Matthew 13: 1-9; 18-23
My first job out of college was serving as a Youth and Family Ministry Leader at a Lutheran church in Southern California. For a period of nearly four years, I came to know the stories of the community and grew to appreciate and love the people God had gathered in that place.
But it wasn’t always easy. At times, I struggled. Not just with learning how to be a young professional working her first job, but mostly I struggled with learning hard truths. Namely, the hard truth that I don’t get to decide what is best for another person.
It wasn’t long into my position as youth director that I began to notice how many of the families who worshipped at this church, lived a fast paced lifestyle. Children and youth were involved in multiple extracurricular activities and social events. Then, after a fully scheduled week, families tried to make it to worship on Sunday mornings.
I remember reflecting upon my own experience of growing up. From my memory it was considerably less busy. I played softball and auditioned for school plays, sung in school choir, but most of my weekends were spent in the church, among church people, doing churchy things like attending worship, Sunday school and youth group, participating in confirmation and summer camp, and traveling to Mexico during the summer on mission trips. This is what following Jesus looked like for me. It looked like choosing church activities over other types of activities.
It appeared, to me, as if the families and kids I served did not follow Jesus in the same way I had learned to follow Jesus and I was confused. Actually, I began to feel frustrated. I struggled with understanding the allure of being busy. In my judgement, I thought parents and families were choosing the ways of the world over faithful living before God and neighbor. In my judgement, I thought parents needed to make better choices for the sake of their children knowing and experiencing Jesus.
So one day, driven by confusion and frustration, I sat down in the office of my supervising pastor and said to him, “I just don’t understand the choices parents are making for their children. What is happening in Christian community for these kids is far more important than any soccer practice or piano recital. Why aren’t they choosing faith? Why aren’t they choosing God?”
We sat quietly for a minute with my questions and frustration hanging in the air, and my pastor said: “Beth, we’re not called to make people choose anything. Faith is God’s business. Like the disciples, we’re only called to cast nets—to be in relationship with the world. We can’t determine how the Spirit will work in the lives of others, and often we don’t get to see the fruit of God’s work in someone’s life.”
I had put myself in the middle of God’s business. Making God’s business of sowing and nurturing faith about me. I thought I knew what was best for the families. When I came to recognize my hubris, I realized I had judged the people and especially the parents for making choices that, at that time in my life, I myself never had to make. I wasn’t a parent yet living in that area contending with the pressures of parenting and raising decent human beings. I began to see that in the years since I was a youth, the expectations placed upon parents, children and youth in society had changed, and I judged before I recognized these changes in familial pressures and expectations.
Pride got in my way and I unjustly passed judgement when instead I was meant to love and serve the families. I was so concerned with controlling God’s harvest that I forgot I was first called to be in relationship, and that the business of scattering and nurturing the seeds of faith belongs to God.
I know today’s Jesus story has all of us thinking about soil and probably asking the question: what kind of soil am I? For just a moment, I want to abandon talking about soil and the fears around evaluating ourselves to instead consider the Sower. The sower in this parable goes out to sow seed and does so with wild abandon and unfocused aim. Seeds indiscriminately fall here and there: some upon the path to be carried away by birds, some on rocky soil, some on thorny ground and some in fertile dirt. What is striking to me is that the sower, at least in this parable, does not seem particularly concerned that some of the seed is destined to die rather than thrive and yield fruit.
Now, I am not a farmer. At best, you could call me an amateur gardener. I don’t know a lot about the planting and tending fields or gardens, but I do know that if you desire plants to grow and yield produce, planting seeds with care and precision is an important step in the process. If the desire is to grow successful fruit-bearing plants, would a farmer really scatter seeds in this way? My thinking is probably not. So what’s going on with the sower? Who is the sower who sows seed so wildly and aimlessly?
In my view, the Sower, is God. God is the one who sows the seed into the world. The seed being God’s good news of grace for the whole world.
I was once told it is unhelpful to ask “why” questions of the Bible. But in this story, I just can’t help but ask why God would scatter the seeds of grace in this wild, aimless manner? Of course, determining God’s motives is far above my pay grade. However, what I know to be true is that God desires relationship with all people, with the whole of creation. God desires for us to know how deeply we are loved and cared for by the creator. So God sows the seeds of grace with wild abandon as a demonstration of God’s great, unending love.
Who is to say that no one benefits when the birds eat the seed? That the quickly springing shoots did not delight the sower? That a warning to remove thorns is not an important implication of this parable?
God sows seeds of grace without fear of rejection or failure. God sows so that the world may come to know God’s deep, unending love in the person of Jesus. God is generous with this grace, this undeserved favor. The challenge of this parable is that the word of God doesn’t always take root in the ways we can immediately recognize. When I sat across from my former pastor, and heard his words I was challenged in my thinking about where God is present. After that moment, I started to wonder if God might actually be present on the soccer fields and in traffic jams on the 405. Of course, God was present for the families in ways that I couldn’t see, and I was reminded that while judging is a normal part of the human experience becoming judgmental of others and their apparent choices is a barrier to recognizing the Spirit at work.
We are not the experts of someone else’s soil. We don’t get to determine if someone’s soil is rocky or thorny or fertile. Our gaze gets to fall upon the work of God who’s desire is to love the world. Even the world that sent Jesus to be crucified upon a cross. Perhaps our task is to trust in the work of the Sower, because the work of the Sower is new life, resurrected life. Even when we can’t make immediate sense of how someone may or may not be following Jesus, perhaps this parable challenges us to check our judgements lest they become value statements and we start to think we know what’s best for another person.
Siblings in Christ, we’re not called to make people choose anything. Faith is God’s business. Like the disciples, we are simply called to join with God in wildly scattering the seeds of grace, trusting the Spirit to do its work and examining our judgements. We don’t get to determine how the Spirit will work in the lives of others, and we might never get to see fruits of God’s work in someone else’s life. Even now, God, the sower is at work sowing the seeds of grace with wild abandon.
Thanks be to God.
