The Sower - Part 1

We are beginning today a series on the parables of Jesus. One Pastor has put it this way regarding one reason that Jesus spoke in parables: “Jesus tells stories to break up the worldviews of his hearers and open them to a new way of life.”

Let’s stop and think about that for a second. I think all of us can relate to the idea that when we are left just to our own way of thinking about life that we can get pretty wrapped up in ourselves and can tend to imagine that our own way of thinking about things is the best way of thinking about things. But perhaps we meet someone or hear a story about something and get jolted. Then, for at least a period of time after hearing the story, we are challenged about how we think about the most important things in life. We stop, think, and become willing to challenge some long held assumptions and convictions; and we become open to the possibility that we may be wrong about some things.

Let me give you an example:
I can recall a friend of mine who held a certain set of convictions about politics and economics. He was very certain of how public policy should be made with regard to the poor. He basically thought that if someone did not have a job - like someone living in an economically challenged neighborhood like Austin or Lawndale in Chicago - he thought it was simply because they did not want one or had not looked hard enough. For a period of time we worked alongside each other in the Austin neighborhood. During this time he heard story after story from one unemployed person after another, stories of how hard it was for some people to extract themselves from multi-generational poverty. He heard the stories from the lips of those caught in the cycle of poverty. One day, my friend said to me, I am going to have to rethink how I approach policy issues that touch on these issues. I now see that things are not as simple as I thought they were. Now, if any number of people had tried to make a straight-forward argument to this person, trying to get him to at least be willing to call into question some of his most cherished assumptions about the chronically unemployed, not to mention some of his assumptions that undergirded his political and economic views relating to the poor, he would have not been very open to listening. But witnessing a story, an indirect form of communication, well this caught his attention.

Jesus’ parables, sometimes called indirect forms of communication, do just that. They create a thought world where certain things happen in a certain way. Sometimes the events of the story occur in such a way as to surprise or even shock the hearer. One thinks of the day laborer who is hired at the end of the day and receives the same amount of money as those who have been working all day. This story is clearly designed to shock and even offend a certain way of thinking. Sometimes the events of the parable occur in such a way as to simply cause the listener to question what they think they know to be true. One thinks here about the parable at hand, the parable of the sower. Only some seeds grow out of all the ones sown? The story is told to get a person to stop, think and question. How does growth happen? Jesus is ready to tell them how and more on this in a minute.

What seems common to a lot of the parables and to the one at hand today is Jesus’ intent to get the listener to stop thinking about God in his or her own wisdom and preconceived notions and to learn about God and God’s ways FROM HIM, through a discipleship relationship with him.


In this way Jesus is presenting himself in the vein of the OT prophet, confronting God’s people with their lack of sensitivity to God’s ways, their complacency towards his pursuit of relationship with them, their arrogance in assuming they know all they need to know about God because they fancy themselves to have already done and believed what is necessary - the card has been punched, so to speak. Jesus calls such people to repentance and renewal; and it seems that one of his preferred ways of taking up the mantle of prophet was through the telling of parables. Jesus, like the OT prophets, was pronouncing judgment on those who had become oblivious and hardened to God’s ways, while simultaneously calling forth a faithful remnant - even from among the hardened - of those who, in their response to God’s initiative, become the ones through whom God will make his appeal to all people.

Now, back to the sower. This parable asks us to reconsider our way of thinking about how God desires for us to relate to him. There is much to be said about this parable but I want to consider a couple of different applications from it in the time we have left today.

Jesus says that some seeds are choked out when suffering comes. Many of us, whether we would admit it or not, move away from God when suffering comes. Whether the suffering is because of being persecuted for our association with Jesus or whether it comes simply from the harshness of living in a fallen and sinful world, we often focus on the suffering and allow our frustration with suffering to distract us from God’s love for us and the way he wishes to be present with us and through us in the suffering we are experiencing. Sometimes when we suffer, we turn to the literal or metaphorical drug of our choice to drown out the pain; in so doing we not only block the opportunity for God to meet us at the point of our deepest ache and fear, but we also lose the opportunity to bring God’s love to others through our mutual share in the cross of Christ. Suffering is bad enough but allowing it to keep us from seeking God and bringing his love to each other in the midst of our suffering, well, that is certainly worse. Don’t get me wrong, when I visit someone in the hospital I struggle with doubt, cynicism, and a lack of faith. But I go to bring the love of the wounded healer (Nouwen’s phrase not mine) - the same love that rescues me when I am in the depth of despair.

Jesus says that some seeds don’t grow because the cares of the world are given priority over the priorities of God. What about the cares of the world, the lure of wealth, desire for other things? Well, instead of saying something silly, like trying to offer some formula that will ensure you are never distracted from God’s kingdom (e.g. you should never own a car that costs more than x percent of your income, etc.), I think it is is more to the point to ask of ourselves whether or not we imagine growth in God comes automatically to us as passive recipients, or whether we need to work at it like we need to work at anything that is worthwhile in this life. For example, is our attention to God and to actively serving him through our commitment to serving one another in the context of Christian community something that consumes some time and effort, or do we take care of it at the margins? Do we make regular worship at least as much a priority as recreation is to us? Is our commitment to serving and giving to the poor something that occupies an important place in our lives or is it at the margins? But what about grace, you say!? Well, to be sure the love and grace of God is always there for us, calling us to freely come and freely receive acceptance, embrace and forgiveness. God’s forgiveness is, to use the title of Miroslav Volf’s great book: Free of Charge. But the freedom of grace is meant to urge us to be active participants in God’s kingdom - not passive recipients who seem to imagine that what is important about God can be taken care of at the margins of our busy lives where everything else takes pride of place. In this story of the seed that dies because of the cares of this world, Jesus says that life would look different and infinitely better if we called into question and repented of the ways we marginalise our relationship with God. But now, on the other side of his death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead we also know Jesus as the one who meets us in the margins, and gently but firmly calls us back to himself so that we might have life and life in abundance! May we respond to his call.

Questions for discussion:

1. Can you think of the last time you felt jarred out of what you later would realize was a period in your life characterized by complacency with regard to your relationship with God? What jarred you?

2. How can we guard against falling into complacency with regard to our relationship with God or other important relationships for that matter?

3. Does suffering cause you to distance yourself from God? What could help you, instead, to move towards God in the midst of trials or suffering?

4. So, we’re assuming there is no one-size-fits-all formula for making sure God and the affairs of his kingdom take their rightful place in our life. How then, can you and I gauge whether the cares of this world are taking too much of our time, energy and resources?