PROPER 10, YEAR A

July 16, 2017

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N.J.

 

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

 

More than forty years ago, I approached the rector of my parish to discuss the possibility of going to seminary and seeking ordination to the priesthood. During the long conversation that followed, I asked what sorts of personal qualities he thought a priest should have. He replied by telling me what the rector who’d sponsored him for ordination had told him. A priest, he said, needs to have a high tolerance for failure. About four out of five things that you try to do in the parish don’t work, at least not as you’d hoped and planned.

 

I found this answer both surprising and unsettling. The priest who gave him that advice was well known for being a competent, methodical, well-organized, and highly effective rector. 

 

Over the years, however, I’ve come to understand something of what he was saying. Parish ministry does bring its share of frustrations and disappointments. In retrospect, though, I do think that he was exaggerating. It’s not really four out of five things that don’t go as planned. It’s maybe more like two out of three.

 

The Parable of the Sower in today’s Gospel calls that long-ago encounter to mind. A sower goes out to sow. But, as the parable explains at length, not all the seed yields grain. Some falls along the path, where it’s eaten by birds; some falls in stony ground, where it can’t take root and is scorched by the sun; some falls among the thorns and is choked by weeds. Obviously that sower must also have a high tolerance for failure.

 

This parable answers an implicit question that must have been on the minds of many among the multitudes that Jesus was addressing. If Jesus is so great, then why aren’t more people following him? The same question may have persisted in slightly different form in the early Church: if Jesus is truly the Messiah of Israel, then why have so many of his own people rejected him? And if he’s truly the Savior of the world, then why do so many of the world’s people refuse to accept him as such?

 

From time to time, we may even be tempted to ask an analogous question in this parish: given all that is so indescribably wonderful here at Christ Church, why aren’t there more people here? But in every generation of the Church’s history, people have asked that question in one form or another. Not: what is it that attracts those who are here, but rather, what is it that makes others stay away?

 

I’m inclined to think that Jesus tells the Parable of the Sower to address precisely this sort of question. The images of the Sower and the Seed bear multiple layers of meaning. At one level, we can think of the Sower as God the Father sending his Son Jesus, the Word Incarnate, into the world. At another level, the Sower is Jesus, proclaiming the Kingdom of God among his people Israel. And at still another level, the Sower is the Church, preaching the Gospel and calling the world to faith in the Lord’s death and Resurrection. In each case, however, not everyone’s able to hear, understand, and respond to the message, just as some types of ground are unable to receive and support grain-producing seed.

 

Yet, the parable assures us, it’s all okay. Never mind the seed that falls along the path, or on the rocky ground, or among the thorns. In the end, what’s important is the seed that falls in the good soil and brings forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty. A crucial bit of background for understanding this parable is that a good yield for grain-bearing seed in those days was seven or eightfold. So, our Lord is clearly describing a miraculously abundant crop that more than makes up for all the seed that’s wasted.

 

To put the point another way: in the long run those who hear and receive the Word grow and multiply in amazing numbers. The final success vastly outweighs what seem the present failures. 

 

The parable challenges us to take the Sower as our model and guide. It’s been said that the single most important sentence in this parable is the first one: A sower went out to sow. In other words, the sower doesn’t stay home and keep the Word of God to himself. 

 

Nor does he worry over much about how much seed he’s wasting. He doesn’t try to verify that this or that patch of ground is good soil before he gives it some seed. He just ambles along, slinging the seed hither and yon. Bad agricultural practice, perhaps; but the point is how different the economics of the Kingdom are from the economics of this world.

 

We’re called to share the Gospel in the same way: not worrying unduly about whether our witness is falling on receptive or deaf ears. Instead, we do what we can, and leave the results to God. At times it may seem that our efforts are going to waste. But then some seed falls on good soil in places where we least expect it, and sprouts up to an amazingly abundant harvest.

 

So, the other side of the advice my rector gave me about needing a high tolerance for failure is that sometimes God surprises us with unplanned and totally unexpected successes.

When I was in seminary, on my very last Sunday in the parish to which I was assigned for fieldwork, a young man who’d recently started attending that parish approached me during Coffee Hour and thanked me for something I’d said to him about two months before. Those words, he said, really changed his life. The irony was that I couldn’t even remember the conversation let alone anything I’d said, and I had to ask him to remind me!

 

In the years since, that same pattern has repeated itself over and over again. Particularly in moments when I’m feeling demoralized by some apparent failure, someone thanks me for something I said or did to bring about some major breakthrough in their life—in a way that I least expected and indeed had no idea about at the time. But according to the Parable of the Sower, that’s precisely how the Kingdom of God works.