What in the World Does God Think He’s Doing?

Matthew 13:1–9 | Proper 10, Year A

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The Parable of the Sower

A farmer went out to sow. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil… Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop. — Matthew 13:3–8

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A Reckless Farmer

If the farmer in the parable of the sower is supposed to be God — and it is! — then this God goes against nearly every economic principle we hold dear. This farmer-God throws seed around like Paris Hilton throws money. And it’s not just carelessness — it’s bad marketing. He broadcasts seed in every direction with no regard for where it lands, most of it with almost no chance of taking root. The ROI on this operation is next to nothing.

What in the world does God think he’s doing?

We know better than that. Many of us grew up in homes where you didn’t leave the table until your plate was clean — vegetables included. My mother liked to remind us that there were starving children in India who would love the food we were wasting. I offered to help her box it up and mail it. She wasn’t amused. Food was not to be wasted. Neither, we’re taught, is anything else.

Some of my more socially conscious friends have bumper stickers that ask, “What Would Jesus Drive?” It’s not really a question — they’re answering it for you with the very car the sticker is stuck to. Apparently Jesus drives a Prius, or maybe one of those little three-cylinder shoeboxes on wheels, or maybe Jesus doesn’t drive at all — maybe he just bikes to church to spare the planet a little more hydrocarbon damage. Jesus conserves. Jesus recycles. Jesus saves — get it? Jesus saves!

But not Jesus’ Father. Not this God — not the spendthrift, seed-slinging farmer in today’s parable. If Jesus is puttering around on a Vespa to save fuel, God is flooring it down Main Street in a gas-guzzling Hummer, tossing seed out both windows without a thought for the waste.

What in the world does God think he’s doing?

The Real Question

What a strange, provoking little story. Some seed on the path, some on rocky ground, some choked by thorns, some — finally — on good soil, where it produces a crop.

Maybe Jesus tells it this way on purpose, to rattle our tidy sense of economy. Maybe he’s reminding us that life isn’t measured in return on investment, but in something harder to put on a spreadsheet. Maybe the real question buried in this parable isn’t “How much does it cost?” but “What is the worth of a human soul?”

That question exposes something in me. Maybe it does in you too — the suspicion that our lives run more on secular economics than on the reckless extravagance of grace.

Seed on Rocky Ground

A certain church had a long partnership with a small, struggling community deep in the mountains of Kentucky — a coal town that lost its mine, and with it its work, its clinic, its school, nearly everything. A missionary family had come in years earlier and helped the people start a small business building canoes and kayaks. It wasn’t much, but it gave them purpose, and pride, and — with the support of partner churches — a bit of hope.

One summer, a couple from the church drove up to see the place for themselves. It took forever — narrow switchback roads, logging trucks nearly running them off the mountainside — but they finally arrived.

What they found stopped them cold. Houses barely fit to be called houses. Barefoot kids in hand-me-downs. Outdoor plumbing. The “factory” was little more than a leaning barn. This was not what people from the comfortable suburbs of Massachusetts had pictured.

They came home and told the Missions Committee, “When we saw what an awful place it is, we wondered if we’re just throwing our money away.”

That night, the committee decided to stop sending seed onto that hard, rocky, thorny ground.

It was, after all, just good economics.

Seed for the One

I wonder sometimes why God keeps throwing seed into hopeless-looking places. Wouldn’t it be more responsible to cut losses? Wouldn’t the accountants back at headquarters give God a raise for producing a bigger harvest with less seed?

This is one of the deepest tensions in the Christian life. The world measures value by efficiency. God asks a different question — not “how much does it cost,” but “what is a soul worth?” Grace comes first. Only then does the question of cost even arise — and even then, the real question becomes: what are we willing to spend to bring God’s love to somebody else?

The first church gave in to the economics and stopped sowing. A second church did the opposite.

That church’s building sat on a hillside — parking down below, sanctuary up top on the third floor, with a cranky elevator that occasionally decided it didn’t have to work on the Sabbath. Fine for most of us. Impossible for anyone in a wheelchair. So someone proposed building a ramp and adding accessible parking at street level.

The cost was steep — the church was landlocked in the city, with almost no room to work with — and a meeting was called to hash it out. Most of the talk was numbers: was it really worth it, when on a good Sunday only one wheelchair-bound woman actually came?

That’s when Don L. stood up.

Don was dying of bone cancer at the time, and he’d stopped worrying much about offending people. This was the same Don who had once stood up in the middle of a sermon to announce, out loud, that he disagreed with it — while the preacher was still preaching. The whole congregation went dead silent. I was just glad it wasn’t my sermon.

That night, Don said he was ashamed to belong to a church that measured everything in dollars. “From the time this meeting started,” he said, “all you people have talked about is money, money, money.” Then he reminded everyone of the friends who once tore the roof off a house just to lower one paralyzed man down to Jesus. “Even if only one person is helped,” Don said, “we should build that ramp.”

They built it. For the one. For the few. And now for the many who’ve rolled and walked and climbed through it ever since.

Rest in peace, Don.

The Grace-Guzzler

The parable of the sower describes a God who isn’t afraid to “waste” everything he has to bring life to others. He scatters seed east and west, north and south — on believers and doubters, the ready and the hard-hearted, the pathway and the rocky ground and the thorns.

And every so often, that seed lands somewhere fertile, and takes root, and grows, and bears fruit for the kingdom.

What looks like waste to us is not waste at all.

It’s grace.

Lavish. Extravagant. Undeserved.

Will Willimon once asked why God didn’t just make one kind of flower — wouldn’t that have been miracle enough? But God made thousands of varieties, more than most of us will ever lay eyes on. Why waste all that beauty on people who’ll never see it? For the few who will. And think of all the quiet good done in this world that no one sees or measures. Why waste it? For the few who benefit from it.

That’s grace. God is a grace-guzzler.

And here’s the difference it makes: economics produces a faith centered on us and our own well-being. Grace produces a faith centered on others and theirs.

What in the world does God think he’s doing? What in the world does the Church think it’s doing? What in the world do we think we’re doing?

Saving the world. That’s what.

Because we are saved by grace, and grace alone.

Go and scatter some this week. Be reckless with it. Be wasteful with it. Spread it far past the point of good sense.

Some of it will land on fertile soil.

And God will win a soul.

RELATED SERMONS:

“Overcoming the Big with the Little” – Luke 17:1-10 (Year C, Proper 22)