I think that everyone has been on a farm. Maybe we’ve visited just a place like The Little Farm in Tilden Park. Once there were two big hogs there with a bunch of piglets. My grandkids named the hogs Lisa and Jason after their parents.
Speaking of names, my father’s cousin, Jimmy, had a good-sized farm in Connecticut. It’s where I first drove a car, and a tractor had to come and pull the car out of a ditch. Years past, Jimmy’s farm dog had been a Saint Bernard. But in his later years, Jimmy drove around in his pickup with a very lively pug. Jimmy was always feeding him, and the pug became quite a little fatty. Jimmy would shout at him, “Get over here, damn you!” And the pug would run and literally jump into Jimmy’s arms. Or Jimmy would shout, “Hurry up, damn you!” And the dog would jump into the cab. The family had named him “Pumpkin” or something like that. But the dog thought his name was “Damn You.”
Jesus is said to have been a carpenter or a carpenter’s son. But, like Jimmy, he seems to have known a lot about farming. Jesus talks about seeds, mustard trees, fields and vineyards, grape vines, day laborers. His disciples snack on standing heads of grain. And he knows animals too — sheep and goats and donkeys. The Gospels are full of the open air, growing things, and probably the noises of animals. And since Jesus tells the story of today’s Parable of the Sower from a boat, I am reminded that he also knew a lot about fish.
So, I wonder how Jesus’ contemporaries, the people on the beach, listened to the Parable of the Sower. A sower was a guy they all had seen at his work and also met on the roads and in the marketplace. He was a pretty important cog in the economic machinery of the time. Everybody lived close to the land.
Jesus’ listeners were probably saying to themselves: “So, what’s Joe the sower going to do in this story?” But Jesus surprises them because the sower and the seeds are background to the story. The surprise is that the story is about the dirt. And, as it turns out, the dirt is actually the people listening to Jesus — the people who are the thorny patch, who are the path or the rocky patch, who are the field itself. Jesus challenges them to ask themselves what kind of dirt are each of them, how do they fit into the parable.
But do Jesus’s listeners really understand this story or are they confused? Jesus doesn’t quite answer this question. There’s a part of this passage that today’s reading leaves out. In it, Jesus talks, in a kind of positive and negative way, about why he tells parables or at least why he tells this parable of the sower. He says that he tells parables because the listeners actually do not understand. Jesus says that they’re like the people that the prophet Isaiah talks about: They can’t hear, they can’t see, they can’t understand with their heart. That’s pretty bleak or perhaps it means simply that people learn better through stories. Personally, I think that’s actually true.
So, as Jesus goes on to explain the Parable to his followers, we see that he knows that there are in fact people that are going to hear the message he gives, people who are the rich soil, people out of whom the seed will bear a thirty- or hundred-fold harvest. This has to be so because it’s fits with how a sower behaves. The sower’s object as a farmer is to sow the field where the rich soil lies. From where the sower stands or walks, the field is bigger than the path around it or by it. It’s bigger than the thorny patch. Now we come to see that the sower, who seems so careless, is Jesus himself. He travels and tosses out his preaching and actions everywhere, as widely as he can, so that he can reach every single little corner of the field. He casts the seeds this way and that in any way he can — parable, miracle, preaching, and resurrection — just so that the maximum number of people will have the opportunity to receive the word about the Kingdom. He’s casting seeds even to people who don’t hear or understand. As we know, even today there are people who need to hear it, who do not get it. Just look at the comments sections in the New York Times! It’s like evangelical radio says today: We’ll keep on preaching the Gospel until everyone in the whole world has heard it.
What about us? We are actually not the people who heard Jesus preach from the boat. They heard this story before the Crucifixion and Resurrection and Descent of the Holy Spirit. We hear the parable after all these great events. So, how is this story meaningful for us?
The good soil, the path, the rocky place, the thorny patch, are us humans. In this, we are like the people on the beach. The seeds are still the delicate, magical, immensely strong carriers of the Gospel. They are always being sown.
But nowadays I am actually every type of soil Jesus mentions. Sometimes, I’m the path where the seed just lies and the birds find an easy meal. Maybe this is when I’m sinning, when my store of love is not an ocean, but a puddle. Sometimes, I’m the thorny ground where the seeds get choked because there are a million distractions every day. There’s the news, there’s the article I absolutely must scroll, there’s balancing the bank account, there’s watching TV, there’s just a general skittishness that makes me restless. Sometimes, I’m the thin soil when I don’t pay attention, when I enjoy worship, but don’t carry it into my world. But, sometimes, even sometimes, I am the rich soil. I say this because, no matter what, my mind, my heart, my soul, the Holy Spirit in me always seem to tap me on the shoulder, to point me to the seeds. So, I turn alternately from being bad dirt to being good dirt, over and over.
But how can this be? How can I alternate this way? If I’m still a sinner, if I fail at love every time I take a step, how can I ever be the rich soil? Here is where Saint Paul helps us out. He reminds us not of our perfection, but of our advantage. St. Paul can be really grouchy and complicated. But he really loves us. He says, in today’s epistle reading, that we have been freed from the law of sin and death — not from sin and death, but from the law of sin and death. So, I can still sin and I will still die. But somehow I am no longer locked in. I can still be the bad soil for a time. But, through the Incarnation and Jesus’s hard work, we have the Spirit in us. And the Spirit is our reminder, the person who knocks on the door. I think this is what Saint Paul says today in the reading from Romans:
The Spirit of God dwells in you . . . [I[f Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.
We are really lucky because we have the Spirit and we are the body of Christ. So we can be the rocky ground, the path, the patch choked by thorns, but only at times — not all the time because we are also rich soil and we bear fruit. Just remember the Apostles’ Creed: I believe in the Holy Spirit; I believe in the forgiveness of sin. As a priest once said to me, God has already forgiven you.
