The Fruitful Quarter

When I was younger, my granddad purchased for each of us grandkids shares of stock in a Fortune 500 company. I think it was his way of teaching us grandkids about the importance of investing and saving money. So, he purchased for me a couple of shares in Johnson & Johnson, and when I turned 21 my granddad transferred control of that stock account over to me. I became a proud shareholder in Johnson & Johnson which was a little troubling to me because the only thing I knew about this company was that they made baby shampoo. Since I wasn’t a baby nor did I have enough hair to justify buying vast quantities of shampoo, I figured this company was destined for failure, but because this was a gift from my granddad, I held onto those stocks.

That first year after I became an official player on Wall Street, I sat down to do my taxes just like most of us do in the first months of a new year, and my fears about the inadequacies of Johnson & Johnson seemed to be justified. I began to open each of those envelopes with the black stamp on the outside that read “Important Tax Documents Enclosed.” When I opened the envelope from Johnson & Johnson, I was horrified. As I read that statement I came to the slow realization that those few shares of stock had steadily lost value over the previous year. All that my granddad had invested in my name and what little contributions I had been able to make were now actually worth less than when I started!

And I panicked! I picked up the phone and called my granddad.

“Granddad!” I shouted when he picked up the phone. “Should I sell my stock? Its value is going down!”

There was a long pause followed by soft laughing. Finally, my granddad said, “Josh, you have to look at the long term. If you had invested during the depths of the Great Depression,” he said, “and held on to that stock until today the dividends would be beyond what you could imagine.”

That was sound advice, but not exactly what I wanted to hear. Because from the second I became an official stockholder, I expected instant success and immediate value in my stock portfolio. If you have ever wanted instant success in the stock market, in your job, in your relationships, in your retirement, then you know what it was like to be a disciple in the early Christian church. By the time we get to the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew the disciples are looking around and they see that Jesus’ teachings are not taking root like they expected them to; they have not yet seen the desired result; God’s presence in Jesus Christ is not affecting others the way that it has transformed the disciples. And Jesus tells them, “That’s because the kingdom of heaven is like a sower planting the fields.”

In all likelihood the Gospel of Matthew was finally written down around the year 90 C.E. maybe 50 or 60 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection . For all of the accounts of Jesus preaching to large crowds, this gospel was probably written to between 20 and 200 Jewish-Christians living in the city Antioch of Syria in the very southwestern corner of modern-day Turkey.

Those first followers of Jesus Christ look around and just like Jesus’ disciples in chapter 13 they ask, “Where are the crowds!?! Where are the hordes of faithful followers!?! Where did Jesus go wrong? Why are there so few of us? Why is it so difficult for the gospel teachings to grow in us and others?

Jesus’ disciples wondered this; the early church wondered this, and we still ask the same questions today: why don’t more people wholeheartedly embraced Christ’s teachings? For some of us we might ask, “Why aren’t more people in church?” Others of us ask, “Why in a Christian community and a nation where most people claim to be Christian is there still so much poverty and hunger.” How ever we phrase the question what we are really asking is why haven’t Christ’s teaching been more successful in truly changing lives? Why isn’t there instant success and immediate value? Let us look at some of the ways that Christ tells us we may encounter disappointment and failure in life and in ministry.

Shortly after I graduated college I made the mistake of watching Steven Spielberg’s movie Saving Private Ryan. I say mistake because this movie about the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France during World War II sparked in me a near obsession where for two years every book I read and every movie I watched was in some way related to World War II or World War II history.

A colleague of mine at the newspaper where I worked knew that my birthday was approaching, and she wanted to get me a nice birthday gift. So, she spent weeks observing and investigating my interests, and finally she decided to purchase a nice collection of CDs containing recorded radio broadcasts – news and entertainment – from the World War II era. She wrapped up the gift and presented it to me on my birthday.

A few weeks later she was over at my house, and she started looking through my music collection when she found this nice set of World War II recordings sitting on my shelf unopened.

She said, “Josh, why haven’t you opened this and listened to it?”

I said, “Well, I love World War II history and culture, but early radio broadcast were so different from news or entertainment today.”

“So!” she said.

“So, I just don’t know if these recording will present a side of history that I’m all that interested in,” I said. “So I never bothered to open them.”

In essence I lost that gift that had been so painstakingly prepared for me. Jesus tells his disciples that those who harden their hearts like a path pounded through an otherwise fertile field likewise lose the gift and thwart the growth of God’s Kingdom. For the gift to be received and for the seed to grow we are asked to open new and unknown gifts; we are asked to leave some things behind; we are asked to take up new behaviors; we are asked to enter into a new community; we’re asked to dance to a little different style of music than we are used to. And when we don’t, we are like hardened paths where seeds have no opportunity for growth.

Make no mistake: as God calls us to continue fruitful ministry here at Pomme de Terre UMC, and as God calls us to start new and exciting ministries here in this congregation we will be asked to take up new behaviors, new attitudes, and new ways of thinking, and we will be asked to leave some behind.

While some seed is snatched away before it ever has a chance to sprout – like a gift that goes unopened – there are times when some growth is possible. I know that we are approaching the heights of summer, and right now we are thinking about shorts, swimsuits and fishing rods. I also know that I am speaking with some folks here this morning who when these hot, sunny days leave, you go with them to warm, sunny places like Phoenix or Miami. But I want you all to imagine that Hickory County is covered in snow and ice – and I know that those of you who lived through some of the ice storms recently may be a little reluctant to do that, but let’s go there in our minds anyway.

As we look out over our icy, snowy landscape we notice that there were certain places where snow and ice seem to melt more rapidly. It seems like places of the fastest thawing are around tree stumps or around dark-colored tree limbs, or around stones that were just under the surface. This is because those stones or stumps or other objects trap or conduct the sun’s energy and heat up faster, and then that heat melts the surrounding snow and ice even quicker.

When we plant a garden if there is a stone or rock just under the surface the same thing can happen. That patch of ground above it heats up faster, so the seeds that have been scattered over that ground sprout up quicker and begin to grow earlier. But when the heat and the harsh days of summer like we are in right now arrive, that plant withers because its roots are not deep enough to penetrate the rocky soil and get the water below. That rock which helped the plant grow quickly now prevents the plant from growing fully.

The Gospel of Matthew tells us that very early on Jesus’ disciples and followers experienced conflict. We hear that disciples suffered physical and verbal harassment. Some were brought to the synagogues and flogged for their beliefs. Others had to go before kings and governors to give an account of their religion. Still others found that their new way of life led to division within their own households. Without deep roots in the face of these difficulties they withered. They turned from their beliefs and opted for the path of least resistance willing to adopt the majority position and forget that minority position known as Christianity.

Of course today most Christians, in this country at least, don’t face this type of persecution. But like the first disciples we do face certain pressures and risks that can thwart our spiritual growth. For most of us these stumbling blocks are probably nothing more than having to weather critical questions from friends, family or co-workers: “Do you really believe all that?” or “How can you believe that?” Sometimes I find myself reluctant to express my faith because I am afraid that doing so will lump me in with political or social viewpoints that I don’t necessarily support. We all face stumbling blocks, pressures, and risks of some sort: places where our faith has grown up but in the face of difficulty cannot be sustained because we haven’t deliberately worked on rooting our faith deeply enough. Then, we wither like plants with shallow roots among rocky soil.

Even when we have good, deep roots growth is not necessarily assured. Last year the USA Today published the results of a poll asking people 18- to 25-years old to select from a list their most important goals in life. In that survey 81 percent of those responding said that getting rich is one of their top two goals in life. Thirty percent ranked helping others in need as a top goal while only 10 percent responded that growing spiritually was an important goal in life. In a similar survey completed 40 years prior in 1967 86 percent said “it was essential to develop
‘a meaningful philosophy of life,’ while 41.9% thought it essential to be ‘very well off financially.’” So we can see that Jesus’ parable of the sower certainly had something to people in Jesus’ time and place, and it had something to day to our culture 40 years ago, and this parable certainly has something to say to our society today.

Being rich in and of itself is not the problem; there were certainly some financially prosperous individuals among Jesus first followers. In a community, and a nation and a world of poverty, disciples are called to trust God’s graciousness and to distribute resources so that all have adequate provisions for life. But Jesus says that the seed that grows up among the thorns is like the person who allows the “worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth (to) choke it.” A misplaced, misguided focus on obtaining wealth and pursuing materialism and making these things the goal of life is more than being scratched or poked by a few pesky thorns; it is akin to being choked, fatally attacked.

As Jesus tells the parable of the sower the picture just keeps getting bleaker and bleaker. If someone came to us and said, “I have this great investment opportunity where 75 percent of everything you invest is absolutely, positively guaranteed to fail!” We’d run the other way laughing. But this is just the type of investment Jesus describes in this morning’s parable. A quarter of the seed falls along the hardened path; a quarter falls in the shallow, rocky soil; another quarter falls amid the money-hungry thorns. This is the kind of investment that God makes, so where is the Good News in that?

Anyone who has ever planted a garden or watched a neighbor plant a garden knows that rarely if ever do you simply throw seed on top of the soil and hope for the best. Rather, weeks and months before the seed ever hits the ground we start tilling the soil, pulling out stones, adding mulch, putting in fertilizer so that the seeds have good soil in which to grow. Whatever type of soil we have in our hearts, we still have the opportunity to prepare it through Disciple classes, Bible study, Sunday School, fellowship times, mission projects, and through gathering each week to worship and praise God. The Good News is God enables to till and fertilize the soil of our hearts, minds, and bodies.

But this is the even better news. The beautiful part of this parable is that God continues sowing even though God knows three quarters of the seed will fail. Whether we are beaten down, whether we are rooted shallowly, whether we have wandered astray, God continues to sow knowing that someday one of those seeds will fall in good soil. In Jesus’ time the average yield was about 9-fold; for ever one bushel of seed planted a 1st century farmer could expect to harvest about nine bushels of crops. But Christ tells us that when that when the seed finds the good soil, the yield from that one fruitful quarter will be 30-, 60-, 100-fold far offsetting the three-quarters that have yielded nothing.

Somewhere around the turn of the millennium my stupidity and my impatience finally caught up to me. I owed a former landlord money from a sublease deal that had gone bad, and the quickest, easiest way I could see out of that predicament was to sell some of my shares in Johnsons & Johnson – to take what had been graciously given to me and sell it off. I cashed in about three-quarters of my stock – it fell like seed onto hardened, rocky, thorn-ridden ground – amounting to relatively nothing compared with what could have been. A couple years later Johnson & Johnson – whose stock I had decided was inadequate and destine for failure – announced a stock split, and the few shares that I still owned doubled and grew in value just like that one seed that by some miracle managed to fall in a speck of fertile soil. May we be the good soil, and may we nourish in our lives that one fruitful quarter.