Rethinking the Parable (mark 4: -34)

Being a Christian who believes that the kingdom of Heaven is something that we are charged with building here on earth is risky business.  It isn’t fun.  It isn’t comfortable.  And it isn’t easy.  My friend Alex once lamented that as a pastor he sometimes worries that if he  preaches what the Gospel really says and teaches , his church would get smaller and not bigger.  And I think that what he was getting at was that sometimes because we feel that we’re part of the in-crowd as far as church goes, that when we do read scripture like the one we just did, it’s super easy to fall into one of two sermon categories for this piece of scripture:

You see, Sometimes when I prepare for sermons, I go and read what other preachers have done with the scripture.  Sometimes It’s quite interesting.  Not for this scripture.  The sermons I read fell into two categories:  The What soil are you sermons where about 50% of the time the preacher  tells us we aren’t necessarily rich soil in order to challenge us.  And the This guy is a bad farmer sermons where we’re reminded not to judge others because we never know where a seed will take hold. We either assume we’re good soil because we’re here or that we’re the ones going out sowing the seeds.

Yet, as I’ve been studying this parable of the sower specifically and thinking about how to put it in context for this week, I think if we fall into one of those two sermon types, we may be missing the point.  I don’t think this parable has much to do with us.  It has to do with the kingdom of heaven.  And while we’re a part of that kingdom - or are supposed to be a part of it - we aren’t the focus.  The Kingdom is the focus.  It isn’t telling us who we are as much as it’s telling us what kingdom people are like.  And the hope is we become kingdom people.

Now, I don’t know much about farming - ancient or modern.  My dad grew up on a farm.  I served a farming community in Virginia. As a kid we had a vegetable garden. And that’s about as much expertise on the matter as I have.  But what I do know is that a farmer makes a living by planting things and having them grow.  I know. I’m really smart.  And the farmers I’ve known have been very careful, very precise people because so much can go wrong.  You have to plant at the right time.  You have to rotate crops to cycle nutrients into the ground at the right times.  You have to have just the right amount of water - not too little and not too much.  You have to harvest at the right time.  They monitor and worry and adjust because farming is a fickle business where so much of what you depend on is completely out of your control and if things go wrong, you can end up losing the income that you need in order to survive.

In Jesus’s time this was even more true because land was precious, taxes were outrageous, and everyone had a quota they had to meet or they were in serious trouble.  It’s one of the things that changes the nature of the story about sons dropping everything they’re doing to follow some weird rabbi when you realize that if a fisherman didn’t catch a certain amount of fish, he’d be penalized through the roof and could lose everything. This was even more true with farming.  Herod liked to build things and in order to do that, he needed land. One of the easiest ways to get land was to confiscate it.  So if you didn’t meet your quota of crop-growing, you were going to lose the farm literally because you would be taxed and penalized beyond recovery.

What I’m getting at is something you’re free to disagree with me on.  But I don’t buy that a farmer would haphazardly scatter precious seed on the road, rocky ground, or soil that wasn’t almost obsessively tilled and cared for.  Too much was at stake.  It would be like if I asked you to take a quarter of your year’s salary and give it to a Nigerian prince, take another quarter of it and invest in some real-estate my buddy promises me is golden in Florida,  then let me take yet another quarter of your annual salary to Vegas because I think I have a surefire way to beat the house at the roulette table, and then you can take the last quarter to make a reasonable investment.  If that sounds good to you and it sounds like it makes sense, see me after church, I’m sure I can catch a red-eye to Vegas tonight and I promise I’ll be back by Friday.

So yes, I do agree that this guy in the parable is a bad farmer.  When Jesus told this story, people must have thought it was absolutely absurd that a farmer would do that.  Did people scatter seed back then?  Sure.  Did they do it willy-nilly like this guy making three quarters of it fall on bad ground?  I’ve never met a farmer in their right mind that would.  The land equalled life in a very literal way.  So, why on God’s green earth would Jesus say that the kingdom of heaven is like this?  Why would he start his teachings on the Kingdom like this?

I think it’s because Jesus knew what he was asking of the crowd and the disciples and what he was asking of us.  Let’s say these are seeds of faith.  Let’s just go ahead and take that for granted. The seeds are the Word and the Word calls us to live differently right?  What are the characteristics of a good person of faith?  Integrity.  Character.  Generosity. They’re  Compassionate. Empathetic.  Righteous. Trusting.  Open.   We hope that someone of faith is a good person.  And what do some people call a generous, good, trusting person who tries to have integrity?  Well some people call them naive.  Or a good mark.  Or Someone who can easily be taken advantage of.

My Aunt Barb once called me out of both concern for me and to yell at me for not taking my wife with me because she got an e-mail that was supposed to have been from me that I was alone and stuck in Cancun or someplace and desperately needed money to get back home.  She had enough sense to check with me first before sending money - which she would have done in a heartbeat because she’s a generous, good, trusting person. I was safely at home in Munster with my wife.  If I had been in Cancun without my wife, a lack of money would have been the least of my concerns.

And I think that Jesus knew that the life he was calling people into, what he was asking people to do, and how he was asking them to live their lives meant that often times they would get burned; that people would take advantage of them.  What’s that saying? Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness?

And what Jesus was saying, I think, is that even if 75% of the time you get burned or taken advantage of, or just outright used, you don’t give up, you don’t give in, and you don’t sacrifice who you are or what you believe to be right because the other 25% of the time it’s going to pay in dividends far more than what would make up for the times you get taken.  I had a mentor who would always say keep your side of the street clean.  Worry about how you handle and react to a situation and not the other person.  You can still be a good person and do the right thing even if someone else isn’t.  I believe parents phrase it as if your friends all jump off a bridge, would you?  Just because other people are going to be selfish and self-interested, it doesn’t mean that we have to be as well.  And that’s certainly a risk and a sacrifice. Maybe even more so in today’s world.  Selfish people try to take advantage of Selfless people.

I think that what Jesus is saying is that the Kingdom of Heaven is made up of people who are willing to be thought of as suckers and naive in order to be faithful, good people and disciples of Christ.  I’ll be honest with you.  I’m pretty much an open book.  I start from a place of trust.  I trust people.  That’s where I start with most people - from a place of trust.  Even with people I’ve been warned about not to trust.  I’ll trust you with my thoughts and my feelings, And I’ll trust that I can tell you things in confidence.  And that means a lot of times I’ve been burned by people. They’ve broken that trust. And it hurts every time it happens.  Betrayal is a terrible thing.  My dad once said trust is the hardest thing to earn and the easiest thing to break and I’ve often lived in the reverse of that.  I trust easily.

But I’ll tell you, for as much as I’ve been burned, there are friends, true friends that I’ve made that I wouldn’t have otherwise if I hadn’t started from that place of trust.  And some of them have been the deepest, most meaningful relationships of my life. And to make even just one friend like that, to have even just one relationship like that is worth having been burned a thousand times to me.  And I think that’s exactly what Jesus is saying in this parable.

That the kingdom is made of people who are willing to risk losing greatly in order to find something deeper, more real, and longer lasting because that’s what makes it worthwhile. The kingdom is made up of people who will go to bat for others even when it means they gain nothing and may even lose just because it’s the right thing to do.

The kingdom is made up of people who will act with integrity and honesty in a roomful of cheaters and liars because kingdom people know that we don’t have to sacrifice who we are just because they sacrificed who they are.  The kingdom is made up of people who insist on being selfless in a world that preaches and promotes selfishness because kingdom people know that true fulfillment is better than temporary happiness. The kingdom is made up of people who love wastefully and freely knowing theres a very real possibility that 75% of the time it won’t be returned because kingdom people know the power of that love to transform.  Because there are times when that love is freely given and returned. And when that happens, it yields far greater rewards than any loss or deficit could ever take away.

So may you be a kingdom person who some see as naive but God sees as faithful.

May you be a kingdom person who risks in order to live a life of fulfillment and true joy.

And may you be a kingdom person who loves openly, honestly, and wastefully because it will always yield more than what can be taken away.