I never knew my grandfather, my dad’s father. He died around a decade before I was born. But growing up I heard lots of stories about him, and my dad and his siblings had the wisdom and foresight in the 1990s to write down their memories of growing up in the twenties and thirties, so my picture of my grandfather was filled out with more detail. 

He was a dairy farmer. He was an experimenter and innovator on the farm, trying new crops, like peanuts one year. One of the stories I heard repeatedly was how he would sort through the corn after the harvest, picking out the best ears and setting them aside as seed for the next year. Then he would take.a few kernels from each of the selected ears, keeping track of which ear they had come from, and try to get them to germinate in the house. If kernels didn’t germinate, he would not use the other kernels from those ears for seed corn. This was long before the widespread availability of hybrid seeds, of course.

In setting aside some of that year’s crop for the next year, he was doing what humans have been doing for thousands of years, since the beginning of agriculture. For most of human existence, preserving seed has been a difficult choice between having enough food to eat until the next harvest, and having enough seed to plant for the next year’s crop. 

Gardeners often do something similar; saving seeds from a favorite variety from one year to the next. It’s why we have heirloom tomatoes after all, varieties that were preserved by gardeners for generations while hybrids took over the marketplace. Those old varieties often have much better flavor or are much better suited for particular cliates.

This may be a useful context for us as we contemplate today’s gospel reading, the familiar Parable of the Sower. I have to confess something to you before I go any further. I did something that I almost never do. I altered today’s gospel reading. Well, I didn’t so much alter it, as shorten it. In the lectionary, the reading includes not only the verses read this morning but also vss. 18-23, which provide an interpretation of the story we heard. I left those verses out because I think they change the way we might hear the story. I’m not saying that interpretation is wrong, just that, as in the case of most stories, there is more than one possible interpretation.

Jesus taught using parables, stories that involved settings and characters often very familiar to his listeners. He used these stories to instruct his listeners about God and especially about the reign or kingdom of God. Often, these stories are so familiar to us that we don’t see how radical and strange they are. In many cases, we fit them into pre-existing categories, or we allegorize them. In this case, as in the interpretation I didn’t include, the sower is God, the seed is God’s word, etc., etc., etc.

But let’s try again. Listen, a sower went out to sow his seed. Some fell on the path, some fell on rocky soil, some fell among thorns. We may not think anything of that—we may have seen yards that have just been seeded where there is grass seed in the street or on the sidewalks. We may have seen farmers who inadvertently corn or soybean seed in a ditch or on a road while planting.

But remember, we’re not talking about industrial agriculture here. We’re talking about subsistence farming, where the seed is precious and may have been preserved while the family went hungry. And what self-respecting gardener would waste their seed or their time by throwing it haphazardly out in the garden?

In other words, the sower doesn’t seem to be behaving as a farmer ought to behave. Think about where he got the seed. Well, it came from the previous year’s crop and it was likely the case that at some point, he had to make a decision between feeding his family with the grain or save it to plant the next year. Given the value of the seeds, he would not be so careless as to allow seed to go to waste by flinging it on rocks, or on a compacted path, or among weeds. 

The sheer profligacy of the sower’s actions only become clear when we interpret it against this backdrop of subsistence farming and the annual reality that there might not be enough grain to feed one’s family or to sow the next year’s crop. Seen this way, the sower’s actions are so out of character, so unpredictable and unnatural that we can begin to tease out the parable’s meaning from those very actions.

 The sower’s behavior is one thing. There’s another odd detail in the story we often overlook—the seed that fell on the good soil produced widely differing results: 100 fold, 60 fold, 3 fold. That sn’t be. Think about Wisconsin cornfields. What should they look like? Absolutely uniform in height. It’s only if the field has drainage problems that we expect variable amounts of grain.

Seen in this light, there is often, perhaps almost always, unexpected and unpredicted details in the parables. Yet, this reality may not bring us any closer to their meaning. Jesus often introduces his parables by saying, “the kingdom of God is like…” So how is the kingdom of God like a sower who acts irrationally and unexpectedly, with such extravagance and profligacy? How is the reign of God like a field that produces widely variable amounts of grain? Or, to put it another way, what does this parable tell us about God, God’s vision for the world and for human community?

Asked in this way, the parable invites us to imagine, to believe in a God who acts in ways completely counter to our values and expectations. We live in a world in which religion, especially Christianity, seems to be imagine a God who reflects our values and expectations. It’s not that God rewards the good and punishes the evil; it’s that God rewards us and those like us and punishes those we unlike us or those we don’t like. But the God of the parables, the God of Jesus Christ, may not behave at all in ways that conform to our expectations and values.

There’s another thing. We expect that our efforts will be rewarded and our evil deeds go punished. Sometimes that means we can be rather smug and presumptive about how God sees us, and that we judge others according to our standards of behavior. 

One of the things about gardening and farming is that it can be humbling. In spite of all of your best efforts, it can all come to naught. We all know this lesson, relearned this summer as we’ve suffered through a drought. As I was riding out the Badger State trail yesterday, I noticed corn fields, right next to each other. In some the corn stood tall and was tasseling; in others, the stalks had barely reached knee-high. 

Just as we want hard work to pay off in our daily life, we want God’s economy of salvation to be fair and to play by the rules, our rules. But the parable of the sower teaches us that the reign of God does not operate by our rules or conform to our expectations.

As hard as that is for us to conceive as we look out at an unjust and suffering world, it is often even more difficult to imagine when we look inside ourselves. We are often apt to hear words of judgment on our selves, our actions, know our own broken and hurting selves, and assume that God rejects us. But that’s not the case either. Whatever we have done in the past, all of the hurt and brokenness we have caused, indeed all of the hurt and brokenness that we experience in our own lives, all of that we can bring to God, and find love and acceptance.

To experience that love is what God’s reign is all about; to know, and love a God whose love towards us is as profligate and expansive as the seed thrown by the sower on good and bad soil, to love that God is what our faith proclaims. That message, God’s expansive love and accepting love, is also our duty to proclaim and share in this broken and hurting world.