Tag Archives: sower

The seed: An earthy story from Jesus (2016)

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Spiritual direction, , ,

In 2016 I was an itinerant, moving among our congregations with basic teaching about developing a life in Christ. This one is about the “earth” stage when faith first takes root.

Dates harvested from Hannah, pollinated by Methuselah at the Arava Institute. Photo by Marcos Schonholz

First, let’s talk about the seed that grew this date palm in Israel. This is a Judean date palm that you would have seen everywhere in the time of Jesus. But there was so much war in Palestine during the Roman era that date palm groves were destroyed and this species became extinct by the year 500.

But an amazing thing happened. During excavations at the site of Herod the Great’s palace near Jericho in the 1960’s, archeologists unearthed a small stockpile of seeds stowed in a 2000-year-old clay jar. For the next forty years, these very old seeds were kept in a drawer at a university in Tel Aviv. But then, in 2005, a botanical researcher decided to plant one of the seeds and see what, if anything, would sprout.

She said, “I assumed the food in the seed would be no good after all that time. How could it be?”  She was soon proven wrong. The old seed from an extinct palm sprouted! The resulting tree has been named Methuselah. It has been eleven years, now, and the tree is not only thriving, it has produced pollen, which has been used to germinate seeds on a wild date palm. It is producing more seed.

Jesus probably loves that story — and not only because he was in Jericho many times and had to pass Herod’s palace on the way up the hill to Jerusalem. I think he loves it because God loves seed stories. God is very earthy. For instance, just before Jesus was crucified, he pictured himself as a seed. Everyone read it: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:14)

That’s a great way to see a seed – as something that dies to its former way of being as a single, encased seed and transforms into a plant and a seed bearer. God is very connected to how the earth lives. Like you heard a couple of weeks ago, our rendition of the Way of Jesus begins with Earth because God begins with the earth. The creator is earthy, God even became one of us – God got buried in us, got buried in the earth, God has experienced all the longing and loving of being a spiritual being in a body like ours as part of the Earth.

Talking about seed

I hope I can get you comfortable with how Jesus is talking about seeds. In the earth, in your body, in your spirit and not just in your mind. I am going to talk about a word, but if you just hear it like it is a word “seed” on a page, I will fail. The word will be truly extinct. I am talking about Jesus talking about a word like a seed, a Spirit-empowered, miraculous transformative seed.

Jesus and the Bible writers are very comfortable with talking about seed. Like I said, He probably loves that story about an ancient seed in a scientist’s drawer that miraculously comes to life. And he has some favorite stories he made up himself. Jesus tells a very basic parable about the sower and the seed he sows. You might remember it: A sower goes out to sow and the seed finds all sorts of soil with which to interact. Some seeds don’t sprout well. Some are eaten by birds. Some sprout and are choked by weeds. And some find fertile, watered ground and thrive.

  • I suppose Jesus told that story because he likes seed stories. But more so he was talking about himself, the seed, the word of God. It is kind of a Trinitarian-like story, isn’t it? – God the farmer, Jesus the seed, the Spirit charged environment as the soil.
  • By extension, the Bible writers who quoted Jesus telling the parable, did that because they were talking about their word, their seed of Jesus they cast by writing it down.
  • There is a lot being taught in that little story. But it all goes back to: The story of Jesus is like a seed that grows in a fertile spirit and an open mind.

One time I experienced a seed of the word lying dormant in one of my oldest friends. When I was in the fifth grade I was awarded the title of “best couple” with my childhood friend, Kim. We were not even embarrassed to be best couple since we had been like brother and sister since first grade. After I left town to go to college I became a full-on evangelistic Christian, sowing seeds like crazy. One time I came back to town and ran into Kim. As she told me the story later, I was totally obnoxious. My side of the story was that I was totally, somewhat blindly, into being a newly “out” Christian. At some point in the conversation I said, “Why aren’t you a Christian yet?” Not exactly the best seed sowing. She told me much later that she swore at that moment never to be a Christian.

I did not remember this event at all until she wrote me a letter about it fifteen years later. Usually it was just Christmas cards between us, but this time I was surprised to get a letter.

She started off with, “I hate to tell you this, but I am a Christian.” She went on to say, essentially, “I vowed I would never become a Christian since you were so obnoxious about it that day. But I was so depressed and my family was such a mess, I guess I did not know what to do. At one point I was feeling especially down and desperate and to my dismay, you came to mind saying, “Why aren’t you a Christian?” And I did not have a good answer. I went to the nearest church the next Sunday and to my surprise, I became a Christian. Thanks.”

The spiritual seed I had planted, a very tiny, compromised seed, had laid dormant for a long time! One would suppose it was extinct. But, to even Kim’s surprise, it sprouted!

  • Amazing isn’t it? How did that happen? How did the seed germinate in you?
  • And if the seed of faith has never effectively sprouted in you, what do you think is happening right now?

The germination process

The Bible writers are fascinated with this spiritual germination process. The whole New Testament is kind of a long telling, in all sorts of variations, of how the seed of God is planted in people and how it grows a new, eternal life in them.

If you dig in to what they are saying, the Bible writers might be more comfortable with seed than we are. For instance, the word for the seed sown in the field in the Lord’s story is the same word for human seed: sperma, shortened to sperm in English.

Paul teaches: “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” – (Galatians 3:29). That’s a nice argument about how Abraham’s faith is the deeper way to know God than Moses’ law. Don’t worry if you don’t know about all that yet. Paul’s basic intention is to talk about being re-seeded by faith through following Jesus. He does not mean we magically become offspring of the father of Judaism, Abraham. He means we are seeded with new life in the Spirit and end up having a remarkable family resemblance to Jesus.

John says, No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. (1 John 3:9). This is even more explicit. Being born of God is like you were an ovum and the spiritual sperm of God wriggled its way into you and started an incredible spiritual cell multiplication. The seed remains in us John says – it is like God’s spiritual genes combined with ours and are creating a new being who can justifiably be called a child of God.

It is all very earthy and organic, isn’t it? So I get upset when people try to fit this word of God Jesus is and which Jesus sows into the tiny, head-bound, rational philosophy that runs the world. God is the sower and Jesus is the seed. Jesus is the sower and his words are like seeds. The disciples are sowers and the Lord’s words are like living seeds, the Bible is like their seed chest.

  • It is so troubling when the word of God, that seed which lasts when everything else is extinct, gets reduced to whatever phrases a person can remember from reading the Bible.
  • Then the Bible gets subsumed under a scientific idea of a word, in which words all become data, and the Bible becomes a book among all the books, in the category “Great religious books.”
  • By now, the whole idea of faith can be reduced to an emoticon. Way too tiny.

All that stuff I just said is a LOT less than what Jesus is and what Jesus, Paul and John are talking about in the parts of the Bible I have shown you or told you. But a lot of Christians I have known, and even more I have heard about, think the seed Jesus is talking about is the Bible, or some factoid from the Bible or some principle drawn from the Bible. And they can reduce the idea down to clip art.

It is not just a seed thought

The seed is often seen as a thought. And Luke 8:11 quotes Jesus saying about his parable of the sower: This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is the word of God. It sounds very rational. Here is the logic if you think Jesus is being merely rational:

  • If the seed is a word, that means a thought, we read words with our mind.
  • And if we are reading words about God, they are in the Bible.
  • So Jesus is talking about finding the seed in the Bible, since that’s where the parable is anyway.

That kind of thinking works if you are committed to a world that is rational. If you think truth is thought-derived or science-and-math-derived, then you might be thinking right now, “What else could that line possibly say?”  If that is what you are thinking then you are probably having an argument in your head most of the time because you believed  Descartes and everyone who built on his dictum that, “I think, therefore I am.” When it comes to faith, you probably think “I believe certain things to be true, so I act on them.”

But there is more. When Jesus is done telling his parable of the sower to the crowds, he says, “If anyone has ears to hear, let her hear.”

He is not just making an argument by telling his story, he expects the listeners to be impregnated, to be planted with the seed through relating to the Son of God and hearing the word.

  • The seed in the story is not just about some thing.
  • The word of God is not the “concept of Jesus” from somewhere else where thoughts come from. It is not a thought that can happen without a body as Descartes thinks truths must be.
  • Jesus is not talking about the word reduced to a book or reduced to someone’s limited understanding.

God doesn’t exist, like Descartes said, because we couldn’t imagine him if he didn’t. God exists in another plane of existence altogether that is beyond one’s mind, beyond what we can fully imagine — like God is doing in the person of Jesus and like Jesus is doing as he tells his story of the sower. The whole process of God sowing the seed of grace and truth is about a person in their environment struggling to receive the life being born in their world, like you and I are doing. At some point we are like the seed, like the soil, like the sower. It all goes together in this ecosystem of love Jesus is revealing.

The seed growing in you

A sower goes out to sow. The seeds sown find all sorts of soil with which to interact.

  • Some seeds don’t sprout, or have such shallow roots in rocky soil they wither in the sun.
  • Some are eaten by birds right off the hard path.
  • Some sprout and are choked by weeds.
  • Some find fertile, watered ground and thrive.

The seed is the word of God, the one who is telling the story about himself is enacting the story as he tells it. Jesus was talking about himself, the living Word of God, and his words are seeds for those with fertile ears. The Bible talks about Jesus telling about himself. The whole book, Old and New Testaments, looks to Jesus, quotes and admires Jesus, and applies the resurrection life of Jesus. The story of Jesus coming, present, working, and coming again is like a seed that grows in a receptive spirit and an open mind.

When Jesus says something to you, he doesn’t want to change your mind, he wants to change your life. If God’s seed sprouts in you, you are going to reproduce life like Jesus lives. If God’s seed remains in you, you are going to feel like living whether all your thinking is in line with your faith or not.

The point of faith is not just thinking correct thoughts and carefully fulfilling conscious behaviors. The seed is planted deeper in us. I say that most of what we do is not all that conscious, anyway. Most of our reactions are pretty automatic. They are mainly trained by who and what we love, not what we think. Starting with our parents, our loves lay out the track for what we do. Our reactions are directed toward what is ultimate to us.

During this speech we have been doing a lot of thinking together. But more important to our faith is how you have been training our loves to live in love. Being in this environment, and exercising the habits of it train our loves for living — this behavior directs your desire back to God. It is where the seed of new life is planted and nurtured.

If you bought the alternative view that you think therefore you are, then you probably have had a constant debate with what I have been saying — you’d have to in order not to lose your sense of self. Descartes taught that doubting is the basis of truth-seeking. You can’t be rational if your mind doesn’t dominate all your other functions.

But Jesus comes along and insists that who and what you love determines who you become and how you live. I suppose it is, “I love, therefore I am.” Jesus says, “If you love me, keep my commands.” (John 14:15).

  • When he says that, is he saying “Figure out the commandment and do it right, think it through and act — believe and so behave?”
  • Or is he saying, “My sheep hear my voice and come when I call, they love me and I love them, and I care for them like a shepherd.” I am with them as they seek me in the street and they will find me.

I say, and I think the New Testament writers back me up, that it is the latter. The seed doesn’t just change your thinking, it revolutionizes your loves. Like the Psalmist says, talking about the Law of Moses that Paul says is a weak precursor to the Word of Jesus: I shall run the way of Your commandments, For You will enlarge my heart. (Psalm 119:32). The seed of God is at work in us to train our loves so we love God again and receive the love that all our other pursuits seek in vain.

If you want to be fertile ground for the seed of God, if you want your soul to be a fertile womb for God’s life to be born, stay immersed in the activities and environments that train your loves. Do them, run in them, never merely think them. Have a life, give into the living places.

I think we have organized a healthy environment for you. For instance, we are trying to put together a track that can augment what happens in our cells on the Way of Jesus website that is filled with Gifts for Growing. It begins with Earth for people who are good soil and for those who may not even have the seed planted yet. Stay in it. If you don’t know Jesus yet, or don’t know if you want to trade in your rationalism, that’s OK. We made this environment for you. It can train your loves while your mind catches up.

  • I won’t go much further except to say run in the way like someone who wants their desires trained for intimacy with God and reconciliation with others.
  • Engage in the rituals: Daily Prayer, Communion, This meeting.
  • Be in the cell. It happens every week to train our loves.
  • Study the Bible like a site map not a text book.
  • Be baptized and join in the covenant.
  • Make the church’s map and move with us as we ratify it on the 25th.

These are exercises for a spiritual being in a body. They help us get started again and again, especially when what we think proves to be outmoded and becomes extinct.

Fragile faith can die: Jesus will reseed us

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When I travel, God gets a chance to reseed me.

For instance, In May I saw this Van Gogh painting of a sower in Amsterdam — great museum!  I have another version hanging on my den wall, a prized gift from someone who saw me as a sower back in the day. Sometimes I look at it and it convicts me. I remember the audacity of my youth and hope I can still access that fire. I want to reseed. I want to keep building, not just sit in the accomplishments of the past and hope they don’t rot before I die.

Hulking husks of faith

The thought of dying Christianity kind of scared me in Europe. What does a town do with a giant, empty husk of a cathedral building? They are sort of like lovely conch shells, beautiful hard things, from which the living creatures are long gone, long dead. Visiting these museums of past Christianity made me wonder if someday the seed that grew into Circle of Hope will be something like an empty cathedral or an empty sea shell sitting on the coffee table of Philadelphia, the Christian creatures and their faith long gone.

Faith is a fragile thing, it seems. If it does not keep growing, if it not reseeded, then it can die. We know people whose faith is essentially dead. And I suspect there are people reading this whose faith is essentially dead, but they don’t have the guts to open up and be reseeded.

The church is even more fragile. The builders of those beautiful Cathedrals did not expect their community of faith to become so irrelevant! Gwen and I went to Aachen Cathedral in Germany for a splendid re-enactment of Medieval and Renaissance rituals during a Sunday mass filled with tourists. But I am quite sure the builders never expected their work of art to be more of a symbol of what was than a gymnasium for worship they built for forever. The building still stands but the seed of faith basically died out for the most part. I was speaking at 2007 Frankford Ave. and I wondered out loud if one day someone would visit that building and receive a little history tour, hear about the early 2000’s, see a picture of us in odd looking clothes, ask questions about Love Feasts and cells, take a picture of themselves with a djembe, leave a token donation as they went back to the van, and that’s it.

We’re at odds; what will happen?

I doubt that untimely death will happen. But I wonder. Because we are a little bit at odds right now. On the one hand, people are being seeded by faith every day because we have some sowers among us. There is a lot of revelation and healing happening — and in an era and a region that seems a bit hostile to Jesus.

On the other hand the burned out or beaten down among us still can’t figure out how to talk about Jesus without being embarrassed. Some of us are much more likely to talk about politics than talk about the risen Lord, as if making the world work right is how people get saved. We can be strangely subject to postmodern discourse rather than revealing what is beyond it. Many people have become in charge of saving their lives and are losing them.

Desert rose, Ethiopia

Nevertheless people get seeded with the truth and love of Jesus all the time. I have been seeded and  reseeded with the word of Jesus at many points during my life, too. Looking way back on some of it now, my faith seems rather unexpected to begin with and strangely resilient. There were Christian seeds thrown around my family but they never found a good place to grow in most of us.  But they did in me. And, somehow, the seedlings survived and grew into a plant that provided a little shade in this spiritual desert.

Somehow we get seeded and reseeded

Somehow there is a spiritual earth in us where the seed of faith can grow. We have to get seeded, and when the plant gets burned or beaten down, that fertile place in us needs reseeded. It seems that something new is always sprouting which will be the tree of tomorrow.

But those little plants of faith in us are fragile. The congregations and cells we plant, as strong as they are, still have a sense of fragility about them. Faith in Jesus is like a seed that takes root and sprouts. We need to take care of one another’s fragile faith. Never stomp on someone’s fragile beginnings. Never assume someone is completely solid. It is not that kind of world. Never take the survival of your church for granted. The community of faith can end up like an empty cathedral rather than a sower in a field.

Last week one of our covenant members died of an apparent overdose. My blessed foreman from 1226 S. Broad tells me that dear man was the fourth to die from among the team of recovering people who kindly and carefully built a place for healing in Circle Counseling. Life is fragile. In Christ, it is eternal. But we wake up every day challenged by our own fragility and by the fissures in society that disrupt our very souls. The faith that seeds eternity seems distressingly weak, like a sprout among weeds or a thirsty seed in the desert. But Jesus, the sower, keeps farming his beloved creation and will even reseed us when we just can’t see how to keep going. And he always seems to find allies to sow truth and love in joy with him, especially when times are tough.

Principle Christianity Is Too Easy to Choke On

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But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop. Luke 8:15

The Lord’s parable of the sower is a hopeful story. But no more hopeful than creation itself, in which a single seed actually does result in many more seeds, even hundreds of seeds.

But the parable is also a starkly truthful story, and that can feel very discouraging. Because some seeds don’t take root, some are eaten by birds, and some, even when they take root, can die from lack of water or by being choked out by weeds.

I’m thinking about seeds that are getting nowhere this morning. I’m the kind of farmer to whom every seed counts.

Parable of the Sower Lisa Snow Lady Acrylic on canvas 2010

People in the weeds

I am especially thinking of the much-loved friends I have who have been effectively choked out by weeds, or, by now, have faith that has been so ill-watered for so long that it is about dried up. Even more specifically, I am thinking about my friends who have what I call a “principle faith”. They received “the seed” of the word of the kingdom of God as a set of thoughts, a system of belief, even as oral tradition from their parents. When they took their faith on the road, when it encountered a world hungry for their allegiance, when it was surrounded by the jungle of desire and demand, it did not have the stuff to withstand the weeds of opposition.

A faith based on principle alone has a hard time standing up against other forces demanding allegiance on a more visceral level. But many people were persuaded to rely on principles at an early age. I’m not sure why Christian parents and teachers did this, but they sat their children in classes to get their training for a life of faith. I know, I went through some of these. Among the first things a child learns from such classes is that Christianity is about learning things in a class! In our classes, we were taught stories from the Bible which all had morals — sometimes more like Aesop’s fables than the Bible. We learned principles of faith, which were extracted from scripture. For instance, from the parable of the sower the following principle might be derived, “It is God’s will that I should be good, productive soil and bear a very fruitful crop for the storehouses of the kingdom.”  Advanced students might argue that they had a more accurate principle to propose. And so it started. Every paragraph, even every clause, in the Bible had a secret meaning that correlated with all the other meanings in a rather intricate system of right thinking that one needed to master to be a good Christian.

Do we really need to be better students?

As most children in school do, a lot of the students of Christianity didn’t listen too well. They were like most of the of the students of 11th grade math who never mastered higher math skills and certainly never used them after 11th grade! Hopefully, they aren’t all like me, but I became much more adept at cheating than at higher math skills as a result of trigonometry. If the principles of math are hard to convey, the “principles” of life in Christ are much harder! Math can be reduced to some principles, perhaps. But life in Christ needs to grow among weeds. The inorganic approach to teaching about Jesus needs a classroom to live in, not real life. So there are many problems with the teaching that a lot of my friends received. They ended up with a smattering of good thinking (or disputable theology) and that’s about all they have of the word when they are facing the weighty issues of their lives.

Does everything happen for a reason?

The friends I am praying for this morning have a “principle faith” that took them quite a distance on the pilgrimage of faith, but eventually it got them lost. For instance, a couple of these friends had very disheartening break-ups with people with whom they had been having sex for a year or so (and so the break-up was a no-marriage divorce and felt like one). The only faith they could apply to the situation was the common, unshakeable assurance a mother or teacher had taught them that, “Everything happens for a reason,“ which is an application of a faulty principle based on an interpretation of Romans 8:28 among other things. It wasn’t enough. Their faith started to wither.

People are more compelling than principles

Another main thing that I’ve seen choking out the weak little seedlings of principle faith in many people is the demand for allegiance from an unbelieving mate (usually one they are prospectively marrying). That demand is a virulent weed. Once you have sex with someone, it is hard to have what is always an intimate discussion about faith based merely on a set of morals or principles and not on a relationship with God that is as intimate as a sexual one with your lover. But in the cases of the dear people I am remembering, their relationship with God never got that intimate — it was all on paper, it was all in their head, it was all a theory they were applying and not a life growing in their redeemed heart.

They were never good soil. “Good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.” One can’t hear the word of Jesus like it is more classroom material to be boiled down to the couple of things one can remember — not if it is supposed to withstand robust competition. Noble hearts hear the word from the Word in an ongoing, well-developed, Spirit to spirit relationship that is rooted in eternity — deeper than any human relationship. One has to retain the word of the kingdom of God like good soil retains water – much more than one strains to maintain a relationship with a mate, even. One must hear the word like a call from a master to direct one’s energy to the task of the day – it can’t be the background philosophy that lightly colors what one is really doing.

What does God think?

My friends did not have the faith they needed to stand up to their circumstances. They still have the same thoughts their mother or a well-meaning teacher taught them, but whatever they needed to hear in their heart got choked out by whoever they finally hooked up with. That connection was probably the noblest aim they could come up with, since their faith was merely theoretical and their love/sex relationship quite real. If they were married to the job, instead, as so many are, the job likely parched their scrawny thoughts about God, and the world at large rewarded them with something tangible for that. They may end up great parents and co-workers. But they are not going to be Jesus-followers unless something drastically changes.

Well, they may think they are Jesus followers. But if they don’t open their heart to hear with their heart, if they don’t retain what the Spirit of God implants, and if they don’t doggedly produce the crop of faith, hope and love that their master bought the farm to produce, will God think they are Jesus followers? What would make Jesus think that?