Sunday Sermon: Casting Seeds and Trusting God
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Text: Mark 4:3-9
Series: “Jesus’ Parables and the Mystery of the Kingdom”
Years ago, when I first started out as a pastor, the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention introduced me to something called the Annual Church Profile. That profile was, for all intents and purposes, a scorecard of a church’s performance over the past year, which was to be turned into the state convention, which then sent it on to the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention so that the denomination might know how churches were doing in term of baptisms and missions dollars contributed and attendance in worship and Sunday School. Those statistics were in turn printed in the respective state Baptist newspapers so that everyone could see how their church stacked up against other churches in their community or even their state. Needless to say, it was the perfect vehicle for creating friendly competition between otherwise cooperating churches and for raising the anxiety level of their pastors, who spent many a sleepless night over the sluggish performance of their congregations and how that sluggishness reflected on those pastors.
The Annual Church Profile is still very much around, and we turn it in each fall. The statistics are also still compiled and published for all to see. It’s just that nobody pays as much attention to them anymore, and for good reason. Such statistics give us Baptists the impression that we are in some way responsible for the results of our ministry efforts and if we would only try harder or work smarter or motivate one another more inspiringly, we’d see more growth in all the numbers.
I am not against growth. By now, that ought to apparent to all of you. And I’m not against hard work or smart work or inspiring motivation. I’m not even against counting numbers. But over the course of time, I’ve come to see that all God calls us to do is to live out the Gospel, the good news of Jesus, focusing on our faithfulness to that calling and leaving the results to Him. Such is one of the points Jesus was emphasizing in his Parable of the Sower, which I like to term the Parable of the Foolish Farmer.
Most of you are familiar with that parable. But have you come to hear it from the standpoint of the man who goes out to sow his seed, sowing it in a way that makes it appear that he has no idea what he is doing? Let me explain.
The fourth chapter of Mark’s Gospel introduces the largest block of teaching material in Mark’s telling of the Jesus story, a Gospel that is otherwise known for its action-orientation. And even then, Jesus’ teaching takes place in a kind of rapid-fire fashion so that the crowd who hears it has a hard time staying up with Jesus’ stories and his disciples beg for more detailed explanation as to what these teachings mean.
Notice how this parable is bracketed by a command to listen. Jesus does so to help his audience understand that when he bids them to listen, he’s talking about much more than physical hearing; he’s talking about life application. He’s talking about living the word. He’s talking about not letting such important instruction go in one ear and out the other.
“Listen,” Jesus tells them. “A farmer went out to sow his seed; and as he was scattering his seed,” which is the point where we begin to see that this farmer is of a different ilk. He isn’t your better than average farmer. Why do I say that? A smart farmer would be careful where he sows his seed. A smart farmer wouldn’t be sowing his seed into less than ideal soil. Yes, a smart farmer would understand that all sowing involves some loss; that’s inevitable. Not all seed comes to fruition. But a smart farmer would make sure that he’s not sowing his seed into areas that promise no chance for a harvest. He wouldn’t be scattering his seed; he would be strategically sowing it.
No, this farmer is not a smart farmer; he’s a foolish one, because he does nothing more than throw his seed to the wind. And look what happens. Some of it falls along the path, where the birds swoop down and eat it up. Some of it falls on rocky places that have little soil. It springs up in those rocky places, but when the sun comes up, the plants get scorched and they wither because they have no roots. Some of the seed falls among the thorns, and as the thorns grow up they choke out the plants that grow with them so that the plants bear no grain. You hear this story and you say to yourself, “What was this farmer thinking?”
But then something happens that takes your breath away. Some of the scattered seed is blown by the wind so that it falls into good soil, where it comes up, grows, and produces a remarkable harvest. Even the best farmer in Jesus’ day would have expected at best to get a sevenfold harvest, but this foolish farmer gets much more than that. He gets thirtyfold; that’s astonishing. He gets sixtyfold; that’s unheard of. He gets a hundredfold; that’s head spinning. So, where did such a harvest come from? “He who has ears to hear,” says Jesus, “let him hear.”
You see, it wasn’t the farmer who produced the harvest. No farmer produces a harvest, even the smartest of farmers. It was God who smiled upon the farmer’s folly and brought the unimaginable out of something that should have produced much, much less.
Do you see the point of the parable? God only expects us to be sowing the seed of the Gospel. God doesn’t expect us to try to figure out where the good soil is. None of us has that ability. What appears to us to be good soil often turns out to be hard and rocky and thorny, where what appears to be a hopeless dead end turns out to be fertile and rich. No, God only expects us to cast the seed and then to trust Him with the results.
Are you familiar with the poem by Elizabeth York Case, titled “There Is No Unbelief?” The title is a bit misleading. After all, there most definitely is unbelief in this world. But that’s not her point. Her point is that certain actions in life show the depth of our faith, and none shows that depth more than the planting of a seed. Here’s how the poem goes:
There is no unbelief;
Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod
And waits to see it push away the clod
He trusts in God.
We sow. We plant. We scatter. We trust God for the results.
Do you remember the story of Johnny Appleseed? That was his nickname. His real name was John Chapman. Born in Massachusetts in the late 1700s, John set out for what at that time was the pioneer west, Ohio and Pennsylvania, casting apple seeds everywhere he went, hence the nickname. As the story goes, many of the apple orchards in the American Midwest stem from the seeds that Johnny Appleseed scattered.
Two things about Johnny Appleseed’s story I find interesting. One, many in Johnny Appleseed’s day found him eccentric, unusual, and more than a tad foolish. That probably doesn’t surprise you. But the second thing might. He was also a missionary. He was a person of deep faith who saw his scattering as a way of giving witness to his love of creation and the God who was behind it. “Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod and waits to see it push away the clod. He trusts in God.”
Do we trust in God? If so, then we won’t so much be an obsessive concern over the results we’re generating as much as there will be a constant readiness on our part to scatter the good news of Jesus everywhere life takes us, casting Gospel seed and trusting in God to bring the harvest. While there may not be a place on any earthly Annual Church Profile to account for such obedience, there will be in heaven, the place where God’s harvest will be gathered, thirtyfold, sixtyfold, one hundredfold in which there will also be a place for you and for me.