Abundant Waste

The First United Presbyterian Church

“Abundant Waste”

Rev. Amy Morgan

July 12, 2020

Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea.

 2 Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach.

 3 And he told them many things in parables, saying: "Listen! A sower went out to sow.

 4 And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up.

 5 Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil.

 6 But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away.  7 Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.

 8 Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

 9 Let anyone with ears listen!"

18 "Hear then the parable of the sower.  19 When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path.

 20 As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; 21 yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away.

 22 As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing.

 23 But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty."

Edward Jenner sent small tubes of liquid all over the world, to anyone who would ask for or accept them. He wrote papers to medical journals, and when they were rejected and ridiculed, he published them himself. He spent months in London recruiting volunteers from every strata of society, and not one person stepped forward.

But out in the English dairy country, an 8-year-old boy named James Phipps had offered up his arm to be the first person to undergo the procedure Jenner would later call “vaccination.” Jenner inoculated the boy with matter from a dairymaid’s cowpox lesions. After experiencing some illness and discomfort, the boy recovered quickly. And two months later, he offered up his arm again. This time, Jenner inoculated him with smallpox.

This dreaded disease had devastated communities around the globe for centuries, killing thousands and leaving survivors with disfiguring scars and blindness. It’s difficult to imagine anyone allowing themselves to be purposefully injected with this disease. Especially a young child. It’s difficult to fathom what parent would allow this experiment to be conducted on their healthy child. It’s a miracle of sorts that James Phipps offered up his arm at all. But he turned out to be fertile soil in which Jenner’s vaccination hypothesis could take root and eventually produce a miraculous yield: an end to the plague of smallpox.

While Edward Jenner was not the first person to experiment successfully with smallpox vaccination, he was the one who sowed the seeds that would eventually lead to the eradication of smallpox from the human population. Like the Sower in Jesus’ parable, he flung the seeds of his theory and data from his experiments far and wide. And much of it fell on inhospitable soil. Many people just didn’t understand the idea. Others got excited about it, but when doubts arose or colleagues expressed skepticism, they walked away. Still others lost out on Jenner’s ideas because of the sheer volume of new medical information emerging in the late 18^th century.

But the story we tell today isn’t about the skeptics or the rejection. We don’t remember those who refused vaccination or opposed Jenner’s ideas. The story we tell is about the miracle of defeating a disease that plagued humanity for 10,000 years. The story we tell is about the man who sowed the seeds of that miracle, and the people in whom those seeds took root and continue to produce miraculous fruit.

It’s the same story Jesus told two thousand years ago.

Because we want to make everything that Jesus said prescriptive, we often hear this parable as an instruction to be good, receptive soil. Don’t be like the dry path or the rocky ground or the weedy area. Be good soil.

If you’ve ever given any effort to the task of gardening, you know that soil has no choice in what it is. It cannot make anything of itself. Soil is what it is, and it’s up to the gardener to cultivate it, prepare it to be life-giving.

Which makes the sower in Jesus’ parable sound rather foolish. He doesn’t prepare and cultivate the soil before carefully placing each seed at the right depth and spaced the appropriate distance apart in neat rows. He just throws it about willy-nilly. There’s some scholarly debate as to whether or not this was accepted farming practice in the first century, but the point is the same either way. This sower isn’t worried about waste. He isn’t exclusive in his distribution of seeds. We get the sense, though, that he knows exactly what he’s doing and what the outcome will be. Three-quarters of what he sows will amount to nothing.

And we could easily make that the focus of this parable. All the ways that the Gospel of Jesus Christ fails to take root and produce anything worthwhile. Many scholars argue that this is the point of the parable: to explain why so many people who hear Jesus fail to follow him.

We often make this the focus in our lives and in the church. We focus on the failures, analyze what went wrong, and put practices and policies in place to protect us from wasting any more resources on failed attempts. We demand a solid explanation for failure so we can do everything in our power to avoid it. We want to cultivate that good soil to ensure that our efforts get results, maximum yield, every time.

But I don’t think this is a parable about failure. This whole section of discourse in Matthew’s gospel is about the kingdom of heaven. Jesus tells parable after parable about what the reign of God looks like on earth. So if we re-frame our hearing of this parable with that theme in mind, we see that it can’t be about failure at all.

First, it is about the extravagance of God. The Sower distributes seeds to every kind of soil, not just the “good soil.” There isn’t any judgment on the inhospitable soils, just a sadness at the circumstances that inhibit growth in those environments. In God’s economy, resources are not reserved for maximum return on investment. Resources are extravagantly wasted so that they can be distributed to all, without calculation of the cost or return.

In this respect, Jesus doesn’t just tell this parable, he lives it. He spreads the gospel of God’s reign on earth far and wide, and much of it falls on deaf ears. And instead of reaping a bountiful harvest from the seeds he sows throughout Judea, it costs him his very life. On the cross, Jesus died for a world that didn’t understand him or his message, for people who would get excited about him and then betray and deny him, fall away and forget about him, and for people who would drown in a sea of competing truth and value claims. In the course of thousands of years, the seeds sown by Jesus’ death have fallen mostly on inhospitable soil. The cross cost Jesus everything. And in so many ways, Jesus’ investment of himself looks like a colossal failure.

So many people misunderstand, misuse, and malign the gospel. The Christian faith has been a tool of oppression, it has been wielded as a weapon or manipulated to undergird injustice. It has been watered down into self-help therapy or a gospel of personal prosperity. There are many reasons why people who have heard the good news of Jesus Christ still fail to follow him, even when we profess to do so.

But this is not where the story ends.

Some seed falls on good soil. Not soil that has made itself good. Not soil that becomes good because it has received the seed. By no means other than divine grace, some soil just happens to be good.

And the sign of God’s kingdom on earth is that this good soil manages to produce a harvest of miraculous proportions. A great harvest might produce seven or tenfold. Thirtyfold would have been a once-in-a-lifetime event, enough to feed an entire town for a year. Sixty or a hundredfold would have been a fantasy.

But this is what Jesus promises will come from those few seeds that fall on good soil. Not only does God sow with extravagant abundance, God reaps with extravagant abundance, too. The harvest that is produced by just a few seeds, that by divine providence find themselves in good soil, is enough to more than make up for those seeds that never produce.

The reign of God is not sown and grown through demographic studies, polling, or carefully targeted marketing campaigns. Churches, businesses, and political campaigns are grown that way. But that isn’t the way Christ’s body, God’s economy or the reign of God works. God’s new creation is sown and grown through radical, seemingly wasteful, extravagance. And it results in abundance.

As humanity faces another devastating, world-wide pandemic, it is easy to focus on what isn’t working. We are tempted to want to focus all our efforts on carefully planned, vetted and cultivated efforts to defeat it. But it will require a lot of wasted efforts to arrive at a final solution to this new challenge. Scientists world-wide are building on the efforts of Edward Jenner in the development of a safe and effective vaccine. Doctors are experimenting with a variety of treatments to make the virus less lethal. And public health workers are encouraging us to change our behaviors – washing our hands more and wearing masks, social distancing and staying home when we’re sick – to help slow the spread of the virus.

Many of these efforts may be for naught. Only a third of vaccines that make it to clinical trials end up receiving FDA approval. Many trials fail because they can’t recruit enough volunteers to be test subjects, enough of those James Phipps-types to grow the knowledge and data needed for a new vaccine to be fruitful. As we learn more about the virus, we may learn that treatments we’ve been using aren’t the most effective. We may discover that our public health efforts are inadequate to slow the spread or that we just can’t get enough people to cooperate with them to make them effective.

But all it takes is a few seeds falling on good soil to produce a miracle. And that is why we will hold out hope, no matter how long this lasts, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how many failures we observe, no matter how hopeless things seem.

Right now, much of the world around us, many of us ourselves, are feeling dry and broken and overwhelmed. It’s hard to imagine anything new taking root and bearing fruit. But the reign of God is still breaking in all around us. There is still good soil, and it will bear good fruit. It will bear enough for all of us.

This is God’s world, and we see that in each and every miraculous harvest. In each and every scientific development that advances the health and well-being of life on this planet. And in each and every person who gives themselves away in extravagant, graceful, wasteful love, who doesn’t calculate the cost and return of their relationships, who casts their gifts not just in those places guaranteed to bear fruit but also into places that are dry and broken and overwhelmed.

So as much as we might be tempted to conserve our efforts, or to focus them on those people and activities that promise guaranteed results, we are called to witness to the reign of God on earth. We are called to trust in and proclaim God’s abundance, even in the face of what looks like failure or scarcity, spreading good news into dry, broken, overwhelmed places. We are called to share God’s reckless, radical, wasteful love, knowing that most of our efforts won’t yield discernable results. And we are called to celebrate the miraculous harvests when they arrive.

Because our story, God’s story, doesn’t end in failure.

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.