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| ISBN-13: | 9781426727627 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2010 |
| Series: | Protestant Pulpit Exchange |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 275 KB |
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What Are You Waiting For?
Sermons on the Parables of Jesus
By Mark Trotter
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 1992 Abingdon PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-2762-7
CHAPTER 1
Listen! A sower went out to sow. [And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds jell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen! Matthew 13:19, 18-23
The Sower
I try to live my life efficiently. I order it rationally, put everything in its proper place, schedule my activities systematically. My goal is to "plan my work and work my plan." I find that it is easier to do that while pulling weeds than when running a church. I start at one end of the garden and systematically work my way down to the other end, eliminating every weed in sight. When I finish I stand up, look back, and proudly say, "Well done, good and faithful servant." It's hard work, but when I'm finished I have brought some order into an otherwise disorderly world.
There are other areas of life where efficiency pays off. Henry Ford discovered the profitability of efficiency and transformed American industry with the assembly line. The assembly line was simply the application of rationality to the process of production. The process was divided into units, each unit given a task, and the work force divided correspondingly. The final product was an automobile produced with the maximum speed at the minimum cost.
Efficiency probably reached its zenith with the McDonald's hamburger. The same method was applied. The process of making a hamburger was analyzed rationally, the elements isolated, down to the actual arm movements, the number of steps, required to assemble a hamburger for a customer. A few seconds were saved here, and a few there. The result was a low cost meal served in the minimum amount of time. McDonald's is an amazing success story, and it can be told as the story of efficiency.
Efficiency in America has become so important that there arises a social class called "managers" who can go into any organization and run it efficiently. They assume that the rules of efficiency are universal. It doesn't matter what the organization is, what its purpose is, or what it produces—the principles are similar and universal.
Almost. There are some limits to rational management. H. L. Mencken said, "There is an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible and wrong." Which fact I discovered when I became the father of a family of four small children. It was then I came to see that the rational model of the world may have some limitations. Robert Capon describes children as gifts to us to remind us that beneath the rational orderliness that we impose on the world, there lies a primordial chaos. "Whatever order I was able to bring into my house was like a ripple on the surface of a vast ocean, and beneath it, in the depth, remained an unfathomable mystery."
Robert Capon, himself the father of six children, described what happened in his household at mealtime. After the grace, the table became chaos, a frenzy of noise and movement. He finally shouted, "Quiet!"
It's a pretty negative approach, but it works. In the shuffling stillness, the hint of order comes again. I quote them St. Paul on the subject of pots talking back to the potter. (I remind them that they are civilized. They are not a mob, and therefore, manners are expected.) The older ones agree. I am encouraged. Then the youngest knocks over a glass of milk. Down toward me it races, like a flood across the land. I jump up and back, but over the edge it pours. And I am hit, right trouser leg below the knee. It's the third time this meal. My largesse is nothing next to the cataract of milk she has produced in three short years. And my inventiveness is small. She has spilled it backhand, forehand, sidearm, elbow first. She has upset glasses with her head, her feet, her shoulders, her knees, her rump, her belly, the middle of her back. And with an endless variety of time and circumstance. Upon thick tablecloths yielding a white swamp which spreads ominously toward us all. Upon plastic tablecloths for a high velocity attack. I can remember only one successful escape from milk on plastic. I nearly broke the chair to do it. She has spilled it before, during, after meals by commission and by omission and with enough broken glass to rival the divine scattering of the hoarfrost.
During those years of early parenthood, I would return to that passage in Capon's book for perspective. It reminded me that efficiency is an arbitrary structure that we impose upon the surface of existence. In fact, it can be done only by circumscribing some fragment of experience, such as assembling automobiles or making hamburgers, and imposing it there. But other areas of life will always defy rational analysis and organization. The more human beings are involved, the less it works. The more you try to make human beings conform to some rational model, the more damage you do.
Sometimes in counseling he will say, "She doesn't understand reason." Or she will say, "He thinks he is so rational, why does he do such dumb things?" I tell them, 'The first thing you have to realize is that you are not married to a rational being. You are married to a human being, who has rational capacities to a lesser and greater degree, but who, beneath the surface, is emotional, irrational, sometimes crazy, and always a mystery. You are living with a human being, and treating her as if she were a hamburger just isn't going to work."
I would say that where things really matter, such as in human relationships, it doesn't work at all. Love works there. Nor in overcoming adversity. Hope works better there. Nor in understanding the hard questions of life. Faith is what will work there. If you try to impose a rational model on those areas of existence, you will end up frustrated and probably angry.
In Judith Guest's novel, Ordinary People, there is a marvelous description of the father of a family. His two sons are involved in a boating accident in which one son drowns. The incident devastates the family. The surviving son lives the rest of his life with guilt. The mother covers her grief with busyness. The father sinks into despair. He is described in these words:
He had left off being a perfectionist then when he discovered that no promptly kept appointments, not a house circumspectly clean, not membership in Onwentsia, or the Lake Forest Golf and Country Club, or the Lawyers' Club. Not power, not knowledge, not goodness, not anything, cleared you through the terrifying office of chance. And that it is chance, and not perfection, that rules the world.
Those who believe they are rational beings can organize their lives efficiently in some areas of their life, sometimes with spectacular results. When all experience does not respond to rational ordering and understanding, they resent it, and end up in bitterness, guilt, or despair.
We can order existence rationally to a degree, the way we can push back the sea a little with a dike, or stop a river for a while with a dam. But beyond the boundaries reason constructs there is disorder, mystery, and even chaos. And sometimes that other world seeps from under the dike, or during a storm overflows the dam, to flood our lives with absurdity. When that happens there is nothing we can do except let it recede. Our technology can't control it. Our reason can't explain it. Our efficiency can't contain it.
The Parable of the Sower addresses this dilemma. Matthew has interpreted the parable to answer questions raised by the early Church. Namely, if Jesus is the Messiah, then why isn't everybody converted? If the Kingdom of God is here, why doesn't the world look like it? Why hasn't the Church been more successful in its mission?
Those hard questions were demanding an answer, and Matthew used The Parable of the Sower as an answer. He recorded the parable as Jesus told it (Matthew 13:39), then interpreted it for his situation (Matthew 13:18-23). That's why there are two versions of The Parable of the Sower in the thirteenth chapter.
Actually, Matthew's interpretation (13:18-23) turns the parable into an allegory where each type of soil represents a certain type of person. It was an appropriate application for the parable to the first-century Church, making sense of their situation, and giving the Church hope. It is not as helpful for us. So we will follow Matthew's example and interpret the original parable (13:3-9) for our time.
One meaning of the parable is found by seeing yourself as the sower. Let the seed that is broadcast widely represent your effort to live a meaningful life in this world, the things that you have tried to do, our labor at making a living, or raising a family, your investment in doing something worthwhile with your life. Those deeds are like seed that you have sown, some of which succeed and some of which don't. Sometimes the seed falls on good ground. Sometimes it falls amidst the rocks and the thorns.
The parable calls you to be realistic. You win some and you lose some. You experience victory and you know defeat. You have good days and you have bad days. One day life gives, the next it takes away. In other words, you can control what you do but you can't always control the results of what you do. Sometimes, no matter how hard you work, no matter how sincere you are, no matter how efficient you are, you are not going to succeed. So do your best. Sow the seed and leave the rest to God.
That's one simple message of the parable. But implied in the parable is this question: If life is that way, why do you persist in expecting success from all of your efforts? There is nothing in your "contract" that guarantees you success. In fact, there is no contract at all. Porky, in the "Pogo" comic strip, put it perfectly to Churchy La Femme after listening to him for four frames complain about the condition of the world: "Shut up. You are lucky to be here in the first place." When you begin with the assumption that life offers no guarantee of success, then maybe you can see that what you have is not necessarily the results of your efforts.
The parable is trying to get you to see your life in a new way. It does not explain why things go wrong, why there are infertile, unproductive soils. In the Bible, evil isn't explained; it remains a mystery. The parable assumes that some things will go wrong. Not all the seeds will take root. That's the way life is.
Therefore the question could just as well be, Why do things go right? Don't ask, Why is there evil in the world? Or why is there so much injustice in human events? Ask, Why do some things succeed? Where do good things come from? Not from our ability to guarantee success. Not from our efforts at efficiency. Our efforts are like sowing seed, inefficient. Some fall on good soil, some on bad. Some things in your control will fail, other things will succeed. And sometimes, beyond our imagining, and always beyond our deserving, some seed will take root and grow. That's the point: You are the sower, that's all. You can do only so much, and you will succeed only so often. God is in charge of the rest.
Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest and theologian, spent a year in Bolivia and Peru. In an interview he talked about what he learned about himself.
I came to realize there that being a Western, Northern person, you always want to do something, you always want to have a plan. You see problems and you want to change something. We have a very structured kind of thinking. Well, when I got there I soon realized if I wanted to approach reality that way I might as well give up. When I walked from the church to home, which was twenty minutes up the hill over a sandy, dusty road, the little children would come up to me and take me by the fingers, literally, so that I didn't have any free fingers left. They climbed all over my body and they were always around me, looking at me, playing with me, playing ball around me. They were telling me something: they were giving me a sense of "This is the day the Lord has made; let us celebrate; let us be glad; let's just be aware of each other." They were indirectly unmasking my illusion of wanting to do something big; they kept laughing and playing and telling me something about life that I didn't know. In the midst of all the misery and hunger and difficulty there was a life-giving reality.
The Parable of the Sower indicates that there is a life-giving power beyond your power. To be a Christian, to be a person of faith, is to trust that though you aren't in complete control, there is a power in this world that is. No matter how hard you try, you are not going to be able to bring order into mystery. You are not going to get rid of chaos. You are not creator. You are a sower of seed, that's all. Some will fall on good soil, and some will fall among the thorns and the rocks. So do your best, and trust the rest to God.
CHAPTER 2'The kingdom of Heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in His field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, "Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? 'Where, then, did these weeds come from?" He answered, "An enemy has done this." The slaves said to him, "'Then do you want us to go and gather them?" 'But he replied, "No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, 'Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'" Matthew 13:24-30
The Wheat and Tares
A farmer who discovered weeds among the wheat in his field said, "An enemy has done this." I wonder what that means? I am not aware of having any enemies myself. An enemy has done this? Is that a clue to this parable?
As was the case with The Parable of the Sower, The Parable of the Wheat and Tares appears in two versions. First Matthew records Jesus' original parable (Matthew 13:24-30), then converts it to an allegory to interpret it for that church's situation (Matthew 13:36-43). As an allegory, the good seed refers to the sons of the kingdom; the bad seed equals the sons of the evil one. The sower is the Son of man; the enemy is the devil. The harvest is the close of the age; the reapers are the angels. The allegorical interpretation spoke to Matthew's congregation, and it could make sense for your situation, but we will go back to the original parable (13:24-30) to find a message for our time.
A farmer is meticulous about his farming. He tries to be the very best farmer that he can. He has a good field in which to work. He sows the highest quality seed, rents the finest equipment, and works hard. In other words, he does everything right. He lives the kind of life that is supposed to produce dramatic results. If the world is fair at all, and if fairness has any meaning at all, then this farmer is exactly the kind who ought to prosper and succeed.
But on the night that he completed the sowing of his high quality seed in this perfectly plowed field, with the contours, geometrically pleasing to the eye, like a Grant Wood painting, while he was sleeping an enemy sowed the seed of a weed in his perfect field. It was done so expertly, so cleverly, that it was not discovered until months later when the workers reported the presence of weeds among the wheat.
A weed in the Middle East, called "darnel," looks just like wheat in the blade. It is indistinguishable as a weed until the ear and the full grain appear. By then it's too late to do anything about it, because the roots of the darnel will have intertwined with the roots of the wheat, so you cannot pull out one without pulling out the other. So when the servant asks, "Do you want us to pull out these weeds?" the master says, "No, let them grow. When the harvest comes both the wheat and the weeds will be cut down and then they will be separated."
The first fascinating insight in this brilliant parable can be gained simply by looking at the context. Matthew 13 is loaded with parables, many of them parables of growth. The Parable of the Sower is placed before this parable; the Parable of the Mustard Seed immediately follows. Both are parables of growth, proclaiming that God is in charge, not us. As any good farmer knows, there's only so much you can do, and you have to leave the rest to God. Sandwiched between the Sower and the Mustard Seed, two parables of growth, is The Parable of the Wheat and Tares, obviously bearing the same message.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What Are You Waiting For? by Mark Trotter. Copyright © 1992 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,1. The Sower Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23,
2. The Wheat and Tares Matthew 13:24-30,
3. The Mustard Seed Matthew 13:31-32,
4. The Buried Treasure Matthew 13:44-50,
5. The Lost Sheep Matthew 18:10-14,
6. The Laborers in the Vineyard Matthew 20:1-16,
7. The Wedding Banquet Matthew 22:1-14,
8. The Wicked Servant Matthew 24:45-51,
9. The Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids Matthew 25:1-13,
10. The Talents Matthew 25:14-30,
Notes,