July 13, 2008

Dear friends in Christ, grace be to you from God our Creator, our Savior Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

1. The gospel text for today immediately gets our guards up.  It immediately gets under our skin.  It makes us wonder and think about what kind of people we are—or better yet, what kind of soil we are.
1. The text is a parable, one of many told by Jesus in Matthew.  It addresses this idea of rejecting Jesus and God’s word.  It asks a difficult question—who rejects the Word of God and why?
2. The text tells the seemingly simple story of a sower who planted his seeds in different places.
1. It describes four different kinds of soil that the sower’s seeds encountered
1. A path where birds came to eat up the seed right away
2. Rocky ground, where seeds sprang up quickly but died in the sun because they had no roots
3. Seeds that fell among thorns that choked them
4. Seeds that fell on good soil
3. Of course, as it is explained later in the parable, these 4 types of soil describe four ways that people react to hearing the word of God
4. Immediately, we go into a panic mode
1. Which type of soil am I?
2. I am the good soil, right?  I’m a Christian.  I go to church faithfully.  I’m nice to the people around me.  Etc, etc, etc.
3. If we are really true with ourselves as human beings, it become clear that
1. Our hearts are all four types of soil, depending on the day
1. Maybe even depending on the minute, or the second!
2. It’s a disturbing text because we are convicted where we sit
3. Some days we’re good soil. 
1. Other days we are too tired to hear the word of God.
2. We’ve just come back from an amazing mission trip, but two weeks later we find ourselves back into our old routine, feeling faithless and wondering why the high of the trip didn’t stick
3. Other days we feel like we’re being attacked by something we can’t identify.  It’s true there are evil forces in the world, and we’re not immune to them.
4. Some days we feel like the questions won’t stop, and we wonder if we’re the only people who wonder if there really is a God.

1. Fortunately, we have a crazy, reckless sower of a God.
1. Farmers I know today are very, very careful about the way they plant their fields in order to ensure some success.
2. However, I also think farmers are some of the most faithful people around.
1. They may do everything in their power to make sure their crops grow well, but there are still no guarantees.
3. The sower in this parable is a really bad farmer.
1. He would make no money, for he’s reckless with the way he throws his seeds
2. He puts them on all different types of ground, knowing that it may not work and they may not grow
3. Yet he tries it anyway
4. This is a farmer who is not afraid of failure
5. He just keeps trying and trying until one seed falls into the right soil and brings forth grain—even a hundredfold.

1. One of my favorite books is by Barbara Kingsolver.  It’s called The Bean Trees.
1. It’s about a young woman, Taylor, who 5 years after graduation leaves her hometown and her mother in Kentucky and takes off west in an old VW bug.
2. Her car breaks down in the middle of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, and she stops at a bar for a meal.
1. When she gets back in her car to leave, a woman hands her a baby and tells her to keep it.
2. The little girl she cares for has been molested and abused.
3. Eventually they settle in Tucson, AZ.
3. The story follows Taylor’s fear of becoming a mother and caring for the child.
1. She is terrified, yet accepts the challenge and does the best she can with it.
2. Throughout the novel, she meets people who become her family and support her in this new role
3. By the end, she had discovered a newfound confidence in herself.
4. I think we as a church sometimes struggle with our confidence.
1. It’s difficult to define success and failure in the church.
2. The ministry is never done, so it’s easy to get discouraged.
3. Just by being a community of real, true people (whose hearts are sometimes good soil and sometimes not), we find ourselves in hurtful and difficult situations
4. We’ve been given a huge responsibility that we don’t quite know what to do with—just as Taylor suddenly found herself with a baby, we feel unsure of how we are supposed to spread God’s word.

• It’s easy to spend a lot of time thinking about ourselves
• That’s the law.  We are clearly convicted.  We know we are not always good soil—there is no way to get around that.  We’re good and bad soil.  Saint and sinner at the same time.
1. The good news is we’ve got a sower—a God—who will keep on trying to plant God’s word in our hearts.
2. A God who knows we live with both reality and a promise
3. A God who came and lived with us, died for us, and will raise us
4. We can be confident God knows the states of our hearts
5. And loves us and grants us grace and salvation
• As the church, we are full of imperfect people
1. We will have disappointments and difficulties in our life as a community
2. We will become exhausted from the never-ending work that is ministry
3. But we can know that we are not doing ministry alone
1. God is with us, ahead of us, working in our hearts of those we minister to
• And knowing that we are not doing ministry alone, we are free to take chances
1. We can be fearless and maybe even reckless in the way we reach out to others
2. We don’t have to be afraid of what we define as failure
• If this congregation helped one person know God’s unending love, would that be enough?
• What do you, as a church and as a community, define as success?
• All we can do is move ahead, confident in God’s love and work in our lives of ministry, and continue to sow our seeds of faith in all areas—the easy and difficult places.