Scripture texts: Isaiah 55: 8-11, Matthew 13:1-23
I remember my first job: flipping burgers at McDonalds. It was the summer of my freshman year of college and somehow I managed to dodge the whole “work during the summer in high school” bit, but either way, I was home from Tech, bored, and broke. So I got a job.
Now it’s a good twenty four years later and I still remember precisely how to make a McDonalds hamburger. Toasted bun, burger patty, one squirt each of ketchup and mustard, one pickle (two if they were small), and a dab of those nasty reconstituted onions. I remember that because we were trained to put those precise portions on each and every burger. I remember that because I then proceeded to make thousands of them over the course of my stint as a McDonalds employee.
Those directions were so precise because, at the heart of it all, that was how McDonalds made their money. If you put too much on each burger, it would increase the overhead and cut into the company’s profits. Most every business is that way: lower costs (in the case of McD it was portion control) in order to maximize gain. That’s capitalism, folks.
We, of course, live in a capitalist society. It is the heart of our economic system and, as a result, we have a tendency to think about a lot of things in life in capitalist terms. Cost-to-profit ratio. Is it worth my time, energy, and money to do this thing or to support this cause? Is it wasteful? Is my money, resources, or time going to best and most efficient use in this thing?
Americans don’t like to lose. And while that’s true in a competitive sense, we also don’t like to lose money. We don’t like to lose time. We don’t like to lose energy. We want the most bang for our buck. If we’re willing to put in, we want to get the most out of it as possible. That’s capitalist thinking, and there are places where that’s a good thing. Businesses in our society do not survive if they are not mindful of how much they are spending versus how much they are making. Too little profit or not enough will sink them. A family must be mindful how much income versus expenses is going, lest they end up in over their heads financially.
But there are also places where it doesn’t work as well. Politicians, for instance, often rail against government waste, although it’s interesting to note their distaste is often rather selective. A Republican will complain loudly about waste in the social safety system, while ignoring waste in the defense budget. A Democrat might do the opposite. So their outrage often proves rather politically convenient and more than a bit hypocritical.
But another place where it doesn’t work very well is the church. Yes, churches in the United States are run, after a fashion, like businesses. We have budgets, allocations. We receive income in the form of donations and we have programs that we support through those dollars. And we are trying to make a profit, but it is not one of dollars and cents. Our purpose is to serve God and neighbor, to spread the Gospel, to help those in need, and often times those purposes are rather intangible. You cannot account for them as a line item on a budget sheet. But that hasn’t stopped us from trying, often to our detriment and to the detriment of those very purposes.
Our first lesson is from the 55th chapter of Isaiah’s prophecy and it sums up nicely the core of the problem here. “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” God declares. “My ways are not like your ways.” God has a different measure of cost, profit, success, failure, risk, pretty much everything and to try to understand him in human terms often brings us up short.
Which is a big part of the reason why Jesus’ parable of the sower, our Gospel lesson today, makes no sense. A sower goes out to seed and he just throws that stuff everywhere. He throws it on the rocks, and in the path, and to the birds, and a small handful lands where its supposed to, but the rest is just wasted. Wouldn’t it make more sense if the sower actually aimed for the good soil? Wouldn’t it make more sense he spend all his time and resources on that instead of just throwing it out there haphazardly?
Well, yes, if we were trying to understand Jesus’ point from a human perspective. But there’s a problem. Yes, a farmer can tell by studying whether soil is good or bad. But can you tell by looking that a person’s heart is good or bad? Can you tell by a short conversation with them if your proclamation of the Gospel is going to sink in? No? Well, there’s our problem.
And because we have this problem, we tend to do one of two things. The first is that we hoard the seed, waiting for that moment when we think we’ll find the person or person on which we can have the maximum impact. The end result is that we now have churches for whom the word “evangelism” has become scary or even dirty. Churches that do not proclaim because, for various reasons, it is seen as a waste of time. It’s not profitable enough. More human thinking.
In Philadelphia when I was in seminary, there was a pastor (his name was Simmons, I believe) who on the day he began his call, he pledged to knock on the door of every home within one mile of the church in order to invite that family to come to worship. And he did that. It took him ten years to accomplish that goal. Ten years of bicycling around that neighborhood, knocking on doors. He got something like 1% of those households to come to worship.
Ten years of work for just 1%? Talk about inefficient. Talk about a waste of time. Right? Well, within 1 mile of that church there were something like 10,000 homes. Do the math. 1% of 10,000 is 100 families that joined the church. A church the size of ours, with maybe 20 to 30 families to start with. Doesn’t seem like such a waste of time now.
The other thing we do is that we target only the people who are like us. Same race, same age, same economic status, and so forth. We presume, perhaps without entirely thinking about it, that these people are the good soil or at the very least the only good soil we can reach.
There is an old anecdote told in the church. One Sunday in the 1960s, church was filled to the brim. It was a good Sunday. So much so that a young hippy that wandered in couldn’t find a place to sit. So, doing what hippies are known to do, he plopped himself down right in the aisle.
What a scandal! This young person with weird clothes and long hair with sense of decorum, sitting down right the middle of the room. There are chairs and pews for that, you know, and if there isn’t any room, then just go elsewhere.
Well, the murmurs went on through the worship service until one of the ushers, an elderly gentleman in his 80s walked down the aisle and somewhat gingerly sat down right next to the young hippy and worshiped with him. The pastor got into the pulpit and immediately discarded his sermon notes, saying “It wouldn’t matter what I would preach right now, because there is no Gospel I could declare greater than what you just witnessed in the aisle of our church.”
Good soil isn’t always where we think it is. And sometimes it takes what we might consider wasteful effort to plant within it. But that’s by design. God wants us to scatter the seed everywhere. He’s the one who knows where the good soil is, not us. And he’s not telling, because it is about him not us. He wants us to realize that what sends out comes back to him.
And it’s not numbers. It’s not money or wealth or success as we humans might define it. It’s lives changed. It’s sin forgiven. It’s death undone. You can’t measure those things. And it’s not just their lives that benefit from God’s deliberate silence on where to find that good soil, it’s ours too. We gain immensely when we step outside our comfort zones, when we dare risk to spread the seed of the Gospel as far and as wide as possible. We grow tenfold, hundredfold in ourselves and in our faith. And as the seed sprouts in ourselves and in others, what grows is the Kingdom of God. Amen.
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