1 “Receptive Hearts” A Sermon delivered by Rev. W. Benjamin Boswell at Myers Park Baptist Church on July 16, 2017 Proper 10 from Matthew 13:1-23 On a cold and snowy Sunday in February, the local pastor opened up the church and began to prepare for worship. Sadly, to his dismay, only one person arrived at church that morning, a farmer from the village. The pastor said, “Well, I guess because of the weather we won't have a worship service today.” But the farmer replied, “Pastor, I can’t believe you’d cancel worship after I came all the way here in the cold and snow. If only one cow shows up on the farm at feeding time, I still feed it.” “You're right” replied the pastor, “We should proceed with the service.” Inspired by the farmer’s dedication, the preacher preached like he’d never preached before. He preached his entire manuscript and beyond. He preached from Genesis all the way through Revelation. After the service was over he stood at the door, shook the farmer’s hand, and said, “Thank you for coming to church today. What did you think of that sermon?” The Farmer thought for a minute and said, “Well pastor, if I go out to feed the cows and only one shows up, I still feed it, but I don't feed it the whole load!” Our text this morning, from the gospel of Matthew, includes the story of a farmer who went out to sow seeds. Matthew tells us Jesus told this story to a great crowd of people who gathered around him in the town of Capernaum near the Sea of Galilee. The crowds on the beach were so great that Jesus had to get into a boat to teach them and, when he did, he taught them using a series of parables. What is a parable and why did Jesus use them? The range of answers are endless. Scholar C.H. Dodd famously said a parable is “a metaphor drawn from nature or common life that arrests the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application.” Likewise, early church father, St. John of Chrysostom, argued that parables cannot be explained literally, for such an approach will only lead to absurdities. Some claim Jesus taught in parables “to reveal hidden truth,” others “to obscure the truth,” others “to teach one truth,” others “to teach many truths,” others “to undermine the truth of the world in order to liberate the Truth of God,” and others say, “all of the above.” All the while, the true purpose of the parables remains a mystery. The parables of Jesus are seemingly simple stories that always seem to defy simplistic explanations. Even when Jesus himself offers an explanation of a parable, as he does in our text today, it leaves us with more questions than answers. It is almost as if parables were being used by Jesus to disrupt, disorient, and then to reorient his audience. Sometimes the primary audience was the disciples; sometimes it was the Pharisees, scribes, and authorities; sometimes it was the crowd, and the audience matters. In any form of communication -- speeches, books, marketing -- knowing your audience is critical to conveying your message, and Jesus knew his audience well. He developed stories based in the contextual reality of people who were living with their families in the rural agricultural society of first century Judea. Jesus told stories about laborers and land owners, farmers and seeds, workers and masters, fathers and sons, weeds and wheat, feasts and weddings, coins and sheep, judges and widows, friends and foes, © 2017 W. Benjamin Boswell 2 tenants and talents, foreigners and travelers—relationships and experiences that common people in those days would have had on a regular basis. But Jesus’ parables were not like Greek comedies, Shakespearean tragedies, or Aesop’s fables. They do not offer us heroes and heroines or tragic figures who are simply the victims of circumstance. You cannot read them and then ask, “What is the moral of this story?” To do that is to miss the point. Parables are a form of prophetic speech that paint a picture of the world the way it is and, at the same time, offer people a vision of the kingdom of God—or should I say, the economy of God. Agriculture was the foundation of the 1st century economic system. There were landholders who owned the land and leased their property to tenants who farmed the land using laborers. Farmers then sold the livestock and produce they grew at the market, but they were required to provide the landowners with the majority of their profits. It was basically a 1st century form of feudalism. Land and wealth went hand in hand. The owners prospered. The farmers scraped by if they had a good harvest. And the laborers suffered in poverty, barely earning enough to feed themselves, let alone their families. This was the economic system in which Jesus proclaimed the new economy of God. Why wouldn’t you want to live in the new economy of God? If you were a laborer or a farmer, it would have sounded like an incredible opportunity. The economy of God was the opposite of the economy that they were living in. It was a topsy-turvy, upside down, revolutionary economy where the last were first and the first were last, the least were greatest and the greatest were least, the poor were lifted up and the powerful were cast down, the hungry were filled and the rich were sent away empty. Why wouldn’t you want to be a part of that if you were a farmer barely scraping by or a laborer struggling to put food on the table? Maybe that’s why the crowds that followed Jesus were so large; they were filled with farmers and day laborers looking for a better world and hoping for a more just and equitable future. Given the socio-economic situation at the time, you can imagine how attractive Jesus’ message must have been. His message was literally good news for the poor and liberation for the oppressed. It’s easy to see why those in political power who owned the land and were holding the purse strings on the current economic system would have seen Jesus as a threat, but it’s hard to understand why anybody on the bottom rung didn’t immediately follow him. Far too often, Christians have overly spiritualized Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom—the economy of God—disfiguring it by turning it into an evacuation plan—a pie in the sky eternal life insurance policy that involves saying you’re sorry for your sins, asking Jesus into your heart, and punching a one-way ticket to heaven. For many today, this is what it means to receive the good news. The problem with infusing the teachings of Jesus with this very modern view of salvation is two-fold. First, it divides body and soul from one another and assumes that salvation is only for our souls and not for our bodies. Second, and more importantly, why would any Jew—particularly a Pharisee who fervently held to the doctrine of the resurrection, care about securing eternal life when they already thought they had it! Most Jews in the 1st century believed in the resurrection. Why would they care about Jesus if he was only selling eternal life? No, Jesus was offering something far more compelling. He was offering everyone, young and old, male and female, rich and poor, abundant life for body and soul right here and now on earth in the new economy of God. © 2017 W. Benjamin Boswell 3 Yet, the wild thing is that people still rejected it—even people whom the current system was oppressing, like farmers and laborers. It was in their best interest to turn to live in a new economic system, and yet many people turned it down. Why? Check out the parable of the sower. This is Jesus’ way of describing the reality of the world—why some get it and others don’t—why some receive his message as good news and join in the economy of God and why others don’t. There was an extravagant farmer who went out to sow seed with reckless abandon. She was careless, imprudent, and lavish in the way that she scattered the seed. She did not cast it in well prepared soil, in a nice clean row, ten to twenty inches apart. She threw it everywhere and it landed all over the place. Some landed on a path, some landed on rocky ground, some landed among thorns, and some landed on good soil. However, regardless of her prodigal and impetuous distribution, the farmer is not the problem and neither is the seed. The central question of the parable is the soil and its receptivity. How will each kind of soil, ground, land, or earth respond to the seed? Will it receive it or will it reject it? The soil is a metaphor for different kinds of people and the many ways people respond to the economy of God. The seed along the path that was eaten immediately by birds, are those who hear of God’s economy but do not understand; and something unholy comes and snatches away what was sown in the heart. The seed on the rocky ground that springs up quickly without depth or root and is scorched and withered by the sun, are those who hear of God’s economy and initially receive it with joy, but cannot endure when difficulty, trouble and persecution arise.