Nearly every time I take an airplane trip, I get a happy surprise. When we take off and rise through the congestion of earth and the grim gray clouds of our immediate atmosphere, there comes that astonishing moment when the plane bursts through the cloud cover into bright sunlight.
I am always surprised by this, even though I have experienced 1t many times. No matter how dismal and gray it is down low, up above there is sunshine and light. It’s easy to forget that above the clouds there is all that light and clarity.
Of course, the problem is that we do have to come down. We do have to land again. You cannot float endlessly above the clouds and the storms; you do have to re-enter reality. And that may not be so pleasant.
I remember flying into National Airport late one summer afternoon. It had been a beautiful day on a comfortable flight from someplace out near heaven, which, as a few of us know, lies about 600 miles west of Washington. I was glorying in the lovely sunlight and was fascinated by the sight of another aircraft off in the distance, perfectly visible through the clear skies.
But then the pilot informed us that because of weather and traffic conditions there would be a longer-than-usual approach time. We would have to circle for a while over northern Virginia and southern Maryland. I looked out my window again, expecting to enjoy the view of the landscape: the mighty Potomac, the monumental core of the city – but what to my wondering eyes did appear but a huge yellow-gray mass, a cloud of pollution so thick and so foul I could already feel my eyes stinging and my throat closing up.
There is only one word to describe such a sight, and every eight-year-old knows that word. Yucky! A thick cloud of yucky that makes you choke! We’d rather not get into in that choking world.
And yet, that is where we live. A choking world. Choking is a fitting picture of the world in which we live. Choking means that something obstructs the air passage, something is sticking in the throat, we can’t get our air. We can’t breathe, we can’t thrive. Choking.
This is a choking world. I do not refer simply to air pollution. I refer to the way many of us live our lives. Choked. Choked off from the things that matter most, choked off from love, choked off from fulfilling relationships. We are in a choking world.
Jesus told a parable about the sower of seed and the soils on which the seed fell. His intent was to remind us that there are all degrees of spiritual readiness. There are all sorts of people who respond to truth in one way or another. His parable tells of four groups. Of all these groups, however, I want today to focus only on one group: on those who live in a choking world.
The parable first, and then part of Jesus’ own explanation of his parable: Matthew 13: 3-9, 22
"Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them ... As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing."
Jesus tells us two reasons why people choke up. He mentions two pollutants that make ours a choking world: “the cares of the world” and "the lure of wealth". Let’s look at those.
I
First, there are many of us for whom the cares of the world choke off life. There are a host of people, not a few of whom are in this very room, who feel choked and starved, captured and caught, by what Jesus calls the “cares of the world.”
What does Jesus mean by that phrase, "the cares of the world?” You and I could spend all morning listing the cares of the world: the material things – jobs, money, food, clothing, shelter. The quality of life things: education, safety, stability, neighborhood.
An astounding proportion of the world’s people have to care about all these things. Literally millions of people around the world have to spend virtually every waking minute finding enough to eat, looking for a place to sleep, scampering for a brief respite from the ceaseless pounding of gunfire. For them, life is choked, this is a choking world. That’s one of the reasons why our foreign missions efforts are so important: just lifting up another way of life, just providing a glimmer of hope for people in desperate, choking circumstances, is worth all of the millions we spend on missionary work.
But the cares of the world include some other things too, very personal things. The cares of the world include disappointment, disillusionment, lack of direction, loss of meaning. I’ve known many people who feel choked by these personal issues. It’s as though they cannot get a breath of fresh air; it’s as though life comes down to nothing but its everydayness ... you get up, you dress, you go to work, you come home, you eat, you do a few chores, and you go to bed. Why? So that tomorrow you can get up, dress, go to work, come home, eat, do a few chores, and go off to bed again. If that’s all there is, that’s living in a choking world. It’s too narrow. It’s too confining, and it doesn’t yield any joy. A choking world.
Deeper still, the cares of the world are material and quality of life and personal. But they are also interpersonal. Some of us are choking on the relationships that ought to satisfy us the most. Our relationships confine us; they are cares, to use Jesus’ word. They are cares, anxieties, rather than privileges. They are burdens rather than pleasures. There are those of us who are stifled and choked by relationships.
Parents who find parenting a choking care. They obsess on iron discipline rather than on tender love. Their children are a choking care that yields them no joy. What a choking tragedy!
But then there are children and young people who see their parents as choking bores, dinosaurs out of somewhere just this side of Jurassic Park. There are young adults who feel oppressed by their parents, and whose parents feel oppressed by them. It’s astounding how out of the very stuff of human love we keep on choking in anxiety.
There are husbands and wives who see marriage as confining, choking, rather than as freeing, expanding. Marriage can be the most intimate and the most fulfilling and freeing of life’s relationships, but there are plenty of people who think of their mates as the old ball-and-chain. That is choking!
Jesus says that many of us are like that even in relationship to God. Many of us are like seed sown among thorns, and the cares of this world are thorns that reach out and choke and shut off life. When you obsess on the cares of this world, you choke up, you cannot taste the joy that’s out there, even where God is involved.
At Thanksgiving, I think of a Thanksgiving service in another church where I was the guest preacher a number of years ago. The host pastor was very concerned that everything go just right. He had instructed me where to sit and when to sit; he had pinned a boutonniere on my lapel and had straightened it three times before we went out on to the platform. I thought I was beginning to pick up a touch of obsessiveness by then. Well, it was amply confirmed when a layman went to the pulpit to lead us in prayer, and all through the prayer the pastor was reaching over, picking lint off the layman’s suit coat!
You see how we miss the joy, we choke out the heart of things, we even miss out on a relationship with the living God, because we obsess on the cares of the world! We major on minors! And Jesus says that when we allow the cares of the world to choke us, there is no yield. There is no joy. There is no fulfillment.
II
But it is not only the cares of the world that choke us and stifle our joy. It is also, according to the Lord, the "lure of wealth." The lure of wealth. "As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing.”
Once again, you and I could name a hundred things that fall under the label, the lure of wealth. The obvious things are the material ones ... the New Testament is so replete with strong words on the dangers of accumulation for its own sake that I need not take your time with that. I need not quote for you that passage about building bigger barns and then finding that your soul 1s required of you. Nor do you need to hear Paul’s observation that the love of money is at the root of all evil. Surely you would not even want me even to whisper Jesus’ warning about it being harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. So I won’t say anything about any of that!
But it is not only the lure of things material that chokes humanity; it is the lure to possess that chokes life in many other ways.
For example, life is choked by the lure of success. The newspaper carried a story this week about Japanese workers and the success-driven way in which they live. One of them said that the only time he ever saw his children was when they were asleep; he would leave early in the morning and work until late at night. All for success. Possession.
Or, to extend the idea, life is choked by the need to possess status, to protect a reputation. Our idea of a good reputation is twisted because we are lured into looking at externals. We look on the outside, but forget that God looks on the inside.
I talked with a man this week about his spiritual needs. He wants to turn his life around. He knows he needs the Lord in his life. We talked about his coming to worship, and he asked if there was some way I could get him some clothes suitable for church. I told him I would try to help, but that we didn’t care what people wear to church. I encouraged him to come in jeans or slacks or whatever he had. But he said he knew better. He said, "I’ve been around church people. I know how they treat you when you don’t look right." Like it or not, some of us are into status and into imposing status symbols on others. Then relationships get choked off and the joy goes out. No yield.
Let me extend this into another area. We’re talking about how the lure of wealth chokes off real life for a lot of people. I’ve mentioned success, I’ve mentioned status. But let me extend this into another area. The lure to possess knowledge. The lure to possess knowledge just for its own sake can choke off authentic life. Some of us are building up our store of knowledge, but are not using what we know where it will help anybody.
When I was a seminary student we used to have a class of folks around the school who became professional students. They came to the seminary not so much because they really felt called to do ministry, but because they were in love with learning. And that’s all right; it’s fine to be a scholar. But the lure to possess knowledge can become a thorn that chokes off life. These folks would finish their Bachelor of Divinity degrees, and would sort of look at the real world of churches, deacon boards, and leaky boilers, and would promptly decide that they needed a Master of Theology degree. Well, that took care of another year, and then they would preach a little bit and find their way back to enroll in a Doctor of Theology degree. If you are clever at that one, you can stretch it out for years and years and never do anything real! Honestly, there was one student who was so intimidated, so choked off from the real world that after they made him take his doctorate and get out of there, he tried to enroll in law school just to avoid doing anything real!
The lure of the wealth of knowledge ... even that can choke us off from the real thing. You’ve been in Sunday School for a hundred years or so; you know something about the Bible. With whom have you shared it lately? You’re still trying to get ready, because you don’t understand it all? Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said that it was not the parts of the Bible he didn’t understand that gave him trouble; it was the part he did understand? It’s time to stop choking up and use what you know.
"Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them ... As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing.”
III
But in this Advent season, there is good news. The choking atmosphere of earth is clearing. The choking thorns are being weeded out. Our choking world has been visited.
Slicing right through the smog of our sin; penetrating the ugly cloud of the cares of this world; blowing away with gale-wind force the seductive lure of wealth; our God has come in one completely authentic life. One real human life, lived out where we live our lives. Touched in all points as we are, yet without sin. Tasting all that we taste, feeling what we feel, needing what we need, and yet so in touch with himself, so engaged with us that in Him we see the very fullness of humanity. In the child to be born in Bethlehem there is authentic humanity; in Him redeeming relationships; in Him unchoked life.
You ask if He knew the cares of this world. And I will tell you that He knew what it was to be homeless, what it was to be hungry and poor; I will tell you that He had no place even to lay His head. And yet in the midst of that He had a drive, a sense of purpose: “For this cause came I into the world,” He said. In the midst of the cares of this world He had a purpose and a love for others. An authentic relationship. “God so loved the world that He gave His ... Son that through Him the world might be saved.” Yes, he tasted the cares of this world, but He came to show us how to live; He came to offer us fresh hope in a choking world.
You ask if He was tempted by the lure of wealth? And I will tell you of a day when alone in the desert He struggled with that demonic power that dangled in front of Him authority, rule, reign. But He put that all behind Him, and He who was rich for our sakes became poor. He to whom the hosts of heaven would gladly have bowed down became a tiny, fragile thing, cradled in the arms of a Jewish teenage mother. “What child is this, who laid to rest, in Mary’s lap is sleeping, whom angels greet with anthems sweet, while shepherds watch are keeping? This, this, is Christ the king ... the babe, the son of Mary.”
He has come. He has come to a world choking in its own cares and problems. He has come to promise release and freedom. To a world choking on its power and its possessiveness, He has come to offer simplicity and peace.
He has come, he is coming, he comes now. He invites you to come to Him. Just to come. Nothing to hang on to, nothing worth clinging to. It’s all just thorns anyway, choking thorns. Let go. Come.
