What sort of sowers should we be?

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Jesus “told them many things in parables, saying, Listen! A sower went out to sow.” Listen! Jesus says.

A parable is a story, but it’s a special sort of story. It’s not a history, or a memory, or even a morality tale. It’s a story that tells you something about God. And it never has just one meaning.

A sower went out to sow. That’s how Jesus begins. He doesn’t tell us the man’s name, or where he lives, or anything else about him. He’s just a man with a bag full of seeds. And as he walks, he scatters the seed.

Some of it lands on the path, where it can only rest on the surface. The birds eat that. Some lands on rocky ground, where the soil is thin. That seed grows fast, but there’s nowhere for the roots to go, and it withers away. Some seed falls among thorns, which choke any new growth before it can reach light or water. And some seed falls on good soil, where it brings forth grain, thirty, sixty, a hundred times what was sown.

I’m a terrible gardener, and I’m definitely not a farmer. But even I know that this is no way to plant a crop. Seeds cost money. You don’t scatter them every which way without paying attention to where they might land. You prepare the soil. You check the weather. You make sure fragile new plants have water and the right amount of shade.

But Jesus’s sower ignores all that good advice. He sows his seed in the most unlikely places. On the path, on rocky ground, among thorns.

Jesus explains the parable himself a few verses later. The seed is the word of God’s kingdom, he says, and the soil represents human hearts. Some hearts are hard, some are shallow, some are distracted, and some are ready for new growth to take root.

The next question is obvious: what kind of soil is in our own hearts?

It’s a question worth pondering. But it’s not the question I want to ask this morning.

Because a parable never has just one meaning. And I’m more interested in a different question: what sort of sowers should we be?

A few minutes ago, we sang a song based on a prayer attributed to St. Francis. “Lord, make us servants of your peace.” I’ve known the words for years, but I only noticed this week that the hymn’s prayer is about a sower, and about the sorts of seeds we choose to sow.

“Where there is hate, may we sow love... where all is doubt, may we sow faith; where all is gloom, may we sow hope; where all is night, may we sow light; where all is tears, may we sow joy.”

The prayer is about a sower — and it’s about a sower who is just as wastefully extravagant in choosing places for seeds to go as Jesus’s sower is.

So where does the hymn’s take on this parable send us out to sow?

It sends us to places of hate, sowing love. Because what is hate but a footpath where little can grow?

It sends us to regions of doubt, sowing faith. And isn’t doubt a sort of rocky ground?

It sends us to all the dark, gloomy, thorn-riddled places of the world, sowing hope, and light, and joy.

And then there’s this: Unlike the parable in the Gospel of Matthew, the hymn we sang this morning skips the good soil entirely. There’s no verse that says, “where there is love, may we sow a little more love.” Or “where there is faith, may we offer gentle encouragement.”

Instead, every line of the hymn points us towards difficult soil, to ground any sensible farmer would walk past.

Of course, God isn’t a farmer. In nature, seeds ride the wind, and drop from birds, and land wherever they land. Most come to nothing. But still the earth turns green. God has been sowing seeds against terrible odds since the beginning of the world. So maybe it’s not so strange to suggest that we should too.

Our job, it turns out, isn’t to figure out the most sensible plan for planting the fanciest, most carefully-chosen seed in the very richest soil we can find. The sower’s job is to sow. The sower’s job is to sow the way God sows, with wild generosity, with foolishness, with abandon.

What grows, grows. Our job is to sow.

We won’t have to go looking for hard ground. Whether we seek it out or not, we’ll find ourselves in places of hate, and fear, and doubt, and gloom, and sorrow. And in those places, God will call us to sow love, and faith, and hope, and joy.

Listen! Jesus says. A sower went out to sow. And so must we. Most of what we plant won’t grow. But some will bear fruit and yield, “in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

Lord, make us servants of your peace.

Make us into sowers who are as generous and as foolish as you are.

Cover image: Tissot, James, 1836-1902. Sower. Via http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_-_The_Sower_(Le_semeur)_-_James_Tissot_-_overall.jpg. Online Collection of Brooklyn Museum; Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2006.