Get Started – The Parable of the Seed Among the Soils
Feb 15, 2009 Luke 8:1-15
Intro:
We all love a good story. From our earliest bedtime memories of “Peter Rabbit”, “Goodnight Moon”, “The Tortoise and the Hare”, to our love of movies, to the simple way we share our lives through the re-telling of situations we find ourselves in, we all love a good story. I particularly loved to hear more of the stories of Eileen’s life, which we grieved and celebrated during yesterday’s funeral service. It is little wonder, then, that stories are one of the main ways that Jesus communicated. I’m particularly fortunate that today, when all of our children are staying in the service with us, we have one of the stories of Jesus to dive into.
A Beginning Story:
Before hearing Jesus’ story, let me tell you one first.
A boy was given $1000 for his tenth birthday from his grandparents. His first thoughts were of all the ways he might spend it… like the Lego Ultimate Collector’s Millennium Falcon™ Item #: 10179, with 5195 pieces, built completely to minifigure scale - minifigures can sit inside and man the controls!, only $679.99 (CAD), plus $34 shipping. But alas, the poor boy, his father insisted he save the money, so he took him to the bank.
“Aha!”, said the banker, “I have just the thing. Young man, you need to buy this mutual fund.” His dad leaned in, interested. “Hmm, yes son, this is the thing.”
“Ummm, what?” asked the boy.
“A ‘mutual fund’”, explained the banker, “is a very safe investment. Your $1000 will be scattered among four different sectors of the economy, and if you come back in six months I’ll show you how your $1000 has grown to be much, much more.”
The dad leaned over and signed the papers, and told his son he’d buy an ice-cream from McDonalds to celebrate.
Six months later they returned. “I’m sorry,” said the banker, “some parts of your mutual fund have performed rather poorly… This first sector was the American banking sector, and though it has been a solid performer in the past, many banks have been forced to close, and so your money is gone.”
“Where did it go?”, asked the poor innocent boy. “Well, probably to employee bonuses and executive salaries. But let’s continue on… The second sector we invested in was oil and gas, and initially we had strong returns, but then some ducks died on a tailings pond and the initial gains were stolen by the environmentalists campaigning against “dirty oil”. There is nothing left. The third sector was historically very safe, mortgages, and again we saw some good initial numbers. But alas, these also were wiped out by people buying more than they could afford, in a pursuit of riches and comforts.”
“Is there anything left?”, interrupted the nervous dad who was now almost wishing his son had a Lego Millennium Falcon.
The banker smiled. “Yes, I am pleased to inform you that the final sector we invested in was in micro-loans for the poor, so that they might start small businesses to support their family. Through this program, the recipients have escaped the poverty trap, provided for their families, repaid the debt with interest, and then we re-loaned the money to another needy entrepreneur. This investment has paid off more than 100 times, if we include the re-loaning and creation of more businesses.”
The boy smiled, and said, “Dad, today I’ll buy the ice-cream. But next time, can I ask grandpa for lego instead of cash?”
Jesus’ Story: Luke 8:4-15
My story is entirely fictitious. Honestly. But it loosely follows Jesus’:
4 One day Jesus told a story in the form of a parable to a large crowd that had gathered from many towns to hear him: 5 “A farmer went out to plant his seed. As he scattered it across his field, some seed fell on a footpath, where it was stepped on, and the birds ate it. 6 Other seed fell among rocks. It began to grow, but the plant soon wilted and died for lack of moisture. 7 Other seed fell among thorns that grew up with it and choked out the tender plants. 8 Still other seed fell on fertile soil. This seed grew and produced a crop that was a hundred times as much as had been planted!” When he had said this, he called out, “Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand.”
9 His disciples asked him what this parable meant. 10 He replied, “You are permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of God. But I use parables to teach the others so that the Scriptures might be fulfilled:
‘When they look, they won’t really see.
When they hear, they won’t understand.’
11 “This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is God’s word. 12 The seeds that fell on the footpath represent those who hear the message, only to have the devil come and take it away from their hearts and prevent them from believing and being saved. 13 The seeds on the rocky soil represent those who hear the message and receive it with joy. But since they don’t have deep roots, they believe for a while, then they fall away when they face temptation. 14 The seeds that fell among the thorns represent those who hear the message, but all too quickly the message is crowded out by the cares and riches and pleasures of this life. And so they never grow into maturity. 15 And the seeds that fell on the good soil represent honest, good-hearted people who hear God’s word, cling to it, and patiently produce a huge harvest.
It’s Not Really the “Parable of the Sower”…
This story has often been called the “parable of the sower”, but it really isn’t about the sower. Better is to call it “the seed among the soils”. It is a simple story, which Jesus did a better job of explaining than I could, so I’m not going to repeat each of the four types of soils and what they meant for the seed and all of that. You are smart people, you understood as we read. So I want to jump right ahead into what this story means for us.
In the story, as Jesus said, the “seed” is God’s word. The “sower” back then was Jesus, then His disciples after Jesus’ death, and then that responsibility was handed to the church and then to each believer who is a part of the church. So we are correct to see ourselves in first in one of the types of soil, and second in the role of the sower. So let’s go straight to Jesus’ main point – what kind of soil are we?
Four Options For You:
The very fact that you are here, sitting in church and listening, proves that we have heard the word of God, or in the language of Jesus’ story, “received the seed”. So what has happened to it in your life? Has it landed on a hardness, where it can’t penetrate inside and germinate? This happens to people – a bad experience, a deep hurt, an un-met expectation, these and other things can create within us a hardness so that we don’t let God’s word through, and into our hearts. We hear the words, but move quickly on, choosing not to dig in, ask questions, seek answers, work through painful pasts, and so the “seed” just sits on the surface for a little while until something else comes along and we forget about it.
For others, it is more like the rocky soil – the seed gets in but not very far. There is initial excitement, some growth, but no depth, and so the minute life gets difficult, the minute that life gets hard and we don’t feel the presence of God or we don’t see God acting the way we want Him to act, we get upset and walk away. The lack of rootedness kills the small seed.
For others, the seed lands and starts to grow. This seed grows for longer, but it doesn’t bear fruit, because it gets choked out by what Jesus calls weeds. He names these in the explanation, “cares (or worries), riches, and pleasures of this life”. This is a significant list, especially in our culture. Those three things are rampant – worries, we might even go a step further and call them “fears”, riches – the pursuit of security and status through wealth, and pleasures – the pursuit of things that make us feel good, but which are fleeting and have no substance. Notice carefully – Jesus is not condemning these three things outright, but He is warning us that they can quickly take over our lives. And when I honestly take a look around at the culture we live in, it is pretty clear to me that those three things are crowding out just about everything else. Am I not bearing fruit because I have let worries and riches and pleasures crowd my life, sucking up the nutrients of my time and effort and desire, instead of me channeling my life into the pursuits of the Kingdom of God? Are you?
And of course, there is a fourth soil, one in which the seed grows and bears a bumper crop. Of this soil, notice the words Jesus uses to describe the result: “hear”, “cling”, “patiently produce.” What I want you to pay attention to is how long these things take. I like Jesus’ agricultural metaphor because it slows the pace of our spiritual expectations down. It takes time for things to grow, and in our instant society this is a difficult concept to grasp, but a crucial one for our discipleship. Christian maturity, “bearing fruit”, often takes a really, really long time. We prefer the break-through, the “instant miracle”, the “I was blind one second and could see the next second” type of stories and experience. But in Jesus’ story, the only things that happen quickly are the things that do not lead to fruitfulness.
Jesus’ point, which he clearly wishes us to reflect on, is to answer the simple question: what kind of soil is your life? The determination is not based on what we want to be or think we should be, but solely on whether or not there is fruit.
What kind of fruit? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This is different from “results”, “measurables”, “quantifiable growth indicators”. Those things are secondary, and some of that list of what Scripture refers to as the “Fruit of the Spirit” are even in opposition to the demonstrable “results” – patience, for example: the whole reason we need it is because the “results” are not there; or “faithfulness”, again we need it not during the harvest time but during the hot days of hauling bucket after bucket of water to the field, when we wonder if anything will ever grow. And then, in God’s time, the plant bears fruit.
Conclusion:
To conclude, I want to go back to the start of the parable and see if we might, instead of seeing ourselves as the soil, see ourselves as the sower.
When I first read this passage from the perspective of our sermon series, that of Breaking Boundaries, I felt like I didn’t need to go past the very first line: “A farmer went out to plant his seed.” He didn’t go to school for 8 years. He didn’t go out to the field and smash every rock, pull every weed, plow up the path. He didn’t read “Planters Diary”, draw diagrams of the fields, agonize back and forth about what methods and techniques to use, how to irrigate and fertilize. He just went out and sowed the seed.
What happens next depends not on him, the farmer; it depends on God – for the inherent goodness of the seed and for providing the moisture and sun that it needs; and it depends on the recipient, whether the soil will be good or whether the seed will go to waste.
So too for us. We can talk about sharing the word of God. We can go to school, lectures, workshops, conferences, to learn about trends and the latest methods and the newest stories from some ministry in the US that is seeing “100 fold” growth. We can think and plan and read.
Or we can just get out into our world and start actually doing some scattering of some seeds. Telling our stories of the Kingdom of God in our life, telling the story of how God has forgiven and restored.
Let me get really practical, for those of you wondering how you might do this: this week, as you encounter people and begin to talk, and they ask you about your weekend or your valentines day, tell them a story of a woman named Eileen, whose funeral was on Valentines day, and when they respond with sadness or empathy, thank them and then tell them of the hope and inspiration she was. How she faced death without fear because of her faith in Jesus. And how she lived a powerful life of love.
Maybe that will sow some seeds in the lives of others, which will eventually blossom and grow and be multiplied 100 times.
