Life for Dummies – The Story of the Soil and the Sower

Life for Dummies – The Story of the Soil and the Sower
Sycamore Creek Church
September 4, 2011
Matthew 13:1-13
Tom Arthur

Peace, Friends!

Today we wrap up a series on Jesus’ stories.  We’ve called the series Life for Dummies, because Jesus takes complex issues in life and boils them down into a story.  The stories are simple enough that we can all follow the plot, but the point of the story is often much more complex.  Today, let’s look at the story of the Soil and the Sower.

Matthew 13:1-14 NLT

Later that same day, Jesus left the house and went down to the shore, 2 where an immense crowd soon gathered. He got into a boat, where he sat and taught as the people listened on the shore. 3 He told many stories such as this one:

“A farmer went out to plant some seed.  4 As he scattered it across his field, some seeds fell on a footpath, and the birds came and ate them.  5 Other seeds fell on shallow soil with underlying rock. The plants sprang up quickly,  6 but they soon wilted beneath the hot sun and died because the roots had no nourishment in the shallow soil.  7 Other seeds fell among thorns that shot up and choked out the tender blades.  8 But some seeds fell on fertile soil and produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as had been planted.  9 Anyone who is willing to hear should listen and understand!”

10 His disciples came and asked him, “Why do you always tell stories when you talk to the people?”

11 Then he explained to them, “You have been permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but others have not.  12 To those who are open to my teaching, more understanding will be given, and they will have an abundance of knowledge. But to those who are not listening, even what they have will be taken away from them.  13 That is why I tell these stories, because people see what I do, but they don’t really see. They hear what I say, but they don’t really hear, and they don’t understand.

This story is about two questions:

1. Soil: How teachable are you?
2. Sower: How generous are you in sharing your faith?

The Soil

How teachable are you?  I like to think I’m pretty teachable, but I have to admit that sometimes I’m not.  When I first got married I tended to do most of the cooking. I had worked in several restaurants (some fast food and one very nice restaurant).  I figured I didn’t need anything Sarah had to teach me about the kitchen, especially since she really didn’t like cooking and didn’t have much experience.  So I ignored most things she told me.  One thing she told me was that it’s not good to put hot food in containers and then immediately put it in the refrigerator.  Ha!  I scoffed.  I had never heard this before.  I rolled my eyes and ignored her.  She continued to tell me this, but soon lost patience and quit.

Fast forward fourteen years to this past week.  I had a bad sleeping night so I got up and watched some TV online.  I picked Chef Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Do you know this guy?  He’s also the host of Hell’s Kitchen.  I had seen this show once before and thought it might be interesting to watch again.  If you haven’t watched this show, I don’t recommend it.  You’ll never go out to eat again.  Chef Ramsay goes into a struggling restaurant and gets to the bottom of why things are falling apart.  He tends to use a lot of swearing throughout the process.  He’s kind of a Julie Child meets Donald Trump meets Eminem.

So I’m watching this Kitchen Nightmares and Chef Ramsay is running over these two guys who own, cook, and run an Italian restaurant.  At one point he opens the refrigerator and finds warm pasta sauce in a big plastic container.  Hmm…I think.  What’s wrong with that?  Then he tears into them.  Don’t they know that you can’t put warm food in a container in the refrigerator?  No they don’t, they say.  He tears into them some more.  When you put warm food in a container in the refrigerator, it turns sour, he says.  Sheepishly I came back to my wife the next morning and told her she was right.

Well, sort of.  I did a lot of reading on this topic on the internet and eventually called Mark McCloud who is a chef at Sparrow.  Mark told me that my wife is right in the sense that you can’t put a big batch of hot food in a covered container in the refrigerator.  It won’t cool down fast enough and will end up in the temperature “danger zone” for a long time where bacteria love to grow.  So you have to put it in shallow uncovered dishes in the refrigerator.  So that’s your public PSA today.  And men, be teachable in the kitchen.

So the point here isn’t really about hot food in the kitchen.  It’s about being teachable.  When Sarah mentioned it to me when we first got married, I could have said, You know what honey, I haven’t heard that before, but I’ll do some research on it and find out.  Thanks for bringing it up.  But I didn’t.  I just wasn’t very teachable.

It turns out that I’m not the only one who isn’t very teachable.  Especially when it comes to negative feedback.  We all hate negative feedback.  Neuroscience has shown that this dislike of negative feedback may be hard-wired into our brains (Psychology Today, April 2011, “A Chic Critique”).  The circuits that handle negative information are more sensitive than those that handle positive information.  Our brains are wired to a negativity bias, as it’s called.  We see a report card and it may be filled with A’s, but our focus turns immediately to the one F.  You look over your performance review, and it’s filled with tons of encouragement and one negative point about needed growth.  You immediately forget all the positive comments and ruminate on the one negative comment.

A Teachable Heart

Despite our reflexive dislike of being taught, Jesus tells a story that focuses on our need to be teachable.  It may not be obvious at first, but there are two characters in this story: the sower and the soil.  The soil is definitely a character.  It signifies the state of our heart.  Is our heart open to what is being planted in it, or is it unreceptive?

The soil is actually several characters.  Some soil is very receptive to what the sower is sowing.  This is the fertile soil that produces plants that are thirty, sixty, and a hundred times more fruitful.  But there are more examples than not of soil being unfertile to what is being planted.  There’s the footpath soil.  Easy prey for the birds.  There’s the shallow soil.  No deep roots here.  Then there’s the weedy soil.  The thorns and thistles choke out the seed being planted.  That’s three unreceptive hearts to one receptive heart.  Which kind of heart do you have?

I’ve been slowly reading through the book of Proverbs over the past month or so in preparation for the next series.  Proverbs has a lot of wisdom to share for all kinds of situations, but one piece of wisdom that comes up over and over is the need to be teachable.  Consider Proverbs 15:5 – A fool despises a parent’s instruction, but the one who heeds admonition is prudent (NRSV).  Perhaps I could insert “wife” in the place of “parent” for my own kitchen situation.  Or take a look at Proverbs 10:17 – Whoever heeds instruction is on the path to life, but one who rejects a rebuke goes astray (NRSV).  Unhun…  We’d do well to receive the wisdom that the Proverbs have to give us about being open to receiving wisdom!

So how can we help make our hearts fertile soil and teachable?  The answer is right in the story.  After telling the story the disciples are clueless about what it’s about.  A simple story, but complex point.  So instead of posing and pretending that they’ve got it all figured out, Matthew tells us that “his disciples came and asked him…” (Matthew 13:10 NLT).  They asked him to teach them.  It turns out that we are most open to receiving feedback, positive or negative, when we ask for it.  When we ask for someone to help, teach, or even correct us, we’re much much more likely to take serious stock of what they say.  We are less defensive about it.  We open our hearts and help make the soil fertile.

When I was at CRASH, our men’s retreat, several weeks ago, we would gather for some teaching in a large group and then break into small groups for discussion.  We had a workbook with questions in it, and each small group time had several questions including a “question five.”  Question five invited you to consider giving permission to your small group to ask a question of you that was not written down.  The workbook told us that this was “risky but rewarding.”  I didn’t choose question five until the very last small group.  Although I modified it slightly.  After all the teaching was done and we were in our small group, I asked my small group to each answer this question for me: “What do I need to most pay attention to that was taught this weekend.”  It was a big question, and it took some members of my small group several moments of pondering to answer.  But others had an answer right away.  So we went around the small group and each man told me what I needed most to pay attention to.  It was not an easy moment for me.  The answers were insightful and at times painful, but painful in the way that a surgeon must cut and hurt in order to heal.  While it wasn’t easy, it was the best part of the entire retreat.  And you know what?  I haven’t dwelt upon the hurt of it.  I haven’t ruminated over and over about how someone said such and such.  I’ve actually taken it to heart and contemplated how to grow in the areas that were presented to me.  Giving permission to give me feedback was risky but truly rewarding.  Who are you giving permission to give you feedback, even negative feedback?

So that’s the first character in the story, the soil.  On to the second.

The Sower

The character of the sower leads us to ask the question: how generous am I in sharing Jesus with others?  When I answer this question, you’d think that because I’m a pastor that I’m super good at this, but I’m not.  I’m somewhat introverted.  I, like all of you, too often buy into our culture’s value that faith should be private more than public.  It’s OK for you, but don’t tell me about it. I grew up on the Simpsons, so I always think of Ned Flanders when it comes to faith sharing.  He’s a likeable guy, but also kind of annoying.  Then I’m also in a Christian bubble.  I actually don’t know very many non-Christians in Lansing.  I’ve spent my two years here so far getting to know mostly Christians at Sycamore Creek Church.  So when this story asks the question, how generous are you in sharing Jesus?, I have to say that I’m not as generous as I could be.

Sociologists tell us that only about one to five percent of Christians actually have the gift of evangelism.  There are probably only about two to ten people in our church who can sit down with a stranger and explain the Christian faith.  But I don’t think that this is necessarily what the generosity in this story has to be about.  We may not all be evangelists, but we all can invite a friend to church.

I asked my friends on Facebook what keeps them from inviting people to church?  Their answers aren’t much different than mine:

• Fear;
• Being perceived as overly “religious” or “pushy”;
• Gotta find people open to trying “something a little different”. A lot of people my age (50s) just don’t find it important to go to church (anymore);
• Selfishness;
• Exhaustion;
• All the low hanging fruit has been picked. The hook at first was a “new” church. Now it’s having to get to know people better, then figure out if they have a church, then a good way to ask. It’s hard;
• I frankly don’t know anyone who wants to go to church.

Jesus’ story of the Sower encourages us to go beyond these reasons that hold us back.  The sower encourages us to sow generously.  Did you notice how much seed fell on unsuitable soil?  And yet it doesn’t seem to bother the sower at all that some of this seed is “wasted.”  Why not be more careful about where the seed is sown?  I’d suggest that it’s because God’s love for us is unconditional.  It’s not conditioned even upon our response.  God does everything God can to plant the seeds of faith and grace in your heart.  Are we as generous as the sower?

Consider for a moment the life cycle of a healthy plant.  A healthy plant begins as a seed. It is planted in the ground and dies.  It is watered, and a small shoot breaks the soil and reaches toward the sun.  Eventually the small seedling grows some flowers and those flowers eventually become fruit.  Within that fruit are seeds that bear the potential for more plants that will grow and bear more fruit to grow more plants.  Healthy seeds and plants bear fruit that bears more plants that bear more fruit and on and on and on.  How fruitful are you at planting seeds that bear more fruit?

We like to talk here at Sycamore Creek about igniting authentic life in Christ.  It’s a metaphor jump from farming to fire, but the same basic thing is true with fire.  Fire catches other things on fire.  Passion sets other people around you ablaze with passion.  We ignite people to have authentic life in Christ who ignite more people to that authentic life in Christ.

So how generous are you in sharing the seeds of faith with those around you?  I’ve been looking at improving the lawn of the parsonage without using a lot of chemicals to do it.  I’ve been reading a lot more about lawn care than I ever have before.  I’ve found out that one of the best ways to beat out the weeds in the lawn is to over-seed.  Over-seed?  Yep.  You put generous grass seed right down over the grass and weeds that are already there.  If you want to choke out the weeds, then generously sow more grass seed.

I’ve got a confession to make.  Over the past two years, I, and thus we, have not been very focused outwardly.  We’ve been focused more on in house issues.  I think those issues have been important (transitioning from your founding pastor to me and beginning a capital campaign for a future building), but I’ve neglected to focus us outward on growth.  The time is changing.  My sights our focused now on generously “over-seeding” our community.  It begins with our next series.  It’s called Clearance: Restocking Your Emotional Inventory.  We’re going to look at anxiety, anger, feeling alone, and addiction.  I’m super excited about this series, and we’ve crafted it to be especially applicable to a new person.

There are several ways we’re being generous in inviting people to this upcoming series.  First, we’re doing a direct mailing to thousands of families in Lansing inviting them to come to our emotional clearance sale.  Second, at the Holt Hometown day’s fireworks show, which took place last weekend, we handed out invitation cards.  Third, this coming Thursday the Team Leaders are leading a “full service” night at the Speedway at the intersection of Dunkel and Jolly at 7PM.  We’ll be pumping gas, washing windows, checking tires, handing out free water, and inviting people to come to Clearance.  Anyone is welcome to join us.  Fourth, on Thursday, we’re going over to MSU and LCC’s campus to pass out invite cards.  Again, anyone is welcome to join us.  Fifth, this is Labor Day weekend.  While all of us are here celebrating and worshiping God, there are many people out there who are working today.  We’ve got boxes of doughnuts for you to take to them after church today.  Each box has an invite card connected to it.  We’re going to thank anyone who is working on Labor Day weekend with a box of doughnuts.  Fire responders, police, gas station attendants, drive through cashiers, hospital workers, and more.  Take a box of doughnuts and an invite.

Lastly, I’m asking you to invite three friends to Clearance.  I’d like you to take a moment and prayerfully consider who those people might be, and write them down.  Then hand delivering a card this week would be best, although mailing could be good too.  Be creative.  Consider the cashier who always checks you out at the grocery story.  Or the barista who always makes your coffee each morning.  Or your neighbor, co-worker, friend, or family member.  Go ahead.  Right them down right now.

1.

2.

3.

Not all of those seeds are going to take root.  That’s OK.  The sower sowed generously without regard to the response.  Sow generously the seeds of following Jesus this week by inviting someone to the new series next week.  Do you realize that our church could double in size next week?  It would only take every one of us inviting one person who shows up.  Is the soil of your heart receptive to this teaching?  Then sow Jesus generously!