Well, is the seed still on the path? Is it lying among the rocks? Are the thorns choking it? Or is it bearing fruit? After five days of deep engagements with gardening metaphors, where do you place yourself in this story tonight?

We’ve spent all week talking about being seeds that are “Sown in the Heart of Christ.” And yes, in some stories, we’re the seed; but tonight, we’re the soil. The seeds are “the word of the Kingdom.” The Good News alive and among us. The divine logos, the Word incarnate: the Christ, Jesus. God is the sower, and God has scattered Christ everywhere, throughout the entire world, and in each of our hearts.

I don’t know how much hands-on experience you may have had with gardening. I’m certainly no master gardener, but I have had one experience of sowing seeds.

Four years ago, my wife Christy and I looked and saw that our backyard was dead, dead, dead—except for a bunch of pesky weeds, of course. We were planning to have a child, and we wanted a plush green lawn to play on. So we tried scattering new grass seeds on our existing lawn. But the entire lawn was compacted, like a well-trodden path, and no grass could possibly grow there. Our seeds were wasted.

In this parable, the seeds that land on the path are eaten by birds. Jesus says the birds represent “the evil one,” snatching away “what is sown in the heart.” Doesn’t that sound hopeless, as if there’s nothing we can do to stop Satan from getting the better of us?

I doubt that very many of us here today feel we’re the path. Those of us at EYE are not immune to the Word being planted in us. But I bet we all know people who might say, “God? Church? Jesus? Bah! What a bunch of superstitious crap.” And we may be genuinely concerned about them and want to do something about it. Well-meaning Christians often make the situation worse by aggressively evangelizing these “path people”: “Just read the Bible! Then you’ll believe!” They act frantically and anxiously because they care, unaware that God’s Word won’t take root this way. I’m not saying you shouldn’t share your faith. When the news is this good, how can we not share our faith? But I am saying that you should never act as if another person’s salvation depended solely on you.

See, if humans are the soil and not the seed, the most important fact here is that the birds cannot snatch people away—just the Word, and just for now. Human beings cannot be destroyed; they can only be kept from their ultimate purpose for a little while. In other words, when the evil one snatches God’s Word from your heart, that’s not the end of the story. It can’t be. Because, as our presiding bishop reminded us: with God, there are no disposable people!

After the new grass in our backyard failed to grow, we decided to plow up our entire lawn before trying again. We rented a rototiller, one of these huge pieces of digging equipment that gives you a good workout, because once you get it going, you have to steer it carefully. We tilled our backyard to a depth of six inches. Next, we rented a gigantic metal roller and rolled the lawn as flat as we could. We scattered bags and bags of grass seed, and then a truck backed into our yard and dumped a gigantic pile of compost by the gate. We had to move the compost with shovels and spread it as evenly as possible over the entire lawn.

God will do the same. If there are seeds on the path for now, who knows? It may be that God is trying to judge which soil is useless in its current state—why dig it up if you don’t have to, right? So pray for the path, that God may someday get out the holy rototiller.

Now, how about those stones? We have a strip of gravel on one end of the lawn. I don’t know why it’s there. We’ve talked about getting rid of it and extending our lawn to cover it. But we would need to pluck out the rocks, do some milder rototilling, and use lots of grass seed, compost, and water. You see? Being among the rocks isn’t much better than being part of the path, because just a little bit of good soil often isn’t enough.

You may be able to relate to that kind of soil, especially if your life feels chaotic and troubled … if you really want to live for Christ, but you don’t have a support system, so your soil isn’t deep enough to allow roots to grow. I sure felt like this when I was a participant representing the Diocese of Northern Michigan at EYE in 1990 (you do the math). I had just graduated from high school and was about to leave a healthy root system behind … and that terrified me!

Are you the thin soil among the gravel? Are you in need of rototilling? That might hurt. But it’s the only way to become good soil. Pray for God to help you remove the gravel and grind up your soil as deeply as is necessary to grow the Word in you.

Now for the weeds. Have you ever dug up a large dandelion? It leaves a deep hole in the dirt. The grass doesn’t grow back there; instead, another dandelion seed wafts down into the hole and starts the whole process over again. The only way to break this cycle would be to plant new grass seeds where each dandelion had been. But I’m usually too sore from pulling the dandelions to go to all the trouble!

Our lives can get like that. We want to hear and live the Word, but the weeds get in the way. The weeds might be a busy schedule; relationships that are less than helpful; circumstances that make us anxious and frantic; or most likely, as Jesus suggests, an overabundance of money and possessions.

Like last week, when the faceplate on my car stereo conked out. Now, I love my mp3s, and I rarely drive without them! So I took the faceplate in for repairs. One week later, I was told they can’t find any record of me having bought the stereo there. I commuted in silence for an entire week before the store even noticed there was a problem!

So I’m angry with the store for losing my information, I’m angry that I might have to pay for the repairs if they can’t dig up my service plan, and … well, it actually takes effort to step back and realize that driving without music for a couple weeks isn’t the worst thing that could happen in my life. You see? It’s a weed. It’s not the situation that’s the problem; it’s my anxiety about the situation.

So I’ve resolved to spend at least a few minutes of each silent commute in prayer. God knows I don’t do much praying when my mp3 player is plugged in.

If we spend all our time thinking about the things we want but don’t yet have, or trying to clutch tightly to the good things and situations we have been given, the Word cannot grow in us. Are there dandelions in your life? Dig them up! And in the hole that remains, pray for God to plant more seeds in you—as many as it takes to overcome those pesky weeds.

Four years after our rototilling adventure, our lawn is in much better shape. We really gave it our all, and I’m proud of that accomplishment. There are patches where grass isn’t growing, and of course, the dandelions get more numerous every time we take a vacation. Overall, though, it’s a good lawn. Our daughter Sarah, who is almost 3 now, loves to play in it.
And do you know where the grass is thickest? Right by the gate, where the truck dumped the compost. Because no matter how much compost we moved around, that one spot got the best dose of it. Do you know what compost is made of? That’s right—waste products. Rotting food, decomposing things, manure. God uses all the crap in our lives to fertilize our soil. If you’ve ever buried a beloved pet in your garden, you know that’s where the plants grow best. We reseeded our entire yard during a time when I was unemployed and desperately in need of God’s rototiller in my soil. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

You know, you really can’t categorize the people of the world into four types of soil. In fact, I have been all four types of soil … and I will be again. When God offers me hope in a hopeless situation, I can react in a number of different ways. I can refuse to believe, stopping up my ears with compacted dirt. I can get excited about new possibilities at first, but then get scared and give up. I can start down a path of redemption but get sidetracked by trivial things like my broken car stereo. Or I can let God do all the tilling that is necessary to make my soil fruitful.

When we get out of the way and allow the seed to grow, it produces the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, self-control. These are not self-made accomplishments, the kind of things you put on a resume; they are the natural result of our becoming more human. We don’t bear fruit by “getting things right.” We bear fruit when we are free from worry and can truly be ourselves. I don’t think it’s much of a puzzle that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. He was fully divine because he was fully human, and vice versa! Jesus destroyed the wall between humanity and divinity.

To bear fruit is to experience abundant life in God’s garden. God wants us all to become fruitful, and I, for one, don’t believe God will fail. God wants us to be happy. That doesn’t mean feeling blithely good and unaware of the evil in the world. That state of innocence ended in a garden, in the cool of the evening, when we ate a different kind of fruit. We wanted to be like God. So now we have lower lows and higher highs. We can be happy in spite of all the evil—happy because no matter how many weeds there are, God is planting new seeds today in every kind of soil, including yours.

In closing, one of my favorite mp3s happens to be by a band from New Braunfels, Texas, just 34 miles from here. Ever heard of Sixpence None the Richer? Their song “Love” contains these lyrics:

The harvester is near / His blade is on your skin
To plant a new beginning / Well then, let the cut begin/ Let the cut begin.