Sunday, July 13, 2008

What did you hear? Did you hear a familiar story? Did you hear a story that you have heard time and time and time again in at least three of the gospels, the very familiar parable of the sower? But as you heard that story again, probably for the hundredth time or more, what did you hear? How many of you have grown up on a farm or with a garden? We have some hands out there of some familiar with farming and gardening. In listening to the parable, you might think that they had it backwards.

At the end of today’s sermon we are going to have a hymn that says, “We Plow the Fields and Scatter”. Now that’s how we do it. We have all kinds of equipment; you would not even think of planting a garden without getting out there first with your tiller and moving the soil up and getting it ready for the seed. That’s because we have lots of equipment. We wouldn’t imagine a farmer planting a field without first going out and disking the field, putting herbicide and pesticide and all those things that keep the weeds and the birds and everything else out of there. But in the times to which Jesus spoke, they didn’t have all of this equipment. They didn’t have all of the nice things we have to make it easier. So indeed, what they did was to sow the seed and then come back and prepare the soil. Sounds strange, but that’s what they did. They scattered the seed and then they went back to prepare the soil. They scattered the seed over the field that they had used the year before.

How many of you have ever noticed that on a college campus there are lots of sidewalks. Now do students stay on sidewalks—very seldom! My college got smart. They put in and paved sidewalks in all the diagonals where the students went. And you can imagine when you go out on the street and on the highways, you see people where the intersection is like 50 feet away, and somebody’s crossing right in front of you. Whether it’s on the street or highway or even the interstate sometimes, they don’t always go to the intersection. You can imagine that in an open field, that people might make a path across it. So even in a field that had been planted before, you might have a path, a path that is trodden. We can imagine, being in different parts of the country around here, fields that have a few rocks in them, a few weeds and thorns. This has been a good field but they scatter the seed and then they come in and plow it and get it ready and hope that the seed gets turned under before the birds and everybody else gets to it.

One of those stories that are in Kris’ family is from one year as they normally took a week and went to the coast at a condo in Texas to relax and get away. Some of her good friends were there; her senior pastor and his family were there. The senior pastor who also happens to be your retired general presbyter here, Bill Branch, was doing one of his favorite dishes which was an omelet which would feed about a dozen people. He had it all ready and he set it out on the table, which was on the porch on the balcony where they were. He turned around, and as soon as he turned around, about a dozen seagulls came down and took the whole thing away. I mean he didn’t even get to the door before that omelet was gone!

Now you can imagine when throwing seed on the ground that birds would like to get to it. So you have to get after it rather quickly. So we understand the problems that are there, and then as Jesus explains this parable to his disciples, he says, “Where the seed is sown on the path and the birds take it up is the people who hear the Word and it just doesn’t stick. Now we never have any problem getting information to go in one ear and out the other do we? We are inundated with all kinds of information in our society. You can turn on the TV, you can read the newspaper and get all kinds of information, and that doesn’t even count the Internet where you are inundated with even more information. We must realize that it is difficult for that seed to find a home at all. We have ears, but we don’t always tune in.

One of the first churches I served had a young man in the congregation who had been in the Navy. He had been in the Philippines, met a young woman there and got married, and she came back to America with him. It was hard for her to understand when she came to their house, which was out in the country, and she looked at their house and asked, “How many families live there?” In the Philippines it was usually one family per room. In that kind of a setting you can imagine that when she was in the house, watching TV or doing something, if you did not say her name, she did not hear you. She didn’t tune in because she was used to tuning out all of that noise,tuning all of those people out—and we do the same thing. The Word has to hit us at the right time so we can hear it; and for many of us it doesn’t.

We live in a day and time now where we are very much like the first century of the Christian Church. We have thought for a long time that we had a very fertile soil, that all we had to do was open our doors, put the seed out there, and everybody was going to flock in. They did that in the ‘40s and ‘50’s. Churches grew, everybody was coming back and everybody wanted a church. And, we assumed as they came in that they had all the preparation needed, that they already knew the basics of the faith, they knew the Lord’s Prayer, they knew what creeds were, they knew how to look through the Bible and find things. But in our day and time now we are finding more and more people who do not have that foundation. They’ve not been exposed to any of that; they don’t know the Lord’s Prayer, the creeds, or how to look through the Bible. Some of our churches, when children get to be confirmation age, or when we get adults in new membership classes, and we say, “Turn to such and such a verse or book in the Bible”, they say, “Well where is that?” They’re not sure if it’s in the Old or New Testament, or whether it’s even in the Bible. We make these assumptions, and we are at the same place Jesus was as he told that parable. We’re scattering the seed, and the ground is not yet prepared; we have to prepare it for people. We have to be able to find a way of getting people to stop and listen, let what we say have an impact, have a way into their lives.

The second instance that Jesus talks about in the parable is where the seed falls on the rocky ground. They receive it very quickly, but you know, when troubles happen, they’re gone. There’s no depth. When controversies happen in churches, it’s amazing how many of the new members, sometimes, those who are on the periphery, say, “Well we don’t want to deal with any of that tension or anything; we’ll just leave. Jesus never said that the church was perfect or that being a disciple meant that everything was perfect. It does mean that we have to trust God to come through some of those times. We hope, that as we prepare people with the ability to hear the Word and understand what God has for us, that they will be enabled to come through some times that are not perfect. We would love it to be nice and easy; you know, back to the days of “Father Knows Best” or “Leave it to Beaver”, where the wife meets the husband at the door with the martini, a Pleasantville movie and that kind of thing.

We don’t live in that day and time anymore. Can you imagine, for most of us, these days, living with one income? We just can’t do it; we need both working, we need both being parents, we need both being everything. We need everybody working together. We deal with the cares of the world, and try to find some depth in our faith, and in the third case, the seed may fall into those thorns. The cares of the world, the worries about money, we have those. We worry about whether or not we can get from one place to another because of the price of gas. We hear about AAA and some of those other plans getting more and more calls because people are getting down to the very end on their gas and running out of gas and calling those places to come and give them some gas so they can get to the next place. Some of them are abusing that because I think AAA is supposed to give them a couple of gallons, and they are then getting from here to there and calling more and more often because it’s a way to use something that they have. Now that wouldn’t occur to a lot of us but we know that people worry. You know we are six months into the year’s economy and losing jobs. In Russellville here, you have a little concern about the possibilities of losing Goodies and some jobs around here. Lots of other things are on the good side. Everybody gets concerns. You know we had the controversy the last couple of weeks about the comments Phil Gramm made and Barack Obama coming back saying, “We don’t need another Dr. Phil” where Gramm is say, “We’re a nation of whiners. It’s simply a mental recession we’re in rather than an actual recession.” But I think if you look around you, you know that times are a little tough for a lot of people.

And we have to again, in that kind of climate, begin to share the Word of God, the Good News, the seed of the Word that we have to share.

Our hope and God’s hope and Jesus’ hope is that we will find fertile soil, good soil, that when we share the news, that people will come to understand it, they will come to embrace it, to grow with it, and they will grow it, some a hundred fold, some sixty fold and some 30 fold, however it is. But that it will come alive in them and in us, and move out into the world. The parable of the sower is yes, Jesus spreading the Good News. Now we are the ones who are called to go out into a world that is really not ready to hear the Word. It’s much like I said, that farming was in Jesus’ time. We have to continue to share the Word, and hope, that indeed, it will find good soil, but knowing that many times it will touch people who don’t want to hear, touch and then fall away very quickly, or those who hear, but troubles come up and they get overwhelmed by them. We’re called to continue to share the Good News, to not stop sharing it, even when it doesn’t seem that the harvest is as plentiful as we would like it to be. We are still called to share that Good News, that good seed, and to go out there and continue to prepare that soil as best we can, so that the seed may indeed find a place for the Good News in people’s hearts and in their lives, and grow. It’s a challenge for us. Jesus took the time to sit with his disciples and explain it a little bit. And we hear that explanation and we need to hear that which is true for us, to know what our task is.

Paul, in his letters, talks about how one person sows and another person reaps. As a pastor, we see that all the time because you are called to teach classes, especially confirmation and Sunday school and things like that, and you wonder if you are getting through at all. You know confirmation age is not the age where children are listening. Junior High is not the age where children are most attentive. So you plant lots of seeds and you hope that somewhere down the road, they do grow, that someone else will continue to prepare the soil in those lives. And it is the same when we have visitors, when we have people that we talk to, to realize that we are always planting those seeds and helping them to have good soil so that the seed may grow, and God’s love, and concern and faith may grow in that person. Our task is two fold. It is to share the Good News.

It is also to prepare places in peoples hearts for the Good News so that they may hear, so that they may respond, so that faith may grow in their lives, so that it may grow in our church, and so that it may attract others so they will say, “Well what’s happening there? It seems like things are going and growing”, because the Word of God is here and alive and growing. At times it may seem that the seeds are going on the path or the rocky ground, or among the thorns; we trust too that God is preparing this church to receive that word and for it to grow in here, to bring new life and new growth and to continue the ministry of this church and the people here. We trust the one who is the good sower, the one who sows the seed and calls us to continue to be about that, to share the Good News and trust that God is working in and through us to prepare the soil, prepare people to hear the Good News so that there indeed will be ears for hearing, so that when the Word comes, they hear it, they understand it and the Word grows in their lives as it has grown in ours.

That Word has come to us, not just through our parents and grandparents, but Sunday school teachers, role models, through all kinds of people who have helped prepare us for that seed to grow. We are called to do the same so that when that seed comes that is the Good News, that it will fall on ears that indeed hear and on soil where it will indeed grow, for that is what God wants, of His word and of us, God’s people. Amen.

There are times when we do that sowing, that we think we are all alone, that we are the only one sharing the Word, doing the work. This is part of why we gather on Sunday morning, to say, Yes there are others who are teaching Sunday School, who are singing in the choir, who are telling our young children about the faith through children’s sermons. As we come together, we gain strength from each other knowing we are about the same task, doing it our own unique way with our own unique gifts, with our abilities to reach different people, but always with that one message about God. And we need that support and that nourishment and that strengthening so that we can work together and sow that good seed.

And now I invite you to share in another way, by affirming the faith we believe in, the faith that is written in the Apostle’s Creed:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,

and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.

He descended into Hell. The third day He rose again from the dead

He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty,

from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen