I Samuel 15: 9-12; Mark 4:26-34

The Great Sower

Last week we talked about power seen and unseen.  We learned that the Bible teaches us that God prefers invisible power to work in our lives.  We learned that soft power can have more impact than hard power.  In today’s text Jesus tells the parable of the sower and it has a lot to do with the Biblical idea of power.  A person sows and then gets up at night impatiently to see if the seed will grow, so excited and nervous is this grower.  Effortlessly Jesus transitions to the parable of the mustard seed: the humblest of seeds will grow into a great big tree to give people shade.   Friends, what if we were to take this parable as far as we could and see God as the One Who sows seeds?

When I was sixteen I had a chance to visit the US for the first time and one of the places I wanted the visit the most was California.   A barely sixteen year old boy in 1972 from Cold War Europe looks at the world a certain way.  There were a few impressions that stayed with me.  One was driving through New Mexico and Arizona and feeling like a pioneer and then suddenly the lights of San Bernardino County appearing and then feeling disappointed that so many people had gotten to California before me.  The second was the high diving board at the old hotel in Arowhead Springs where I almost messed up my back for good.  Then there was the shock of walking across the border into Mexico where you could ten walk from the wealth of San Diego County straight into the slums of the Third World in Tjuana. Then there was the Golden Bridge and finally: the Monsanto Pavilion in Disney Land.  What a modern company that must be I thought.  But what company was it?  It took me about 30 years to find out, because you don’t hear much about them.  Well, it turns out Monsanto has a near monopoly on the agricultural seeds in the world. They have great hybrid seeds that are resistant to disease, but they also have forced the world to buy there seeds, thereby limiting seed diversity which could be disastrous. This is what I heard. I’m not an expert.  Friends, we forget how crucial seeds are for the worlds.  Jesus obviously understands that.   Maybe the idea of the seed is crucial in understanding the mind of God.

Let’s take the universe.  It turns out the building blocks of the universe are surprisingly simple.  Positively charged protons will attract negatively charged electrons which will go into orbit around them. That’s where we get hydrogen.  Karl Giberson (Christianity century, June 16, 2015 p, 21) writes:”

Everything that has happened from the moment 13.7 billion years ago (i.e.the Big Bang) until now was an expression of just four kinds of interactions: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear (…enables nuclear fusion) and weak nuclear (..produces radioactivity). Every event in the long history of the universe, from the formation of the first atom, to the explosion of a distant star, to the recollection of a childhood memory, to the purr of a cat, was and is controlled by these four interaction and the simple rules they are constrained to obey. “ He explains that slowly hydrogen balls turned into stars, producing the first-what we would call it- sunrise.

Chinese thinker Chuang-Tzu once asked:”Who governs this? Who maintains this? Who, without acting, pushes and makes this move?”

Friends, what if we were to think of the creating God as sowing these simple elements of the universe until the universe became ever complex and the mind of people developed so much that they were able to conceive of machines a million times more powerful than the human muscle and a million times faster there the movement of a finger; until the human heart grew so much that it was able to love without seeking its own survival?   What if God works that way: from protons all the way to human love?  So God picks the shepherd David to become the greatest, yet deeply flawed, leader of the Hebrew people,  thereby sowing the seeds for the future of the nation.  Is God not always sowing something, something that may grow or may not grow, depending on the reaction of the people in their environment?

Buddhist monk Matthieu Picard, sons of a well-known French philosopher has just published a book called “altruism.”(interview with Tavis Smiley, KVIE, June 2015).  He argues that altruism is in our self-interest, even though economists tell him otherwise.   He is sowing an idea that is not strange to us, but may still sound a bit naïve.

Friends,  if God is the great One Who Sows, as Creator, as compassionate liberator, as Holy Spirit,  then perhaps we too must sow and maybe that’s the logical implication of what Jesus is saying. Perhaps you and I are here to sow, sow kindness, goodness, compassion, social justice,  faith, hope, love etc.   If this is true then the question of the Church and of this congregation becomes not: how do we maintain what we have, but what will we sow? May God give us wisdom.