Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 Commentary

Recently I have been trying to start plants from seeds. I carefully put individual seeds evenly spaced on the watered and fluffed potting soil disks designed to help start seeds. Then, I carefully put the plastic greenhouse dome over them and set them in the dark for the prescribed amount of time, and then in the indirect sun as per all planting advice for this particular plant. As you might imagine, this has been an utter failure. For all of my painstaking care and the hundreds of seeds I planted, five seedlings have emerged and only one has put out a second set of leaves. The other four went back to the soil from which they came, heedless of my encouragement and pitiful protests. My thumbs are not green. One possible plant from hundreds of seeds and I didn’t even carelessly spread them on rocky soil or in thorn patches! Even the most casual gardener will know that growing plants is not particularly easy. But, it gets easier with practice.

There are several good ways into the wisdom of this densely packed passage. It might be helpful to start by asking “who am I in this passage,” or “who are we?” Am I the Sower? If so, you have a wonderful opportunity to talk to your congregation about the importance of spreading the Good News wantonly. One thing that strikes me about this passage is how wasteful the sower is, strewing seeds willy-nilly. I oh-so-carefully, seed by seed, gently placed each tiny little seed in its place. Here is the sower scattering seed with abandon. This farmer must have quite a store of seeds. Perhaps Jesus is telling us that we should be providing the unlimited resource of the Good News to not just anyone who will listen, but even to those who will not or cannot. Keeping in mind that God is not a coercive God, what does it mean to spread the Good News to those who cannot or will not?

The Good News is good news because God’s love for us is boundless. If we preach this parable as if the sower is the individual believer, then the Good News is the seed. We have a limitless supply because God’s love is limitless. The power of unlimited love is far greater than coercion. It is not our job to make those seeds grow, it is our job to spread them. By that I mean, it is not our job to judge who is or is not worthy of God’s love. It is our job to spread God’s love and let that love fall where it may. In terms of process theological thought, we understand that God’s love is given to such an extent that we simply cannot wrap our minds around it. In the same way, we really cannot actually understand infinity, we cannot grasp God’s infinite love. God’s love comes to each of us in the form of the subjective aim.

In layperson terms, God’s love and grace are provided as the kickstart and purpose for each and every occasion in existence. Grace comes to every occasion. Every molecule, of every moment, of every “thing” in existence since forever and until forever is a recipient of God’s grace. We are lucky enough to be complex enough to be aware of this grace in some moments. Yet, for most of our lives, each of our moments receives this grace and we are completely unaware of it. And, to add grace upon grace, God not only provides subjective aims for each occasion but provides them with perfect real-time feedback. Based on that feedback, the aims for our next occasion offer possibilities for the best possible based on the choices we have made plus the goodness and perfection God desires for us. Grace upon grace upon grace, those aims are attainable if only we’ll follow God. This grace, this love, is unlimited and eternal.

The Good News is so much more as well, but this parable emphasizes this aspect of the Good News. We often like to preach that God’s love is limitless, but often we do not believe the extent of that love. And perhaps even more often, we’d like to stand in judgment and decide in advance about the kind of soil we think a person has. The parable of the sower stands in direct contradiction to this kind of miserliness and judgment on our part. God’s love is not conservative. (It’s not liberal either in terms of politics.) Love is simply something that, in order to be love, cannot be conserved. If we conserve love, if we penuriously dole out a little love here and there, we will find we have less and less to give. It is not an accident that the words miser and miserable come from the same root. Love, paradoxically, increases the more we give. In their book, “The Paradox of Generosity: Giving We Receive, Grasping We Lose,” Christian Smith, Professor of Sociology, and Sociology doctoral candidate Hilary Davidson, at Notre Dame give the scientific evidence of the truth of this foundational Christian practice. After conducting their studies, they concluded that people who are generous with their money, time and friendships are happier, healthier and more resilient than those who were not generous. If that is how it works for human beings, then in God, we would expect ultimate generosity with God’s love. (Funny how so much of our scientific research seems to back up the deepest truths of Jesus’ teachings.) God’s love, the seed we have to sow, is limitless. We are called to sow it with abandon, with joy, with careless regard for where that seed falls, with no thought or judgment to the “kind of soil” it might fall on.

This is less of a call to be selfless and more of a call not to be selfish. There is so much of God’s love to go around, we can spread it everywhere, anywhere. When I suggest that we spread it regardless of whether people want to or even can hear the good news, I am not suggesting that we should be engaging in questionable, coercive tactics that fall into the mean self-righteousness we all too often see in strangers who want to witness to us on the streets or on our doorsteps. God’s love is powerful enough, God’s love is bountiful enough, to be spread even where it may not take root or thrive.

The question about how that can be done looms large in this parable. It is a question that our congregations truly, deeply want answered. They are desperate to know in practical terms how they can spread the Good News without the weirdness and self-righteousness we have encountered in so many who “witness.” Thankfully, Scripture gives us some very good clues. Step one: be generous. Being generous with God’s love first and foremost means that we spread it without the miserliness of judgment. Step two: follow Christ.

And here is where you, good preachers, get to preach the Good News. With generous love, tell them of God’s action in our world in Jesus Christ. Tell them again about why Jesus came. What he did. And how God’s judgment on us is not condemnation, but forgiveness. The Good News is that we are supposed to live out that extravagant love. And so we come back around to the practical: how do we live out that love? How do we spread the seeds of the Good News regardless of the soil? One does not have to have their “elevator speech” about why they are Christian ready. (Although I highly recommend that.) What they can do is simple: love God by loving your neighbor as yourself and conversely: loving your neighbor is loving God.

God’s love for us is so generous, so boundless, we are empowered to be as boundlessly generous with God’s love on behalf of God. Loving our neighbor is loving God. Loving our neighbor means loving them like ourselves. In short: be kind, be good, be patient, give the benefit of the doubt. My favorite way to talk about this is to talk about driving like a Christian. Here is the joke I use to illustrate what I mean:

A woman was being tailgated by a stressed out man on a busy boulevard. Suddenly, the light turned yellow, just in front of her. She did the right thing, stopping at the crosswalk, even though she could have beaten the red light by accelerating through the intersection.

The tailgating man was furious and honked his horn, screaming in frustration as he missed his chance to get through the intersection, dropping his cell phone and electric shaver.

As he was still in mid-rant, he heard a tap on his window and looked up into the face of a very serious police officer. The officer ordered him to exit his car with his hands up. He took him to the police station where he was searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a holding cell. After a couple of hours, a policeman approached the cell and opened the door. He was escorted back to the booking desk where the arresting officer was waiting with his personal effects.

He said, “I’m very sorry for this mistake. You see, I pulled up behind your car while you were blowing your horn, flipping off the driver in front of you, and cussing a blue streak at her. I noticed the ‘What Would Jesus Do’ bumper sticker, the ‘Choose Life’ license plate holder, the ‘Follow Me to Sunday-School’ bumper sticker, and the chrome-plated Christian fish emblem on the trunk, Naturally… I assumed you had stolen the car.”

While it is terribly important, good preacher, for our Congregations to learn the maturity of faith to talk about why their faith is important to them, it is even more important for Christians to behave as Christians. We have to spread the seeds with everything we do. It simply does not matter if the other drivers know you drive like a Christian because of Jesus. It matters that you drive like Jesus would have us drive. When you get cut off in traffic next time, remember the last time you cut someone one off. Extend the other driver the same forgiveness you extended yourself. The next time another driver comes blazing past you at a million miles an hour, remember the last time you were super late and over stressed and rationalized away the need to follow the speed limit. The, extend that to the “moron” who just blazed past you. Heck, even say a prayer for their safety and the safety of the drivers around them. We do not need to judge, we need to love. We need to sow the seeds regardless of the quality of the soil.