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Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church
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Good Dirt, Bad Dirt |
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Luke 8:4-15 Sexegesima Sunday January 27, 2008 Preachers love to preach about the Parable of the Sower because it is so easy. The sermon outline has been written for us, all we have to do is fill in the points. The symbolism is also quite clear. The Sower is Christ. The seed is the Gospel in all its meanings. The soils are the different types of people, and their responses to the Gospel. In short, some are good dirt, and some are bad dirt. The dirt by the wayside was bad dirt. The seed fell on it, the Gospel was planted in it, but it did not bear fruit. Why? The wayside was the side of a road. It may have been a public road or a cow path through a field. Either way, it carried too much traffic to allow the seed to grow and bear fruit. The Gospel Seed was “trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it.” You will remember that seed was scattered by the method we call “broadcasting.” The sower carried a bag of seed and scattered it upon the tilled ground. Naturally the wind blew some of it into places the sower never intended it to go. If you have ever scattered seed this way, you know what I am talking about. That is the way the seed came to be on the wayside. Christ is telling us some people are like the dirt in the wayside. They are just too busy with other things to allow the seed to sprout. There is too much traffic in their lives, so that they don’t have time for God. They may hear the Gospel. They may know that God has a rightful claim to their time and energy. They may have moments in their lives when they actually think they want to belong to God. But when that “seed” lands on their soil, a wagon or a horse, or a cow, or even a child playing comes down the road and stomps the seed into the mud and it can’t sprout. Or if, by the grace of God, it does sprout, the tender seedlings which should be the beginnings of faith, are trampled and killed by the traffic. That traffic could be almost anything. It could be our work, our recreation, our family obligations, or a schedule we have allowed to grow so full we just don’t have time for God. It could be an act of the will, an intentional action in which we stomp the seed into the mud to insure that it does not grow in our lives. There is a saying, often quoted by men, who, like myself, are losing their hair, “grass don’t grow on a busy street.” Likewise, the Gospel doesn’t bear fruit in a life with too much traffic. Christ also says of this soil that the birds come and devour the seed out of it. In other times, before seeds were treated with herbicides and fungicides, birds loved to eat them as they were planted. It was a real problem. A flock of crows could devastate weeks of hard work. They knew how to dig into the rows and dig out seeds. They were also adept at eating the fresh, tender sprouts as they came up out of the ground. This is why people used to put scarecrows in their gardens. They don’t do that so much anymore because the birds have learned that scarecrows aren’t people. In fact, I have seen birds resting on the scarecrows, as though they thought they were put there for their benefit, as a place to rest between rounds of gorging themselves on the seeds and sprouts. Christ says the traffic and the birds in the soils of human lives are the work of Satan, treading down and plucking up the seed of His Gospel, where it lay open and unprotected in the road. What a terrible sin it is to allow the Gospel of Christ to be trodden under the foot of men, and to become the food of devils. But note that when the Spirit of God is at work sowing the seeds of faith and godliness through the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Satan and his legions of demons are also at work treading it under foot and devouring it. Know this and beware. The next soil is rocky soil. It too, is bad dirt. This doesn’t mean soil filled with rocks, but rather a shallow stretch of soil that covers a large boulder lying just below the surface of the ground. There is enough soil to allow the seed to sprout, but not enough to develop a strong, deep root system. So when the sun grows hot, and the winds grow strong, and the soil gets dry, the plants have no way to get to the water they need to see them through the trial. It is not difficult to apply this story to the lives of people. We have all seen people who receive the Gospel gladly, but can’t seem to find a way to continue in the faith once they profess it. They start well, but when the trials of life strike, they find they have no spiritual root in them. You know that when dry weather comes, a plant will drive its roots deeper into the soil to find water. But a plant on a rock has no soil to dig into, and it dies. So it is with some people. As long as life is happy, they are wonderful Christians. But when the trials of life strike, their faith withers and dies, and they fall away. Again, we must beware, lest we find that we become as rocky soil. Next is the seed among the thorns. The thorns are simply the cares and riches of the world. We have all known people who cannot tear themselves away from these things, not even to save their own souls. But what good is it to gain the whole world if they loose the one eternal part of themselves to live in eternal darkness and separation from God? I once knew a man who said he was going to come to Jesus one day, when he was too old to have any fun. But at that moment he wanted to enjoy himself in the pleasures of sin. I would say that is like walking a tightrope over the fires of hell. You may make it, but one little slip, and its all over. Finally, there is the good soil. This soil hears the word, like the others, with one difference, it also keeps the word. It perseveres in the faith, to use a good Calvinistic word. The cares of the world do not choke it out. The trials of life do not dry it up. The assaults of temptation and evil do not devour it. It perseveres and bears the fruit of righteousness, faith, and, finally, the Kingdom of Heaven. To state the natural conclusion, or, moral, of the parable is almost anticlimactic. Those who have understood the meaning of the soils realize it is a warning to us all to be good soil. The whole point of the parable is to exhort us to; “take heed of those things that will hinder our profiting by the word we hear, watch over our hearts in hearing, and take heed lest they betray us; take heed lest we hear carelessly and slightly, lest upon any account we entertain prejudices against the word we hear; and take heed to the frame of our spirits after we have heard the word, lest we loose what we have gained.” (Matthew Henry, vol. V, p. 659). Let us pray, Holy God, Sower of Good Seed, who has planted the Gospel of Christ in our hearts, grant that by Thy mercies alone we may be good soil. In the name of Christ. Amen. The Rev. Dr. R. Dennis Campbell, Vicar, Holy Trinity Anglican Church,
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