Sermon 7-12-26
Sermon 7-12-26 7 Pentecost Mt. 13:1-9, 18-23
I have a pretty large garden at home. Those of you who come here on Sundays during the summer know that. I try to bring the produce to share with you. God and I grow way more than Elizabeth and I can consume. God is pretty good help in the garden. I've never known Him to pick up a hoe or pull a weed, but He tells me what I should do next.
Every year I try to plant at least one thing I have never grown before. Elizabeth really likes garbanzo beans. They call them chick peas around here. One year I decided to try my hand at those things. In early January I started looking around for some seed. They were not easy to find. I finally ordered some from Italy. A small package, enough for one row, cost me almost six bucks.
Spring came and I planted the seed. That very afternoon I went to Walmart for some groceries and they had a one pound bag of garbanzo beans for nineteen cents. God has a sense of humor.
Our Gospel reading from Matthew today is another one of Jesus parables. This one is about sowing seeds. There may be as many as fifty parables used by Jesus in the New Testament, it depends on how loosely we use the definition of a parable. Our English word parable comes from the Greek word parabole which means “to place side by side” or “compare”.
They are short metaphorical stories used to illustrate a spiritual lesson. Jesus used them to compare familiar everyday concepts with complex truths. All of His listeners knew the parables were meant to explain the kingdom of God. This one is a textbook example.
If you notice, there are 8 verses missing in this reading. Verses ten through seventeen. I kind of wish they were in there, read them when you get home. They start with, “Then the disciples came and said to Him, 'why do you speak to them in parables?'” “And He answered them”. You are going to like that part.
As we read and listen to this parable the first question we might ask ourselves is “who is the sower?” It could be a tenant farmer, the landowner or just a day laborer. The sloppy method of sowing the seed would have been despised by the peasant audience who were listening to the parable. The seed would have been a precious commodity.
But, the extravagant harvest tells us and those people there listening that Jesus means the sower was God. And the seed was the Word of God. The story is “compared” it's placed “side by side”.
Remember they are living at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, not in Illinois, the bread basket of the North American Continent. The soil there is only a couple of inches deep and rain is sparse at best.
Those people could only expect a four or five fold return on their sowing. Around here we plant about a half bushel of seed corn to the acre and harvest on average one hundred and eighty six bushels of corn on that same acre. Sometimes we can even go to Walmart and buy a pound of chickpeas for nineteen cents.
Jesus is telling them that the word of God and not human effort produces a harvest that can be unimaginable in their world. At the end of this reading He says, “All we have to do is hear the word and understand it”. Easy, right?
Hear and understand. Hearing and/or reading the the Word of God is not that difficult. In every one of the pews where you are sitting there is a Holy Bible. See it? It contains the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha. Apocrypha literally means “things that are hidden”. We won't go into that today or we will all be driving home in the dark.
Understanding the Word of God is a horse of a different color. If we were to get one of these oil drilling rigs that we see around here to drill a hole completely through the earth, it could conceivably come out a stone's throw from the area where the Bible was written.
That means “the other side of the world” in layman's terms. And even the newest parts of the Holy Bible were written thousands and thousands of years ago. I have more than a dozen different bibles on my book shelves. They all begin with “In the beginning” and end with “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with us all. Amen”.
For the most part those bibles are in the English language. One is in French, a couple are in Old Greek, I just use those two for study purposes. If we were to take those English versions and lay them side by side for comparison, like a parable, you would be amazed at the difference in the wording. Keep in mind the vast majority of the Old Testament was written in Ancient Hebrew with a spattering of Aramaic. The New Testament was written in what is called Koine Greek that was translated from the oral Aramaic. Koine Greek is an obsolete language now. Even my buddy from Springfield would have no idea what someone speaking it was trying to say.
The first real English language interpretation did not come on the scene until close to the year AD 1600. But, like they say, “If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me”.
It is Jesus' goal to help us understand the Word of God. He uses a plethora of subjects in His parables to do that. Sheep and goats, shepherds, grape vines, wedding parties, children who have left home, unsavory rulers and landowners, even seed and sowing practices like we have here today. Familiar everyday concepts placed side by side with complex truths.
The types of soil, four of them, represent four types of people here on earth and how they receive the Word of God.
There is a Hebrew book called The Mishnah. It is the first written account of the oral traditions of that religion from about AD 250. One of the tractates, a discourse on a specific subject, from what is called the Aboth section of the book, also called “Ethics of the Fathers”, lists four types of characteristics of people, very similar to the ones Jesus uses in this parable.
Parables were not unique to Jesus or His Hebrew brothers. They were being used as teaching tools thousands of years before the time of Jesus and the two thousand years after. Teaching tools that lay the familiar next to the complex, side by side. The eye doctors ask, “Which one is better, this one or this one?” The gardener asks, “Which one is better, a six dollar pack of seeds or a pound for nineteen cents?” Simple, right?
Father in Heaven, make it possible for all your children to hear, understand and act upon your Holy Word. Amen.
