Fairhaven UMC

In the seven-some years since we moved into Hilltops Parable, one of our greatest battles has been to have a lawn. And I constantly talk about how I could kick myself for never having taken before and after pictures of things that we’ve done in that parsonage backyard because I know in my head that we’ve come a long way from where it was. They have these roses of Sharon that grow along the chain link fence on the side of the backyard that used to arch the whole way over the backyard. The whole back two thirds was in shade, just rocky ground because it was all shaded out. We’ve got those roses of Sharons corralled now. Stormy always picks the most inconvenient time and decides that we’re going to go cut them and we have to bag up seven bags of Rose’s Sharon. So we go do that. But it’s worked.

And up towards the house, it’s been an even more difficult fight to keep the grass between heavy dog traffic. You know, they shoot out the door right there into the backyard. And there’s this rushing flow whenever it rains of what clearly used to be a spring, just like pretty much a shallow creek bed down the middle of the backyard. And so the front third of the yard has alternated historically between being a mud pit and a dust bowl. Hard to grow grass there. But we’ve managed to get that largely under control too. We have something like a French strain now, a really half-baked French strain. We put a strip of river rock down that breaks the runoff flow. It slows things down, stops the erosion from being as and bad.

But one of the most effective things we’ve done to get a yard is reseed it. When the landscaping was finished at the front of the church last summer, we snagged a little bit of that leftover grass seed to give it a try in our own yard. And I can’t remember what this blend was. I wish I could. It was like Black Magic or something, maybe. But the bag said that it was a fancy, high-traffic, drought-tolerant blend developed by some university agricultural extension service. So this was good stuff. You know, not that quick cover that only lasts for a season but patches over bigger problems. Not the bottom-shelf Kentucky bluegrass that just dries out here. And it’s been a little over a year now, and this seed has largely worked. We’ve got a pretty heavy green carpet now in our backyard.

Hilltop’s front lawn looks great even when we go a bell weeks without rain. That grass seed blend, though, again, the first we’ve really gotten to take off, it’s like 80 bucks for a two-pound bag, I’m told. Now, two pounds of grass seed, that’s a lot of individual grass seeds, for sure. But it’s not that many square feet when you get down to it. So before we planted it in our yard, and July is not a great time to do this to begin with, we made sure to lay down bags of mushroom compost in key places. We took a metal rake to dig it in as much as we could to loosen the soil. And once it was down, we put down this new grass fertilizer. And we fenced off the parts of the yard that we most wanted to grow to keep the dogs off it for a couple weeks. And we watered it every day. Remember that last summer, this was crucial because it was hot and it was dry. I had every intention of making this work the first time because all of this was very inconvenient. And most importantly, because I didn’t want to go buy another $80 bag of grass seed to try again. Very high stakes.

And it seems to me that taking care in this way is what a good sower, a good farmer is supposed to do. And now you’ll note that as far as crops go, grass is a pretty useless crop. It doesn’t provide anything for us except for a nice carpet to walk on, to sit on, to look at. You like those nice freshly mowed lines. Maybe that’s just the man thing. I don’t know. But if I had planted wheat or corn that I was relying on as my and my primary source of food, I’d have been even more careful before and after I sowed the seeds to make sure I got enough of a crop for my family to survive. So Jesus listeners, when they’re hearing this parable of these seeds, these aren’t casual gardeners growing a couple zucchini plants, maybe some cherry tomatoes. They did not have grass lawns. That wasn’t invented yet. These are subsistence farmers. They eat what they grow or they die.

And so when Jesus is describing in this parable this sower, he’s describing a very bad farmer. If an actual farmer were to do their job like the one in this parable, they would likely come out of the harvest season bankrupt, and if it were back in Jesus’ day, they’d potentially come out of the winter dead. And those who would have originally heard Jesus’ parable, they understood this perfectly well. And it probably surprised them a lot that this doesn’t really seem to be a concern of Jesus’ in the story. This farmer being wasteful, being bad at his job, that doesn’t really seem to be the point of the story at all. They would have known that this farmer is throwing away valuable seed at random to see what takes, even in places that make no sense. You know, you cultivate a field. You don’t spread your corn on the driveway, right?

And these farmers would have been very puzzled because they, like us, prefer to live their lives in a risk-averse way. We’re not going to dump valuable resources onto rocky ground or into the thorns. Whenever we look at our resources, whether it’s an $80 bag of grass seed, whether it’s our church budget, whether it’s the very limited energy each of us has, we try to be very careful with how we invest them. We want guaranteed returns, visible victories along the way, predictable growth. It doesn’t have to be enormous, but it should be predictable and reliable.

But at the same time, we have dueling impulses within us. Because even as we want that stuff, we’re also really notoriously bad at calculating long-term growth and risk. You know, especially when we get desperate or tired or anxious, we stop thinking well about the $future. And whenever we’re under pressure, we stop being conservative and risk-averse and start looking for instant wins, instant gratification. And we see that in our Old Testament reading today with Esau. Esau comes in from this hunting expedition, probably been out a day or so. He’s hungry. His legs are wobbling. He’s about to drop over unless he gets something to eat. He’s desperately hungry.

And I don’t know about you, maybe this is an insulin problem I need to get looked at, but I experience this pretty frequently. A few months ago, I was in Costco having skipped lunch, walking around Costco with Stormy and I got this overwhelming feeling that if I did not get to the food court right now and get a smoothie, I was going to black out and crack my skull on the rotisserie chicken rack. And it is very scary whenever you feel hunger overtake you like that. You want to deal with it immediately. It’s this ultimate, immediate, acute, short-term crisis, and it’s one that Esau is having. Esau says to himself, I need to eat, and I need to eat right now. And his brother Jacob, who we just heard his backstory, he’s been a schemer, he’s been an opportunist from before he was born. Jacob sees his moment and he offers his brother Esau a single bowl of red lentil stew. And he’ll give that to Esau on credit. You don’t got to worry about paying me right now for that. He will just owe Jacob his entire inheritance when his father dies. Worry about it later.

And Esau is completely caught up in the physical discomfort that he’s in. Again, he’s going to drop over. And he says, look, I’m going to die right now if I don’t eat. So what good is this inheritance to me? You got it. And he sells his entire future, not just his, but his kids, his legacy. He sells his place in God’s covenant. You know, he was the firstborn. He should have been the father of God’s people. He sells all of that for a bowl of soup. And it’s easy for us to look at Esau and wonder, how could you be so stupid? Although I think we need to give him some grace and maybe he thinks his brother was kidding because that’s a crazy thing to do.

But Esau here is the embodiment of what Jesus calls this rocky soil. And Jesus explains in his parable that some seeds that are scattered fall on rocky ground. There’s only a thin layer of topsoil. And these seeds actually start off growing incredibly fast, faster than any others. The soil is loose. It’s warm. It gets the morning sunlight, easy for water to get into. And at first glance, it looks like it’s a massive success just in the short term here. Like this harvest is going to be huge. Look at this crop shoot up in the rocks. But the moment there’s a hot summer’s day and a week without rain, these seedlings wither and die because they have an no deep roots to sustain them. There’s no anchor. There’s no drawing of nutrition from deep ground.

And this is Esau. Esau is a simple guy. We see that throughout the narrative here in Genesis. He’s a simple guy. He’s not a schemer. He’s not a thinker. He likes going hunting. Now, this is not a problem, but for him, again, it means that he lacks the deep roots of commitment and faith that would secure his footing in challenging moments. And instead, he is ruled by the immediate climate of whatever is around him. Whatever’s happening, he responds to it without being careful. And so the moment he experiences that first hot summer day with the sun beating down like those seedlings, he gets some hunger, he feels physical discomfort, he’s worried about what’s about to happen, his roots reveal just how shallow they are. And he chooses this quick fix, this soup that’s going to nourish him in the moment over this long-term promise of stability.

And if we’re honest with ourselves, the rocky soil is a warning to each of us. The easiest soil of any of these, I think, for us in the church to be is to be that rocky soil, to be the seedling who starts out devoted to Jesus, devoted to the $church for a time. We love it here. We’re very excited. We’ve seen new things where what is this place like? What’s Jesus like? All this. We see just great things happening within and around us. But as time goes on in the church and in our faith, we lose interest a little bit. We lose commitment a little bit. The thrill of newness wears off and we hit a moment of disillusionment or conflict and then it’s over.

But this is a lifelong thing. We can’t be that way. And what we also see in this parable is that the painful reality is that proclaiming the good news, doing the work of the church of a Christian in the world, like planting seeds, is not usually going to work by our metrics. We will not have every seed sprout. In this parable, keep in mind that this sower has a failure three quarters of the time. We will not even have most of our seeds sprout. Most places that we plant will be totally unsuccessful in getting the results that we’re hoping for. And maybe our biggest disappointments are going to be the moments when we’re expecting some return on our efforts, and it appears to show up, these little seedlings, but then it’s in the rocks and it wilts in the sun.

Jesus shows us in this parable that we can’t force a solution. We can’t force growth. We can’t force seeds to take in places that they’re just not gonna. Because the kingdom of God just doesn’t work like that. Our role is to live our lives both as the soil, and that’s how parables work, right? You’re multiple things, multiple levels in the parable. But our role is to live our lives planting the seeds of the gospel, being fertile soil, spreading the love of Jesus around us, and doing our $our best to set up the body of Christ, the church for a successful harvest. And this requires us not to get disproportionately caught up in the short term, not to get nearsighted in our actions. We’re not supposed to get stingy with the seeds, but we’re also not supposed to think short term. Because if we’re doing what we’re supposed to do, and that’s not reflecting in our budget, in the number of people in the pews, in our own spiritual growth in this moment, that’s not inherently a marker of failure. If indeed we are committed to keep doing what we’re supposed to do, an enormous harvest, we see this at the end of the parable, an enormous harvest might be on the horizon in those places that are taking very slowly. Whether we personally get to see it or not.

This is one of the hardest things, whether we personally get to see it or not. And on the flip side of that, these other types of soil, if we make short-sighted decisions to achieve quick results by force, that’s like planting on thin, rocky soil and getting excited when the seedlings shoot up. They’re only going to last a short time. Churches, disciples of Christ, have to be cultivated over time. This is the only way that plants can grow to maturity that are hardened, that are resilient against the heat. Those of you who do garden and do it from seed, more labor intensive than how I usually do, know that whenever you get some tomato plants, you’ve got $got to put them outside in the early spring to harden off the weak ones, which really means kind of kill the weak ones and strengthen the ones that are going to last. So there’s a process over time that involves a lot of failure.

And the coming of the kingdom of God is like this long, slow process that requires hope and expectation whenever the evidence might not be visible yet. The seeds that we plant might be starting by digging down roots long before a shoot comes up. Building the church, awaiting the fullness of the kingdom. These things are a lot like farming. It doesn’t take a lot of reading in the Gospels to realize that Jesus talks like that a lot. Because like farming, it’s God who decides what is going to happen, what’s going to grow. God brings the harvest. You and I don’t grow seeds. We just plant seeds and try to make the best environment for them.

And again, because the harvest belongs to God, because it’s brought by God, we don’t have to be stingy or calculated or careful with the seeds that we throw around. Think about how different that is, again, from our instincts. As I can testify about my backyard, it is hard enough to get seeds to grow on decent, prepared, fertilized, watered soil, and good seed is expensive. We hoard what’s precious to us, what’s valuable, because we’re afraid to waste it. We’re afraid that if we get rid of it, we’ll lose it, that we’ll end up behind.

But I think this is an important part of the parable, the part that Jesus doesn’t say when he doesn’t condemn this bad farmer. He doesn’t say he’s a bad farmer. We don’t call this the parable of the bad sower. It’s expected that the farmer should be reckless with his seeds. It’s not a problem. It’s how he’s supposed to be. Despite what appears to be this tremendous waste, the harvest the farmer receives in the parable is a huge one. So are you really wasting seeds if what you get is a 100 to 1 harvest? Whatever he might have hoped for, he gets way more beyond his wildest dreams. I don’t know much about how you grow grain, but every commentary I read about this says that a 100 to 1, a 60 to 1, a 30 to 1 return is absurd. So what he harvests is not a normal yield. It’s not even a good year. It’s a crazy good harvest. This farmer would have more grain than he ever knew what to do with.

And suddenly scattering those seeds all over the place isn’t going to feel so wasteful. He sowed with this wild hope and he reaped a harvest that only God could produce for him. This is what the kingdom of God is like. This is how we are called to live. Foolishly, recklessly pouring out the love of Jesus into the world and trusting that God’s going to do something with it. That God will grow something with what we scatter. We do our part and God brings the harvest. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.