black suit, changed the sheets, and lay down on the bed, I decided to die too.

Although people said that Daisy was crazy, that she was the one with mental issues, that she was the one they feared would hurt herself or others, I was the one that should have caused everyone to worry. I was the one who should have been locked up and tended to. I was the one who should have been restrained and drugged and analyzed because unlike my beautiful and gentle sister, I meant harm to everything alive and breathing.

I was crazy. I was broken. I was dead.

And then, one day I wasn’t. It took months and it took grace and it took some unexpected slight shift of sadness that slipped just enough, just barely enough to make room for beauty. And once it happened, once I saw it happen, I got up from bed and I went out to the corner market for milk and chocolate bars and I decided to live.

When people first asked me about my business venture, about why I do what I do, how I switched from being a student of law to a florist, I used to shake my head, look around at where I was standing, where they were asking and I would say, ‘the flowers saved me.’

I used to try and explain about my death and resurrection when I was asked in innocence or passing why I became a florist; but I soon learned it is too much of a story. It is too intimate a portrait of loss and most folks don’t want to hear of deep longings, of grief being soothed by beauty. So I never tell that story even when I’m asked how I survived the death of Daisy. I never say that I owe flowers my life and that I am simply giving back to the source of my salvation. I never say that I grow, select, arrange, and sell flowers because I now belong to them and because it is my way to honor that which snatched me from the jaws of death and set me back on the path of life.” [5]

Listen, Jesus says. Listen. Imagine and understand this. The seeds of the redeeming love of God, the compassion, the mercy, the forgiveness, the justice of the realm of God are everywhere – there’s so much, that God isn’t fretting about what falls on the road or on the rocks or in the thorns, God isn’t fretting about what the birds eat, what the sun scorches or about the weeds. God knows that there’s enough good soil in each one of us, in all of us together, in the world, to ensure a mind-blowing harvest.

So what would it look like if we really believed that? What if we lived as if it were true that the seeds of love and compassion and mercy and forgiveness and justice didn’t need to get distributed in the good soil only – but that they could get tossed around with reckless abandon? What if, instead of fretting about the condition of the soil in ourselves, in others, in the community or the world, what if we started imitating the sower in spreading beauty and mercy – tossing it everywhere? What are things that we could do with the love of God as a parish that would be crazy extravagant?

Instead of fretting about our limited resources and placing all kinds of careful restrictions on them that have to do with the fear of “not enough,” or the fear of running out — what if we explode the notion of what a resource is and assume that we have way more than enough – we have enough to throw seeds everywhere – on the pathways (even in the ruts), on the rocks, in the thorns. Let’s dare to be crazy extravagant in our ministry together. Maybe that sounds brave – but I bet for at least some of you it sounds foolish (and to tell you the truth, it sounds like both to me) – and maybe that’s just what we’re being surprised (or disturbed) into becoming – both brave and foolish and crazy extravagant for the love of God.

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