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.

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 like 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 25^th.

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.