Sermon:
September 6, 1998

Scripture:
Matthew 13:1-9

I don't know about your experience, but most of the sermons that I have heard or read on the passage of Scripture I just shared have not said much about the sower. I have to confess to contributing to that situation, since that has also been the case with sermons that I have preached. They have usually focused on the reliability of the seed and on soils and on the responsibility of the Christian to be good soil in which the seed can grow, but with little said about the sower.

This minimizing of the sower isn't really difficult to defend or to understand, since this is precisely what Jesus does. He begins with, "Behold, a sower"....and that is the last you hear of the guy. He moves quickly on to the act of sowing and a description of the field and the varying yields of the harvest, and never he mentions the sower again. Likewise, when we read the explanation of the parable that comes a little later, the seed is said to be the Word of God and the kinds of soil are named as representing the varying receptiveness with which it is received, but again, nothing is said about the sower. It is little wonder that we tend to deal with this passage as a Parable of Seed and Soil.

I do not want to argue the legitimacy of that application. As I said, that is clearly the emphasis that Jesus made. We must not let the seed of the Word lie just on the surface of our lives where the wind will blow it away; we must not so clutter our lives with the cares of this world that the Gospel gets choked out; we need to root the Word deeply so it will endure and not fade away when hard times come; we need to hear and receive the seed into good soil and bring forth an abundant harvest.

All of that is one side of the Gospel, and it preaches well, especially in an activist culture. But this morning I would like us to also hear a word about the sower, because I think the picture of the sower in this parable, while it is passed over rather quickly, suggests something quite important about God and about the work of God in the world.

To begin with, have you ever asked yourself what kind of a farmer would sow valuable seed on a plot of ground such as Jesus described? There are rocks and brambles in the field; part of the soil is evidently a trodden path, or what we call "hardpan," where the seed will have little chance to germinate because the roots will never penetrate the surface; there are weeds in the soil that may choke out the seed before it reaches maturity; there are flocks of hungry birds just waiting for the seed to fall so they can pounce upon it. What kind of sower sows seed in a field like that?

Part of the answer that came to me as I pondered this story from this perspective was that a sower who sows seed in that kind of field is a sower who has that kind of field to sow. How is that for being profound?

We need to understand that Jesus is not talking about several different fields here, as if the farmer could choose the field he wanted to work in. He is talking about one field with different kinds of soil in different parts of the field.

It is also instructive to note that, in fact, the kind of field that Jesus described was precisely the kind of field that many of his hearers had to work with. No rich, black, fertile Michigan peat for most of these people! Folk tales about the land of Israel say that at creation, God gave his angels bags of stones and told them to spread the stones across the earth - some stories say there were seven bags, some say two - but the stories agree that one of the bags broke and spilled its allotment of stones intended for much of the rest of the world on this little plot of land that we have come to know as the Holy Land, an area that is only about fifty miles across and about one hundred and fifty miles in length.

Part of what this image says to me is that God does not have a perfect field in which to work. This world is a field very much like the rough field of the parable. There are thorns and weeds and rocks and hard places and hungry birds a-waiting. We might wish, and God surely does, that this were a better field, but it isn't. Like it or not, this is the field that God has.

I recognize this raises the question of why God didn't make a better field. Obviously, I am not privy to all that information, and like many of you, I hope to get a bit of clarification on that matter some day.

Let me in passing, however, quickly point out that the Biblical record reports God as making the world out of what many translations refer to as chaos, which again suggests to me this mixed and imperfect field. That pushes the question of creation back a notch, but it fits rather well with our experience, does it not? At any rate, the field described in the parable is the kind of field God has.

The second thought concerning this sower is that a sower who sows seed in a field like this is a sower who is willing to work with what he has. There comes a time when you either sow the seed in the field you have, or give up and sell the farm. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it well in his essay "Self Reliance." Emerson wrote, ""There comes a time when every man must realize that no kernel of wheat will come to him until he cultivates that portion of soil that falls to him" (or her).

The sower has to work with what he has; and I find it helpful at times to understanding that this applies to God as well as to us. This world is not all fertile soil for the Word of God; but such as it is, it is what God has, and so He sows the seed.

This also says something to me about the mission outreach of the church. There are some very rough places in that field. Africa and Haiti and Cuba are a few of the places from which returning Americans have an almost irresistible urge to hug the first customs officer that they meet and fall down and kiss the ground. One evening during my last visit to what was then Zaire, I attended a gathering of several missionaries. One of them was telling about the last time he went home on furlough. He said, "When the custom officer asked me where I was coming from and I told him `Zaire,' the man swept off his cap and bowed and waved me through the line, saying, `Welcome home!'"

It is more than personal things such as travel connections never seeming to work out; or remembering to use a glass of boiled and filtered water to rinse your mouth and your toothbrush when you brush your teeth; or soaping only part of your body at a time when taking a shower so that you have less of a problem when the water goes off in the middle of the process; or of being frustrated because the electricity fails in the middle of doing something that is dependent on electrical power; or remembering that it is Sunday and so you need to take your once-a-week malaria medicine; or of walking into the clinic and finding a pile of unwrapped vials or bottles or hypodermic needles and a half a bushel of termite debris where your cardboard box of supplies had been setting the evening before.

It also has to do with roads that are nonexistent or nearly impassable during the rainy season, with fuel that is often inaccessible even if you can afford it, with rules and regulations that are interpreted at the whim of the official with the gun who stops you at a roadblock or a border crossing. It has to do with having one hospital to 150,000 people. It has to do with inflation that results in literally needing a backpack or a wheelbarrow to carry your money to go grocery shopping. It has to do with no employment in many villages and towns, and hunger in the cities, because there is no way to transport produce from the rural areas; it has to do with sickness and disease because of lack of money to pay for what little medical care there is. It has to do with having little in the way of immunization against even the preventable diseases like measles and chicken pox and polio. The results are often ignorance and lack of motivation and lack of understanding. All of this can make for difficult fields to work in.

A few years ago, I made a mission visit to Argentina. In addition to several smaller projects, the Midland Church wanted to pick three or four places to focus some of its outreach. We talked with the Board of Global Ministries about a place where $10,000 a year for a few years could have an impact and make a difference. They suggested a project with the Tuba Indians in northern Argentina. Since we were planning to spend a significant amount of money, it seemed worthwhile for me to visit so we would have firsthand information.

I knew it was going to be difficult when I discovered that, about the time I arrived, the missionary with whom we had been working had been appointed to serve as District Superintendent and would very soon no longer have much contact with the project, and there was no one there who spoke or read English, and we did not have ready access at the time to anyone on the Mission Work Area who wrote or spoke their language. Nevertheless, it was clearly a worthwhile project and we decided to go ahead.

One of our Work Area members had good contacts with a pharmaceutical company and I took with me something like 10,000 vitamin capsules. They were the large, maroon colored capsules that some of you may be taking yourself or know about. The interpreter told the local worker the about the gift I was leaving at the village. Some months later the missionary (now District Superintendent) was back at the village for a visit and the people told here that they had planted the beans that I had left, but none of them had sprouted.

That is both humorous and sad, isn't it? It is also wasteful and exceedingly frustrating, and some would say is a perfect example of the waste in mission outreach. What kind of sower sows seeds in soil like that?

And the answer is, one who has that kind of field in which to sow and who cares enough to work with what he has.

But lest you think that all of the problem soil for the Gospel is in Third World countries or poverty situations, let me ask you to ponder what kind of sower sows seeds in a field that would rather grow pornography or drug addiction or lifestyles that have little place for the Gospel? What kind of sower scatters seed on soil that is so affluent that God is dismissed as irrelevant or, at best, treated as a parachute for emergencies? Or where the work of God is left for whatever time there is after all the real priorities are taken care of? What kind of sower sows good seed in fields where the size of a bank account or the power of a position or the label on one's clothing or kind of car we drive or the address on our mailing labels or the color of one's skin is considered more a touchstone of worth than the content of our character?

The answer is the same as before: a sower who sows seed in a field like that is a sower who has that kind of field to sow; a sower who sows seed in a field like that is one who is willing to work with what he has. God has very mixed fields in which to sow; but He sows in hope.

I have seen fruits of that sowing. I have seen the thorny places where the seed was crowded out and I have seen the hard soil where the seed never took root. I have seen areas where the lack of moisture has killed the seed, where hungry birds have carried it away. But I have seen places where the seed has borne much fruit; churches where the Gospel is preached and where people are finding Christ, places where people are cared for and healed, where they are taught and clothed and fed, where people are learning to care for each other and for the stranger in their midst.

When the Midland church paid off their indebtedness shortly after Pat and I went there, one of the goals adopted was to support a full time agricultural missionary in response to world hunger. That ended up being Dan Hammond, and the church sent us to visit the area where he would be working in Zaire.

On a day we will never forget, we were driven by landrover to the village of Samba, several miles up a road that we were told had once been drivable with regular automobiles. While we were there, we stood out a tropical rainstorm in one of the village homes. We stood because there were no chairs to sit on. We watched the village children holding bowls and pots to catch rain water running off the roof of the medical clinic, the only building in the village with a metal roof. It was not a game. They were doing that so they would not have to carry it so far from the spring or river where they normally went for water. And we watched the lady of the house push the coals of her cooking fire together with thickly callused hands to get the maximum heat under her little pot from the fuel she had gathered sometime earlier that day.

After the rain they used "the Talking Drum" to call the people to the little church and, through the translator, I told them of our hope to be in ministry with them through Dan Hammond. After the meeting we had a meal in that home, where people who might eat meat once a week - if they were lucky - killed two chickens and borrowed chairs and glasses and forks and spoons from their neighbors so they could seat and serve a meal to three white people, two of whom they had never seen before.

"And some seed brought forth forty fold and some sixty fold and some a hundred fold...." But it wouldn't have done that if the sower had not been willing to sow the seed in the field that he had to work with.

May I suggest that the difference between the competition of the seed with witchcraft or ignorance or lack of incentive in parts of Zaire or Haiti or Argentina and the materialism and indifference of American or European culture is really only the difference between one kind of inhospitable soil and another. Who sows seeds in soils like the Congo or Haiti or Cuba? The same God who sows them in soils like Birmingham or Midland or Detroit or London or Moscow and all the other fields of earth and we, as God's people, are called, not only to be soils that bring forth good fruit, but to share in the ministry of sowing.

Think about that for a moment. The fact that God has been gracious enough to cast some of his good seed into our lives is amazing; but the chances are God didn't do that directly. God works through helping sowers - parents, a Sunday School teacher, a youth counselor, a pastor, a friend - they, too, came sowing. Some of the seed that they scattered was probably lost, but some of the seed fell on our patch of ground, didn't it?

And now this Hopeful, Sowing God calls us, not only to be good fields, but to join in the task of sowing. So go, and sow the field you have in faith and hope and trust.

Amen.