Plant in Faith, Harvest in Joy
Matthew 13:1-9
July 10, 2005
I want to tell you a story about Bill and Helen, two people now well into their eighties, who have a faith that is rock solid and which serves as an example for any who come to know them.
About twenty years ago, Helen was scheduled for some surgery. It was not complicated, nor especially dangerous. She was expected to make a full, complete, and speedy recovery. Still, any surgery is not to be taken lightly and Bill had his share of anxiety.
His pastor was with him in the waiting room. Trying to keep the right balance of concern and light-heartedness, the pastor said to Bill, “Wouldn’t it be nice if life was easy and we didn’t have to face stuff like this?” It was then that Bill told a story.
He had met Helen in High School. They had been voted the couple most likely to be married. But World War II intervened. Immediately following his graduation from High School, he was inducted into the army and sent to the Pacific Theater. He missed all the big battles: Leyte, Saipan, Okinawa. The biggest battle however, lay ahead; the invasion of Japan. He was on a troop ship steaming toward Tokyo, afraid of what was to come, dreaming of home, hoping against hope that this would soon be over. Then came the mushroom cloud which stilled the guns and put an end to the war.
He returned home to the waiting arms of Helen. They were married and Bill enrolled in college. Even with the GI bill, it was difficult making ends meet. He worked the evening shift in a textile mill after classes were finished for the day. Helen worked as a legal secretary. But they made it. He graduated and got a job teaching at the High School level.
He turned out to love teaching and was very good at it. He thoroughly enjoyed his students and they thought very highly of him. It wasn’t too many years until he was asked if he would like to become the school’s principal. When he took the job, he became the youngest principal in the state.
They had two children during those years. Life was good. They were successful and able to give their children all the benefits of a strong, loving family.
Bill began to have a dream of teaching on the collegiate level. To do that, he knew that he would need a Ph.D. So he talked it over with Helen and they decided that he would resign his job and the whole family would move several hundred miles away to a university town where he could complete his education.
The road to a Ph.D is a long and hard one, but he persevered, worked hard, and graduated. Following graduation, Bill moved directly into a university classroom to teach, and steadily rose through the professorial ranks. It was during this time that he and Helen decided to have another child.
After she was born, it became clear that their youngest daughter was not developing certain cognitive abilities as she was expected to do. A number of doctors were consulted and she was finally diagnosed with a learning disability. Over the years, they loved and supported her, finding specialized schooling and training. It was a long and sometimes frustrating road, but she finally graduated from high school, beating the odds against which few had given her a chance.
Now he sat in a hospital waiting room while Helen was under a surgeon’s scalpel. He looked at his pastor to answer the question. “Show me a person who has never had to face adversity,” he said, “and I’ll show you a flower that will never bloom.” (story taken from “Life-Rails: Holding Fast to God’s Promises.” 1987. Scott Walker. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. pages 10-15). You see, seeds which are sown in hope will bloom and prosper.
Some of the greatest joys that I have had as a pastor have come when I have talked to people who have kept their faith even though going through tragedy and hardship. In every church that I have served, there have been those who have told me stories about friends and acquaintances who don’t understand how one can keep one’s trust in God alive when he or she has not been spared the slings and arrows of adversity.
Their answers are always pretty much the same. Yes, hardships come and go, they say, but God is good all the time. Psalm 126:5 says, “May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.” “The Message” says, “so those who planted crops in despair will shout hurrahs at the harvest.” God’s promise of abundance, while sometimes difficult to perceive, is nonetheless real at the harvest.
Not too long after Jesus had chosen his disciples, he found himself up north, along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Matthew 13:1 says that he came out of the house and sat beside the sea. My guess is that he was staying at Simon Peter’s house in Capernaum, on the north shore. I’ve been there and it is only a short walk down the hill to the beach.
Jesus was always able to gather a crowd. They were all gathered around him, so many in fact, that he got into a boat, pushed off a little ways and taught sitting out in the water.
Jesus was a great story-teller. He told them to imagine a fellow planting a crop. He had a sack of seed and he was broadcasting it around him as he walked up and down his field. That is a pretty imprecise method of planting crops, so some of the seed fell on the path, some fell among the rocks, and some came to rest among the weeds and thorns. Luckily, there was some of the seed that fell on the good, fertile soil where it grew and produced an abundant crop.
On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright sent a telegram from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina to their sister living in Dayton, Ohio. The telegram read, “Sustained flight for 59 seconds. Hope to be home for Christmas.” She found this to be incredible news, so she took the telegram to the local Dayton newspaper. A small headline appeared the next day on the back page. It read, “Popular bicycle merchants to be home by Christmas.” Sometimes we miss the extraordinary because we are blinded by the ordinary.
This parable is a short lesson drawn from ordinary times and ordinary circumstances. In that agricultural and pastoral setting, people would have naturally understood and identified with the farmer and his methods. The perils of farming were obvious. One planted seed with one eye to the weather and another to the hope that is the natural inclination of any farmer. There is a natural, easy rhythm to the growing cycles, nothing extraordinary about it at all.
But from the ordinary comes a picture of the extraordinary grace and overflowing abundance of God. It is true that some seed fell on the path, some amid the rocks, and some among the thorns. The amazing part of the story is the incredible surplus of harvest from those seeds that fell in the good soil.
My understanding is that an average first–century farmer could expect a good yield to be about 10 bushels of wheat for every one bushel planted. But Jesus is talking about yields of 300, 600, or 1000%.
I’m convinced that God doesn’t disappoint those whose seed is cast out in hope. Too often we believe that our seed has been sown in hard, rocky, or weed infested ground. We blame nature for not giving us the proper mix of talent and luck. We blame circumstances in life that beat us down.
Bill and Helen had a whole lot of reasons to give up. They didn’t have to search very hard to find reasons to give in to pessimism and despair. But they sowed their seeds in hope and so reaped the benefits of peace, grace, and assurance. They were not disappointed. They utilized the tough times to become stronger. They rose from their challenges and persevered.
The seed in the parable fell on the hard path, among the weeds and thorns, and amid the rocks and stones. The lucky seeds fell in the good soil where they grew into abundance. You know, we have a tendency to try to place blame and escape responsibility for our circumstances. We say that we are victims of bad luck or bad timing. We blame others for plotting against us. We explain away our faults and failures by appealing to the flaws in human nature. We identify with the seed in unproductive soil and believe that it is only the very fortunate who are planted in fertile ground.
Do you remember the movie “The African Queen” which starred Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn? Probably few people under fifty have ever even heard of it let alone seen it. But there is a terrific scene in it.
Bogart, as Charlie the sailor/hero tries to explain his drunken evening to Hepburn’s character, Rosie the missionary. He tells her that he was only human and so couldn’t be expected to be good all the time. Rosie looks up over her Bible and says, “We were put on earth to rise above nature.”
It is true that we all have different realities with which to contend. We all, from time to time, have to contend with circumstances that don’t go our way. Death, disease, conflict, loneliness, rejection, disabilities, and so much more are indeed realities.
The sower in the parable knows that he needs to sow enough seed so that, in the end, he will be assured of an abundant harvest. Not all of our seeds…not all of our efforts…not all of our hopes and dreams will fall on fertile soil, but if we sow enough, we can be assured of an abundant harvest.
God will bring about incredible yields when we sow our lives in faith and trust and hope. Trusting God enough to put all of our eggs in his basket, promises blessings beyond imagination. I am firmly convinced that God rewards faith and hope. My prayers are that we might all sow our seeds of faith wherever we are and wherever we go, in order to give God even more opportunity to increase his grace among us.
