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Rocky XIII
Matt 13: 1 – 23
Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 04 Jul, 2004

DON’T LET  traditions fool you. Don’t worry about the farmer in this parable. He’s doing fine. They might call this “The parable of the Sower,” but it’s really about the soil. What soil are you?

  When Jesus told this story, there were no machines to plant seed.  When Jesus told this story,  any good farmer planting wheat or corn on a farm scattered it by hand.
  When I was a kid, we sometimes helped in the garden. We had tomatoes or Jerusalem artichokes or potatoes. I planted radishes. In the back yard, you mark out rows in the plant bed and plant the seed at regular intervals. I used to make a hole in the soil with my finger to put the seed into.
  I couldn’t have planted 20 ha that way. You can’t do it so carefully on a farm.

  In Palestine, every farmer learnt where the underground rocks were. He wouldn’t plough there. Why ruin a plough for the sake of an extra bag of wheat at harvest? Some poor farmers couldn’t even afford a metal plough, and had to make do with a hard piece of wood.
  And, of course, the farmer watched out for any bad infestation of weeds.
  You know the weed called Patterson’s curse or Salvation Jane. Beekeepers love it: the flowers make good honey. Artists like how it covers square miles with a lovely purple and green carpet. But cattle and wheat farmers hate it. It makes cows sick, and it’s too hard to get rid of if you want to plant a crop.
  Farmers have always coped with weeds. Didn’t God tell Adam there would be thorns and thistles? And who ploughs where he can’t see?
  The worst was the soil on the edge of a weed infestation. Who knew what weed seeds blew or shook off into that soil?

  There weren’t many choices for the farmer. He had to get his crop planted, or there was nothing to eat when harvest came, and nothing to sell to bring in extra money.
  So the farmer ploughed one day and, on the next day, he put on his seed bag and went out to sow, planting seed in his new–ploughed field.
  It wasn’t hard. Just reach into the bag, pull out a handful of seed, and scatter it. If it fell where it would grow, that was fine; if some fell where it was wasted, that was factored into the costs.

  Jesus sees a principle here. He teaches his disciples and all those who want to hear, by telling them about a Sower’s work, and about the problems that that work faces.
  You all understand what the Sower does. He walks along and dips his hand into the seed bag and throws the seed left and right. He is responsible for throwing the seed, but once it leaves his hand it is at the mercy of the wind, of the birds, of the soil where it lands.
  So he picks up a handful, and some falls from his hand onto the path where he is walking; he throws it, and some of it lands on the ploughed ground, and a little bit drops onto the rocky part, and some even goes a little further and lands where there are already weed seeds in the soil, or it even lands right among the weeds. And some falls in where it can germinate, and some is snatched away by birds before it can even feel the cool earth touching it.

  That’s just how it is when the gospel is preached. When you try to serve the Lord by witnessing to people, you are fulfilling your responsibility. But who knows how that word is received?

  We had an  evangelistic team from College as part of our 1987 Church centenary celebrations.
  One Saturday, we did some street outreach.
  Later, we gathered for a debriefing. One girl — call her Margaret — was devastated. She had shared the gospel with a woman who seemed interested, and pressed her to decide for Christ. But she refused.
  Margaret was very upset that the woman resisted the gospel.
  I talked to her, and it emerged that she was more than upset: she was ropeable! The woman had no right to resist!
  Margaret looked ready to punch someone, but I talked to her until she settled. Then I said, “Margaret, it is your job to tell the gospel, but whose job is it to convert people?”
  She sat there for a long time, then she said, “It’s the Holy Spirit’s job, isn't it?”

  Jesus is the great Sower. He calls us to sow alongside him. But the outcome is not in our hands. That is up to the Holy Spirit.

  On that Good News video last week, we heard from the wife of a converted criminal who is now a pastor in South Australia.
  She didn’t nag her husband: she prayed for him. She often wept, because her prayers seemed unanswered. But God directed her husband’s steps all the way, and he was responding even when she couldn’t see it.
  When she was pregnant, she couldn’t drive to church for a special service, so he drove her and sat at the back to wait to drive her home.
  And he heard the gospel and was converted.

  That’s how the sowing bit goes. But where does the word land when it is scattered widely across the paddock?

  Jesus says that there are four choices. The seed can land on the path. It can be snatched away by birds. It can land on the rocky place, or among the weeds. There are many ways that the seed can be lost. But there’s always the seed that lands on the good soil, and that is where you get the good crop from.

THE PATH

  At Fairfield Council, I was responsible for minor concrete works. If you wanted a driveway crossing or path paving in front of the house, or the gutter constructed, I was the man. I measured, I quoted, I wrote the specifications, and, where necessary, I designed the street and put in pegs for the construction gang to work to.
  One day I had to peg a driveway for a service station in Cabramatta. This was not a new service station. The existing entry had been well–compacted through years of traffic.
  My assistant was doing something else, so I tried to drive the survey peg in myself. I hit the hardwood peg with a sledge hammer, and it split down the middle.
  This sometimes happened if you got a faulty peg. I took out another one and tried to drive it in. Same result. Finally, I realised that I would only get it into the ground if I made a hole with a crowbar and filled around the peg once it was in!
  If you have ever seen really well-compacted gravelly soil, you’ll know what it is like. It can set almost as hard as concrete.

  It’s no wonder that Jesus described it as somewhere that seed would just lie on the surface and be eaten up by birds!
  Can I ask you: when God’s word comes to you, where does it land? Is the surface so hard that the seed lies there sterile? Does the word get snatched away without affecting your life? Every one of us must answer that question!
  There is hardened ground in my life. Sometimes the word falls where it fails to take root. Within hours, I have forgotten it.
  If there is hardened ground in our lives, we need to pray that the Lord will break it up, dig it over, manure it and make it fertile again, because the birds wait to snatch that seed from us. As the song says,

This may be the last time, children,
I don’t know.

  None of us ever knows what time we have.

THE ROCKS

  It doesn’t take a lot to see that a hardened path isn’t the ideal place for growing a crop. But there are less obvious traps, too.

  Chris loves camphor laurel trees, and I don’t entirely blame her. They are rather fine trees. But they are not the right kind of tree for Marrickville. If they can find a water pipe or a sewer, they will go for it.
  A while ago, Joan Oates gave us a camphor laurel tree. Chris got me to dig a hole in the backyard to plant it in.
  Did you know that where the manse is in High Street is the edge of the old Schwebel Quarry, where the rock for the splendid sandstone buildings of Sydney came from? So we have rock just about everywhere in the backyard. I imagine that the roots of that camphor laurel went down about a metre and struck solid sandstone. We have a bonsai camphor laurel in the backyard! In 8 years or so it has almost reached 1.5m in height. Anywhere else, it would probably be 3 – 5m high by now. It sprang up fine, but it couldn’t keep going.

  And that’s just like the seed that falls on the rocky ground. It doesn’t mean that there is no soil. It doesn't mean that the seed lands on bare rock, but it means that there isn’t enough cover for the word to get its roots established. Some of the seed grows, but is badly stunted, and doesn't achieve anything; some of it springs up and burns off as soon as the sun falls on it.
  Are you rocky ground for the seed to fall on? Are you like me, someone who can hear the word and accept it enthusiastically, but not let the word dwell in me richly? Do you come to church and say, “That word speaks to my heart,” yet, in days, it has faded from your mind?

THE THORNS

  When I was a kid and my father often planted out his tomatoes and beebleberries or whatever, I was never excited by the weeding bit.
  Because Stephen and I were home by 5 pm, we were the lucky ones who got that job. Watering was boring, but OK. Weeding was the pits. You do it bent over, on your knees, getting dirt under your fingernails. And that meant an encounter with the scrubbing brush later.
  If we didn’t pursue the weeding all that enthusiastically, we were found out. You know why. Weeds grow faster than anything else in the garden. Weeds overtook the garden plants. Then our job became worse. We had to weed without pulling up the plants. And, if we didn’t, the weeds killed the plants. I know, because there were often hard–to–reach bits of the garden beds where the weeds did beat the plants, where the little, struggling shoots died and disappeared among the more powerful weeds.

  Sometimes the seed of the word gets planted among weeds. The troubles of life seem set to defeat us. Conflict comes, and strife. The market slumps; accident, sickness or death strikes. When those things come, they can pile in until they crowd out the word that God has spoken into your life.

  The past 18 months have taught me a lot about this truth. Things I knew I should do in response to God’s word got crowded out by the circumstances of life.
  I should have been alert. My life has not been without its “weedy” bits in the past. We all have weedy patches in our own lives, where the seed gets choked out rather than finding the opportunity to spring up into eternal life.
  There are two solutions: assiduous, enthusiastic weeding as soon as you see even the smallest shoot of a weed growing up, or doing everything you can to ensure that the good plant grows faster than any weed.

THE GOOD SOIL  

  Jesus’ parable sounds like bad news all the way through — until you get to the end. That’s where the seed falls on good soil and yields phenomenal growth.

  Where we lived in Fairfield, we had good soil — if you dug it and weeded it and made sure that it was properly prepared. We lived at the bottom of a hill, not far from the river bank. My father used to say, “Just pour a glass of water on the ground and follow where it runs to: it will take you right to our front yard.”
  This meant that most of the good soil from up the hill had washed down over the years, and was in our yard, too.
  The area was vineyards when my parents were young, because the hillsides got the sun, and the soil was rich and deep.
  Anything planted there. As I said, even the weeds grew. When the gardening bug caught my father, we always had lettuce and tomatoes and... We even had peanuts one year. Lots and lots of peanuts. You wouldn’t think how good young, unroasted peanuts taste. You can eat them shell and all, just like eating snowpeas.
  When seeds reach good soil, crops are abundant!

SELF–ASSESSMENT

  Every life has different soils in it at different times. At one time, I was nearly entirely hardened pathway. I had no desire to hear God’s word or to respond to it. People who opposed the gospel told me it was not worth listening to. The birds snatched away the good seed. There are still, no doubt, areas where I am impervious to Jesus’ words to me. There are aspects of my life that respond with hopeful joy to God’s word, yet the enthusiasm wears out after a while. There are places where I am vulnerable, where the word is easily swamped by difficult times. And there are even patches of good soil.

  I challenge us all to assess ourselves.

  It is easy to assume that this parable speaks mainly to the world. Yet, when Jesus taught it, the world didn’t hear or understand. The people of Israel basically thought it was the ravings of a madman.
  Even Jesus’ disciples were amazed and perplexed. Jesus hadn’t taught this way before. But now he told them,

The knowledge of the secrets of the Kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them... that is why I speak to them in parables.

  If the people around him were mainly like the hardened pathway, Jesus still wanted his disciples to understand the rest of the teaching. Both we, and those around us, can be just like these different soils. Perhaps your great tendency is to take something on enthusiastically and then drop it after a short while. Or your great tendency is to be overcome by thistles.
  It is easy to think, “I have a patch of good soil where the word of God germinates quickly.” But what if that patch is as big as the backyard garden we had at Fairfield, but the rest of your life is a hardened pathway? What if you are choking in weeds, but are still able to feel good about a lovely chorus? What good is that?
  In the end, the measure is the crop. As Jesus said,

By their fruits you shall know them,

and

My Father... cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit.

  We met around the Lord’s Table earlier this morning, and we heard the words,

Let a person examine himself before eating of the bread and drinking of the cup.

  This parable is about soil. What type dominates in you? We are called to bear crops —

...a hundred, sixty, or thirty times what was planted.

  If you and I are not producing crops, let’s go to Jesus, the sower, and ask him to plough and break up everything to make us fit for his use.