“A scatter-gun approach”

By Rev. Michael Stonhouse

Meditation – Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Mark 4:1-20 (Forward, p. 46) CEV p. 1030

Somehow I had never noticed this before, namely the fact that the sower in today’s parable scattered the seed willy nilly, without even the least thought or concern about where it was going. By the standards of today’s precision farming, he would make a very poor farmer indeed. In fact, with today’s GPA guidance and carefully aligned seeders and sprayers the possibility of either seed or spray going astray are greatly reduced.

However, the sower in today’s parable doesn’t seem to care about this even a whit. He lets the seed fall where it may, leaving the response entirely up to the hearer, here represented by the four kinds of soil. The sower doesn’t know what the response will be, neither does he care.

Much of this seems to fly in the face of how we today do our preaching and evangelism. We carefully try to ascertain what our audience might be and then try to tailor our message, our appeal, to that particular target group. Yes, even in our preaching we do that. If we have a congregation of sixty or seventy plus people, we just naturally call up symbols, stories or incidents that connect up with their life experiences. And with a young audience, we do that same. It just seems natural to do so, a ‘no-brainer’, you might say. And, when it comes to evangelism, we sometimes are so careful, so particular, in our planning and preparations, in wondering how to reach a particular audience, that we simply never get around to doing it. We certainly at not at all like the sower in our story that simply trusted the process, simply trusted that ‘things would work themselves out.’ (Now, in saying this, this is not to rule out planning or preparation, but simply to caution ourselves about overdoing it.)

There is one other thing inherent in the story that we often miss out on. We somehow assume that the four kinds of soil, representing four kinds of people, or four responses, are something fixed, static and unchangeable. That once hardened or shallow or cluttered (or even receptive) they will always remain that way. But the reality is that people change and that those people who we might have originally written off as seemingly unresponsive, might actually change their minds and become open to the message. Returning to the world of our parable, that is exactly what took place: the sowing happened first, then the plowing, which meant that everything changed henceforth. The hardened soil might have been broken up, the shallow soil deepened, and the weeds of the cluttered soil uprooted. In other words, one never knew for sure just what might happen once the plowing was finished! And so the sower didn’t try to prejudge the results but simply do his or her job of distributing the seed, the word of God, to all comers.

What this says to me is that we today should do likewise. We should avoid prejudging people or prejudging the results. And we should sow the seed, the Good News of God, whether by word or by deed (by whatever means we can lay our hands on), and leave the rest, the reasons, up to God. Amen.

Forward notes: “Listen! A sower went out to sow” (verse 3).

“One summer day, I was walking on the sidewalk in my neighborhood and saw a small buttercup flower growing between the cracks of the cement. I have sedum plants that have volunteered between the stones of my patio wall; they bloom every year. I marvel at how the buttercup in the sidewalk and the sedum between the stones defy the odds and bring unexpected beauty.

“In this parable, God is the sower. God knows where the good soil is. Instead of placing seeds only in the good soil, essentially guaranteeing growth, God liberally casts the seeds across the soil. The seed falls on rocky soil, soil filled with thorns, a shallow path, and good soil. Why isn’t the sower more careful with the seeds? Why not plant them carefully in the good soil and guarantee a harvest?

“Jesus explains to his disciples that the four types of soil represent four ways people may receive the word. If God is the sower and the soil is humankind, I believe that God casts the word as wide as possible knowing the good soil will bear fruit, and there just might be a buttercup among the thorns.”

Moving Forward: “Throw some wildflower seeds on a patch of dirt.”