Text: Mark 4:26-27
Jesus also said, "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.
Prayer: from Psalm 19:14
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Students, young people, and their advisors from the Greenville Community Church have been busy being gardeners. First they were involved in preparing and planting a garden here at the church. If you haven’t seen it, take the time to take a look at it after the service this morning. It’s right on the outside of the kitchen wall. There’s lettuce and tomatoes and peppers. Hopefully the rabbits won’t get at it and there’ll be lots of produce.
Then two weeks ago a number of our young people and their advisors went to the Clarryville church to help them plant a garden for the people of the community. I saw the pictures of their activity. They’re posted on the bulletin near the church office. It looks like they worked hard and also had fun.
Our young people are experienced gardeners. They know what to do to make a garden. You prepare the soil and then plant the seeds of seedlings carefully. You fertilize the garden and water the plants. But that’s only the beginning. As the plants grow the garden needs to be tended. Weeds need to be pulled and the plants need watering if the ground gets dry. It takes a lot of work to be a successful gardener.
Jesus tells a parable about a gardener, a sower to be precise. Indeed Jesus tells a number of stories about a sower sowing seeds. This morning we read the one from the gospel of Mark. It’s a very short parable.
Jesus also said, "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.
I love the parables that Jesus tells. They can be interpreted in so many different ways. For example:
One could interpret the parable to think that God is the one who is sowing the seed. One could think that we are the seeds, that we are scattered on the ground to grow as the children of God. The ground could represent the world in which we are planted.
This morning I’m going to interpret the parable as if we, you and I, are the ones sowing the seed. The seed is the word of God and the ground represents those who receive the word of God and give it a place to grow.
Now I’m looking at it from my point of view. As a minister of word and sacrament, I am one who sows the seed, I scatter the words of God as if they were seeds. You can look at it from your point of view, because you also plant seeds, you also sow seeds by your words and deeds. You plant God’s word through every deed of kindness. You plant God’s word through words that point to God’s love and grace. Yes, you are a sower of the word as much as I am.
Now I’ve been preaching for better than 45 years. And sometimes I wonder what I’ve accomplished. You see, that’s one thing about being a sower. You really can’t see what happens. You really don’t control what happens. A sower simply scatters the seed. It’s up to others to pull the weeds, to water the garden and to reap the harvest. The sower simply sows seeds. There are many things that are beyond the sower’s control. The sower can’t control the rainfall. The sower doesn’t control the insects. The sower doesn’t control the rabbits that might come to feast on the lettuce plants. So sometimes I wonder what happened to the sermons I’ve preached, the seed I scattered.
At the beginning of my preaching career I was pretty sure that I knew quite a bit about preaching, and sowing seed, how it worked and what made it effective. I was pretty cocky. I’ve reread some of those sermons. I pontificated a lot, and the sermons were pretty dry. I couldn’t possibly reuse them.
After 45 years I have a lot of questions about my preaching. What makes it work? What makes it effective? How come I’ve worked so hard on a sermon and it seemed to fall flat? How come some people hear things I never said? “Preacher, you really touched my soul when you said such and such!” And I don’t remember saying what the listener heard. What’s going on? What’s going on when I slapped a sermon together at the last minute and someone says afterward, “God really spoke to me through your words?”
Someone asked what made John Wesley’s sermons so powerful. Wesley was the founder of Methodism and his preaching sparked a world-wide revival. What was it about his preaching? Was it because Wesley had a powerful and inspiring presence? Hardly! He was small. He barely cleared 5’2”. Was it because he had a powerful voice? No. We are told that he had a frail voice that could hardly be heard. Was the content of his sermons? People who read them today find his sermons, formal, devoid of any illustrations or connections to everyday life. Perhaps there was nothing about John Wesley. I think it had to do with God. I think that God used John Wesley and the people who heard were ready to receive God’s word.
You see it’s all about God. It’s not about me. It’s not about you. It’s about God. The Apostle Paul said it well when he wrote to the Corinthians: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”
That’s the way it is with planting seeds.
Some of you remember Howard Hageman. He was the beloved pastor of the North Reformed Church in Newark for 28 years, then he finished his career by being the President of New Brunswick Seminary. And for twenty years he wrote the last page of the Church Herald, called Focus on the World. He gave the following advice to preachers: “When you finish preaching the sermon, lay it on the altar, as if it were. It is your gift to God. When you’ve finished preaching it, let it go.”
That doesn’t mean to say that we don’t take our mission seriously. Scattering seeds is essential work in the kingdom of God. I take my calling and my craft seriously. But what happens after I scatter the seed is up to God.
Let me tell you the story of the first wedding I ever conducted. The groom was a member of my parish, one of the deacons of the church and a teacher by profession. The bride was a young Lebanese woman who was raised a Muslim. The wedding had been planned for a long time. It was to be in the church, and I would conduct the ceremony. At the last moment her family decided they could not enter a Christian church. They boycotted the wedding. It was traumatic. But the wedding went as scheduled and afterward the couple came to Sunday worship faithfully. They eventually had two children I baptized. The groom made the vows and the Muslim bride stood next to him. Even though I invited her, she never became a Christian while I was the pastor of that congregation. But faithfully she came to worship.
Fast forward twenty years…. I was attending a meeting at a church not far from my first parish. During a break I was looking at the bulletin board in the hallway, and I noticed the roster of the Consistory, the names of those who were deacons and elder at the congregation. Among the names on the roster was a familiar name, one with an Arabic given name and a German surname. It was the name of the young Muslim bride whose parents had boycotted her wedding so many years ago. She did become a Christian. She was baptized. Indeed she was ordained an elder and became a leader in the church.
I smiled inwardly and gave thanks to God.
I take no credit for what happened. I don’t know if any of the seeds I planted made a difference. There were many people planting seeds. But God took the seeds and made them grow.
And so the moral is this: Keep on scattering the seeds. Scatter them generously and with abandon. Scatter the seeds generously and without judgment. Scatter the seeds with hope with patience and with prayer. Then leave it up to God to provide the growth.