It's not always about the soil

My best friend in junior high was Scott.  We went to school and church together, and would get together several afternoons a week to play ping pong.  We were good friends, and I thought I knew him well.  Then one day as we were walking home from school, he pulled out a cigarette, lit it up, and began to take a long drag.  I was shocked, and not just because we were friends, or because we were in the 8^th grade, but I thought I knew him.  As we began to talk about what I was seeing, I realized I didn’t know much about Scott at all.

Have you ever experienced something like that?  You thought you knew someone, or you thought you knew what was going on, only to find out you didn’t know much at all.  

The parable of the sower is an amazing story, complex and layered with meaning.  The traditional approach to reading this parable, and possibly the correct one, is to constantly examine the soil.  We cultivate it, tend to it, softening the hard places, removing rocks and thorns, making it ready to receive the seed.  We like to think we’re experts in soil, responsibly throwing seed where we think it has the best chance to grow.  We don’t believe in waste; we want to be productive making sure our seed has the best chance to grow.  There’s nothing wrong with that, right?  Here’s what I’m thinking.

We say we believe that God is active everywhere, all the time, seeking to redeem and restore everyone.  That is the message of our Gospel — that this is for everyone.  I wonder if I’ve always believed that.  The reason I say that is because I haven’t just been surprised over the years by friends like Scott, who I thought I knew only to find out there was this hidden part of his life that I knew very little about.  But I’ve been just as surprised by students and adults over the years who appear to be far from God, later to find myself surprised by how God was at work in their life.  I’ve slapped labels on them that I’ve had to remove because of a conversation around a kitchen table, or a response at a retreat, or an act of compassion on a missions trip.  I thought their hearts were hard, calloused and crusty, only to realize there was this soft place where God had been working.  I may not have seen it, but God was working in spite of me.  He had thrown some seed that had taken root and was helping to break up that hard, crusty exterior — pouring on the tenderizer, if I may.  I’m embarrassed to admit that from my perspective, I saw nothing.  How does that happen?

I think it’s because I like to be an expert on soil, and not so much on sowing.  One point to the story that I don’t hear talked about much, is that the sower wasn’t concerned about where the seed fell.  This is called the parable of the sower, not the soil.  The seed is thrown everywhere, almost wastefully — on the path, among the thorns, in the rocky places as well as the soft, believing that God is at work in all of them.  So maybe I need to throw off some labels that I’ve put on people.  Maybe I need to be grateful to realize that God’s activity isn’t limited by what I see going on.  Maybe I need to stop thinking I know what God is up to, and just throw some more seed.  Anybody else?

Text for the week:  Luke 8:4-10