I’m always reluctant to teach a parable. Flannery O’Connor, the great Catholic writer said, “In most English classes the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected. Every time a story of mine appears in a Freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle. I realize that a certain amount of this what-is-the-significance has to go on, but I think something has gone wrong in the process when, for so many students, the story become simply a problem to be solved, something which you evaporate to get Instant Enlightenment.”

Too often we are doing autopsies on Scripture passages that are dead to our listeners.

There is also the temptation to read parables like allegories – finding the hidden meaning and symbols in every word. Pretty soon, the parable has stopped being a story and become simply a carrier of hidden messages in “this really means something else or is a symbol for that.”

The other temptation is to find the theme or main idea of the story and lift it out from the story itself. “When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.”

John the Baptist announced the kingdom and made statements. Paul taught theology and doctrine. Jesus told stories about the kingdom. Stories pulled people in because they fly below the radar. They literally light up a different part of the brain than statements and facts and finding themes. They are not fiction. They are a road to the truth that is relatively unguarded and most people will let you pass through any obstacles they would put up to facts and statements. We love stories and the people in them. Max Lucado said “Jesus told stories and people wanted to sit on the front row.”

Maybe that is why Jesus says he uses parables to confuse others – the scholars. Stories and parables are not sophisticated enough for them. They want systematic theology and intellectual depth. Jesus knows that is not what gets past the obstacles. In fact, it just throws up more.

So, this morning I do not want to dissect the parable of the sower and the soils and reach for the deeper meaning or the things Jesus wanted to teach but didn’t have the time. I just want to see if the story is as true today as it was then.

  1. The story is told as a warm-up. It is told as everyone is coming in and getting seated and there is no sense of worry about wasting something great on less than a full house. If you were entrusted with the responsibility to communicate the most important truth in the world, how would you do it? It wouldn’t be stories and if it was then surely you would wait until everyone was seated and quiet and had their notebooks open.

This is an insight into the one who told the stories:

God is extravagant. He does not seem to believe in “waste not want not.” He wastes stories on people who will to believe.

God reverses all of our expectations at times. He saves the best wine for last and he throws away the best teaching before people are all seated.

It’s really an introduction to the spirit of the parable itself – the image of one flinging seeds by the handful and letting them fall where they may. He never runs out of seed.

  1. The Four Soils. Think about it as our not being one soil but our being a field with four different types of soils in each of us.

Think about it with the sower not just sowing once in your life but on a regular basis – over and over again with all kinds of seed. Not just sermons and lessons in Sunday School. We know the word “propaganda” which means repeating a lie or misinformation over and over again until it becomes true in the minds of people. This is, on the other hand, propagation which is repeating truth in the form of parables and stories over and over.

The First Soil

The seeds were not even scattered. They were spilled. They were seeds that slipped through his fingers and miss the fields entirely. They fall on the path he is walking. The roadway traveled by everyone else as well. I think of it as the overexposed life.

The seed cannot get below the surface because it is competing with a thousand things in our life for attention.  We have lists of things to get done. We have commitments and emergencies. We are preoccupied with what is most immediate.

So the little things and the distractions fly in and pick up what has been scattered. We are bird feeders but nothing grows.

As well, the soil has become so hardened that nothing will grow.

Jesus often describes the overexposed life – the hardened life – as that of the religious professionals and not the great sinners. The proud and not the prodigals. He has just come from a dinner with a religious professional where a woman who had lived a sinful life washed his feet with her hair but his host, Simon the Pharisee, had a hardening of the categories.

The more of a public path our religion becomes, the greater the chances for pride. This soil in us loves to be important, recognized and influential…and pride has paved it over.

I don’t think public religious pride is a big section of your field. Perhaps other kinds of pride but not this one. This hardness is more apt to be in my life than yours. We want to be known as great teachers or pastors. We like the seats at the head table and the influence that comes with it. We like having platforms and the public recognition.

The Second Soil

It is essentially solid rock covered by a thin layer of soil.

The strength of the underlying rock surprises even us sometimes. We have a veneer of openness to the seed but it’s only superficial. We consider the truth for a time but it cannot penetrate our fixed biases.  We are intrigued but not convinced.

This is the soil of unexamined beliefs and preconceived notions in our lives. This is what Jesus faced time and again with the Pharisees who could not imagine anything different from what they had been instructed to believe and what they instructed others. It was not a matter of conserving beliefs but of protecting beliefs from growing. Imagination had dried up and died.

Or, the seed dies for lack of constant moisture. It depends on outside sources because it does not have anything to sustain it. There is no retention and whatever moisture it gets evaporates quickly. So, it depends on inspiration from the outside – sermons, music, radio, television, quick and memorable phrases, flashes of good intentions and a constant trickle of inspirational things. It lives from one sermon to the next. It is not a tree planted by a stream.

It’s not hard-hearted or prideful – just shallow and incapable of going through any dry spells. It’s forever immature, wanting a life of faith to be easy, fun and entertaining – but not difficult.

It’s what you might call the “Hallmark syndrome.” We experience so many superficial emotional moments where we choke up a little, tear up and feel something but we cannot sustain it. We are touched….but cannot break through the rock. Our emotions are accustomed to being exposed briefly but not deeply.

The Third Soil

This is the uncleared soil. Everything takes root in us because the soil is so good. But instead of rooting out the thorns we try to learn to live with the distractions of the thorns. C. Wright Mills, a sociologist said in 1963 that “the mass production of distractions is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.” It’s not become better since he said that.

Much of our spiritual life becomes learning to live with thorns successfully instead of clearing out the thorns. We rationalize it and say the thorns are not really affecting us all that much. In fact, we are almost protective of what is choking the life out of us – worries, riches and comfort.

It’s not as if we don’t grow spiritually. We do…but we are spindly and thin. We never have substance. We never mature.

Tex Sample is a Methodist pastor, professor and writer. In his book, “US Lifestyles and Mainline Churches” he writes about three segments of our population – the cultural left, the cultural right and the cultural middle. These are not political categories but lifestyles. A life surrounded by thorns is descriptive of the cultural middle. How does he describe it?

Success is central and the major source of personal identity. We need to have successful careers, successful children, and all the indicators of a successful life.

Stress is constant and unrelenting – especially between work and family.

We see other people as competitors

Highly mobile, we are networked but not really connected. Many acquaintances but few friends. Never really rooted in a place or with people.

Alexis DeTocqueville put it this way in chapter 13 of his book: Causes of The Restless Spirit of Americans in the Midst of Their Prosperity.

“In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it, and he sells it before the roof is on: he plants a garden, and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing: he brings a field into tillage, and leaves other men to gather the crops: he embraces a profession, and gives it up: he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure, he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days’ vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days, to shake off his happiness. Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which is forever on the wing.”

There is a disturbing sense of isolation and loneliness. Sometimes they feel they are losing themselves.

There is a fear of being “found out” and a reluctance to be too introspective or quiet or to ask questions.

Whole territories of the self remain unemployed. Henry David Thoreau put it this way. “When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.”

We always think we’ll know the critical moment when our life changes from being surrounded by thorns to being choked out by them. But we don’t. Unless we pay close attention it sneaks up on us.

Finally, the productive soil. There is not much of it but it makes up for all the rest. It’s open to genuine emotion and feelings – not just brief showers that come and go. It is as clear as possible from distractions and preoccupations that choke out life over time. It is not hardened by pride and the desire for recognition.

How do we encourage the growth of this kind of soil in our lives – knowing the others are always there as well? What needs changing in our lives? What needs clearing and weeding? How do we deal with pride, shallowness and a preoccupation with success?

Let me suggest three things based on three words in verse 15:

  1. The antidote to pride and constant comparison is found in the word noble in verse 15. It comes from the word “kale” which means beauty but not just superficial beauty. It means something perfectly fitted for the role it is intended to play. It is the beauty of being in the right place. That is why we call settling somewhere as putting down roots. We find our place and commit to it. Is not concerned about appearances or being anything other than what God chooses for it. It does not need recognition because it is satisfied with its assignment. It’s a beauty based on trust and confidence.
  1. The antidote for shallowness is found in the word perservance. It is “hupomone” and it means “that which remains”. It is the rock within the rock that you see in batholiths in the Southwest – those columns of igneous rock where everything around them has eroded but they remain. It means endurance and patience. Not fatalism or resignation but the ability to remain when everything else erodes and fades. We’ve all seen the trees by streams with their roots exposed by the soil being washed away. They continue to feed the tree in spite of their circumstances. You might call it faithfulness.
  1. The antidote for pleasure and comfort that are always self-focused is in the word “agathe” or good. It does not mean self-righteous or always looking for self-fulfillment or self-actualization but, literally, an esteem for others. A love that connects to and includes others. Other people are not competitors. We don’t need to compare ourselves to them or have what they have to feel good about ourselves. We do not envy them. We are not driven to keep up or pile up more and more to feel better about ourselves. It is the good that can be invisible. I like the quote from George Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch.” “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” We are what the Bible calls content and blessed.

How does Ecclesiastes put it?

“Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work – this is a gift of God.

This week try focusing on these three words – beauty that is defined by being content with the role you’ve been assigned; perseverance that is faithful when everything is eroding around you and, finally, goodness that enjoys the success of other people – not just our own.

As Paul says, “Think on these things.”