How’s It With Your Soil?

If you travel to Upstate New York, north of Albany and into a town called Saratoga Springs you find an incredibly cool town that was very much built around thoroughbred horse racing, and the town where my dad grew up. But if you can make it even a little further north of that wonderful town, you’ll find yourself driving up into the Adirondack Mountains, into a small town called Corinth. Corinth is where my grandmother was raised. Right between those two towns is a whole bunch of land that was once owned by my great grandmother’s family. Like a whole lot of land. Many many years ago it was where they farmed.

On that stretch of land now stands the most majestic of places. A place that I experienced God in a lot of ways. Where I walked endless miles alongside of my dad and my grandma. Carved into the side of the Adirondack mountains is “Brookhaven Golf Course.” There was really just nothing quite like going out there in the middle of August and hitting a golf ball 130 or so times with a few generations of equally dismal golfers. They were all much more proud of their tennis abilities. But none of that really mattered. We were there, together, connecting with the land, with the soil, that held the history of our family. It is still, to this day, good good soil.

We’re trekking our way through the Gospel of Luke together this summer, and today we find ourselves is Luke Chapter 8. What we’ve been looking at over the past several weeks in our series “Follow Me” is the radical lifestyle that we are called to when we are asked to follow Jesus, and what the marks of a life of apprenticing under Jesus looks like.

We started our journey by looking at the stone cold fact that only a small fraction of people who claim to be Christians are actually living a life that would qualify as “following Jesus.” And we took a little inventory of our lives to just get a reality check of whether or not we are being shaped more by Jesus or by the other influences in this world. Last week then, we looked at how the life of following Jesus calls us to see others in a new way, as God’s children — no ifs ands or buts about it.

Today we are going to be looking at how following Jesus invites us to a life of listening, learning, and understanding.

Today’s text begins in

Luke 8:4–15 NRSV

When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: “A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew, it produced a hundredfold.” As he said this, he called out, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” Then his disciples asked him what this parable meant. He said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that ‘looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand.’ “Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away. As for what fell among the thorns, these are the ones who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.

This is one of the very rare instances in which Jesus explains a parable — or story — that he tells. If you’ve been around the church for any length of time I’m sure you’ve heard some kind of teaching on this parable. But if this is all new to you, the teaching is pretty clear.

There’s someone out spreading, or sowing, seed. This is a pretty common practice in Jesus’s agricultural society. Basically a farmer would go out into their field and sow seed pretty indiscriminately prior to then plowing the ground in order to get the seed down into the soil.

Now we can look at the sower as God, most obviously. If the seed is the word of God, and God is sowing the seed, we take comfort in this truth that God is spreading God’s word indiscriminately. But the sower is also us, Jesus’s followers who are charged with doing the same. So I guess that’s our first question — are you sowing God’s word (God’s truth, goodness, and love) without condition?

And then we’ve got 4 different types of soil. The path, the rocky soil, the thorny soil, and then the good soil. And these all are referring to the state of a person’s heart.

Typically this is where the interpretation of this text really gets personalized to however a certain strain of theological thought wants to explain why some people get this whole Jesus thing, and why some people don’t. There’s lots of options, we won’t get into them all. I’ll just give you the reason that I think they are probably wrong.

I think they are wrong because they all equate the soil to being something a person is, rather than something a person has. Let me say that again.

The soil is not something you are. The soil is something you have.

Growing up in Upstate New York as the descendants of farmers meant that my family was really interested in gardening. Which was something that was very easy and natural where we came from. You could take a shovel to the ground just about anywhere and turn over rich, dark, beautiful, silty soil. You could honestly just put stuff in the ground and it would thrive until that first frost.

But when my parents landed in Eastern Pennsylvania, they learned that gardening wasn’t quite as easy of a task. Long gone were the days of rich, dark, beautiful, silty soil. Now their reality was dense, rocky, clay. You put a shovel into the ground in the greater Philadelphia area and you are flirting with a stinger through the hands. Not ideal. Under the top two or three inches of good soil was just endless rocks.

Now I ended up following this path that was like a mash up of my family’s love of growing stuff and my own love of the golf course. For a number of years I worked in residential turf grass management, which is how I ended up in Florida. But when I worked in Pennsylvania I would be tasked with trying to make people’s lawns look good, despite the fact that Pennsylvania soil isn’t ideal for growing much.

This was particularly difficult to do in new construction neighborhoods, which our sales department LOVED to target. You see developers would do this thing where they would scrape off those top few inches of good soil before constructing a home. And then never put it back, unless you bought it. Which no one ever did. And then they would spread this really poor quality contractor grass seed over the property that was mostly weeds.

And we would go out and kill the weeds and put down some fertilizer but the lawn would just be this rocky patchy mess. Then the sales guy would say oh you need to buy a seeding. And then we’d go seed the lawn. And it wouldn’t take. Because of the rocks and the weeds that would just continuously spring up and compete with the grass seed.

Does this all sound familiar to Jesus’s Parable yet? This is real life stuff. Now, what I knew and what all of my coworkers knew, was that these homes were never going to have a lawn like they saw on TV, unless they did something drastic. Something that they didn’t want to do. They wanted to take the easier softer way and just put some chemicals and seed down and fix the problem. But the problem was that they just needed… new soil.

They needed to start over. To invite a big old dump truck to come and dump some rich, dark, silty soil on top of all that rocky mess, to spread it over all that patchwork of grass and weeds, and then watch as new thick healthy grass grew, year after year, once they spread seed into that good good soil.

I think this is the point that we often tend to miss when we read Jesus’s story. Remember, we have soil. And some of us in this world have been given less than adequate soil. Some of us have hard sandy desert soil. Some of us have thorny rocky south east Pennsylvania soil. But what we all need is some of that upstate New York soil.

And this is the good news… we can always bring some new soil in. Just like across the street, in that garden that used to be a parking lot. The soil we have doesn’t have to be permanent. The condition of our heart is not a permanent state. It can be softened and it can be hardened just the same.

What Jesus wants us to be is persons who have good soil, hearts in which the word of God is planted and in which the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control are able to grow in abundance year after year after year. God wants us to have a heart in which the deep abiding love of God grows so abundantly that we are perfected in love.

And so my question for you is — how’s it with your soil? What’s the deal with your heart? Do you have good soil that is able to hear the Word of God? Is your soil able to produce the fruit of love by listening to, learning from, and seeking to understand God and others through their experiences and stories? Do you have soil that is open to being corrected, changed, and moved in new directions?

Or if you’re honest, is your heart filled with the rocks of resentment towards people or ideas? Is it infested with the weeds of worry and doubt about whether God is really good and if God’s way is really what’s best for your life. Is your heart hardened by hurt — an impenetrable wall that won’t allow anything good and beautiful grow?

There’s good news. You can bring some good new soil in that will soften that heart and create a space that allows the way you live and love to change forever. But sometimes the new soil isn’t the most convenient way.

We want to just sprinkle a little prayer and scripture reading in, like those homeowners wanted me to just throw a little fertilizer and seed and hope for the best. And over the long haul maybe that could have worked. But that would have been a lot of wasted years with rocky, weedy yards.

What we all need to do is to invite a truck to come and spread something new. And we do that by reorienting our entire lives around Jesus. Everything thing that we do needs to be oriented towards the pursuit of following Jesus — which has it’s end goal of “doing what Jesus did.”

WWJD or “what would Jesus do” was the motto of 90’s youth group Christianity. I don’t know why we stopped asking that question. Maybe because we asked, but then never got comfortable actually doing what Jesus did.

But here’s the deal. Being a person with good soil that is oriented toward Jesus means that we live a life that does what Jesus did.

It means that we actually love our neighbors — all of them — like Jesus loved his neighbors.

It means that our public witness is in line with Jesus’s public witness and less allied with one side of a culture war or another.

It means that our political witness is more concerned about Jesus’s kingdom than the kingdoms of party politics.

It means that our business practices and consumer practices reflect Jesus’s practices rather than only satisfying the bottom line.

It means, well it means that we do a lot of things that don’t feel natural. Until they do. Because the seed has done its work in the good good soil of our hearts.

If following Jesus was easy, a lot more people would do it. But you and me, I think that when we follow Jesus, people will see that it’s worthwhile. And maybe they’ll order up a nice truck full of soil to spread across their hearts as well.