Parable of the Sower, Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

I doubt if many people these days remember Kenneth Horne, the radio entertainer. His first great success was “Much Binding in the Marsh” which began in 1947; he then went on to star in “Beyond Our Ken and “Round the Horne”. These were very daring programmes for the period, packed full of suggestive lines and doubles-entendres. Somehow they managed to evade the BBC censors – perhaps Horne’s posh accent lulled them into a false sense of security!

“Beyond the Ken” ran for seven series and was rich in characters. These included Betty Marsden’s ‘Fanny Haddock’ (which parodied the television cook Fanny Craddock); Bill Pertwee’s Frankie Howerd impersonation ‘Hankie Flowered’, and Hugh Paddick’s working-class pop singer ‘Ricky Livid’. One favourite was Kenneth Williams’ country farmer, ‘Arthur Fallowfield’, whose lines were full of innuendo and double meanings – Horne once introduced him as the man who “put the sex into Sussex”. But what we remember most is Fallowfield’s reply to every question: “Well, I think the answer lies in the soil!”

Alan Titchmarsh (and none of us would dare argue with him!) agrees: “Great soil”, he says, is “the secret to a happy garden”. He tells us that there are six basic soil types. First comes clay soil, which is what we’ve got in our garden. It feels lumpy and sticky when it’s wet, but turns rock-hard when it dries out. Clay soil drains poorly, has few spaces in its structure for air, warms up slowly in the spring and is heavy to cultivate. However there is good news too, as it does retain nutrients which plants can use for growth. Sandy soil is almost the complete opposite: it drains so freely that plants rapidly dry out and die. This soil warms up quickly in the spring and it’s easy to work. But it contains few nutrients and these are all-too-easily washed away in wet weather; that’s why sandy soil is often called a “hungry” soil.

Well, I don’t intend to give you a rundown on gardening science this morning, especially as I confine my own activities to pruning and mowing the lawn! But you might like to know that the other four soil types are silty, acidic, alkaline (which is often stony), and finally loamy, which is by far the best of all. To quote Alan Titchmarsh again: “Consider yourself very lucky if that’s what you’ve got in your garden”!

I guess that the soil conditions faced by a first century Palestinian peasant farmer were rather different to the ones I’ve just mentioned. His first challenge may have been with the hard-packed soil that lay between the cultivated strips of ground and got repeatedly walked on by farmers and passers-by. A seed that fell there had no chance of penetrating the earth and growing; in fact, it became nothing more than bird feed because the sparrows and crows could easily get to it.

The shallow soil, on the other hand, looked fine. But it only consisted of a thin layer of earth laid on top of an underlying shelf of limestone. That sort of ground would warm quickly with the sun’s heat, and the plants sown in it would initially do very well. But, of course, as the plant sent down its roots in search of nourishment and moisture, it would meet only the hard rock and eventually be starved to death. The soil may have looked good: but that was ultimately an illusion.

The other types of soil in our parable don’t require much explanation. We can all understand an area of ground which has been infested by weeds. Even after we’ve cleared the undergrowth there are still many seeds lying dormant in the soil; when that’s disturbed by ploughing and sowing, they sprout up and smother our fragile seedlings. In the fertile soil, however, clean and properly drained and full of nutrients, our seeds can do astonishingly well. The people listening to Jesus would have chuckled to themselves, though, for it was unheard of for a crop to ever multiply itself 100, 60 or 30 times: apparently the average crop yield in those days was less than eight to one. In fact getting anything harvest at all was quite an achievement!

I wonder if the way I’ve started today’s message has been a bit of a surprise. That’s because we usually call this story “the parable of the sower”. Well, that’s perfectly understandable (after all, it does begin by saying that “a man went out to sow”, and we all like a story with human interest); but we need to realise that the sower isn’t actually its focus. All he does is toss his seed onto the ground in what’s called “broadcast” sowing, very wasteful when compared to the sophisticated, computerised and GPS-guided ways in which  farmers plant seed today. But Jesus isn’t teaching his audience about farming methods; indeed, many of them probably knew more about agriculture than he did! His focus is on the soil into which those seeds fell; although the seeds were all identical the harvests were dramatically different.

This is one of the few parables that Jesus actually explained. As I said last week, he used them to get his audience thinking: an approach which sometimes leaves us scratching our heads in frustration! Here we are explicitly told that the seed is God’s word; the fact that it is broadcast so indiscriminately (and hopefully) has been taken as a sign of God’s generosity to all people. Indeed it’s been suggested that some of Jesus’ hearers, all of them Jewish of course, might have been quite angry at the implication that God was offering his word was to all people, not just those of his chosen race. That’s an avenue which I don’t intend to go down this morning although we do know that the New Testament shows Christianity breaking the boundaries of its Jewish origin and starting to become a universal and worldwide faith.

What I do want to do, however, is go slightly “off-piste” and think of the many “seeds” – not just God’s words – which get sown in our minds. Here I’m thinking particularly of little Sioned who will be exposed to many influences and words– we could call them “seed thoughts” – as she grows up. These, as they fall into her young mind, will germinate and grow and shape her into the adult she will one day become. I’m sure we’d agree that a child’s mind is fertile soil in which values and attitudes easily take root; this means that parents, friends and teachers must be careful in what they say or do as they may unwittingly be sowing “weeds” which will restrict or strangle the good growth. There’s a well-known verse in Proverbs which says, “Train children in the way they should go: and when they are old, they will not depart from it”, this may need to be countered by another verse from Ephesians: “Parents, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord”.

We can extend this idea of seed-sowing beyond children and into many areas of life. Jesus talks about “sowing God’s word” into society and I’d say that that means more than overt evangelism, important as it is in a time when fewer and fewer people are conversant with even the best-known Bible stories. Many of us older folk grew up on these stories, whether at home or at Day- or Sunday School; church-going today is much more of a minority activity which means that there is definitely a place for direct and public proclamation of the Christian message, although I’m not at all sure how this can best be done.

But I think there’s more to seed-sowing than the telling of Bible stories and Christ’s good news: I’m sure that God also wants us Christians to bring Bible-based values and understandings into the serious conversations we may have with our colleagues and companions. For instance, if we’re complaining about the cost of living and its unequal effect on the rich and the poor, could we mention what Jesus said about wealth and possessions? If we’re discussing climate change and the environment, could we bring God’s command to be good stewards of his creation? If we’re chatting about those small boats, refugees and migration, should we quote the Old Testament mandate about hospitality to strangers? – as the Bishop of Durham and the former Archbishop of Canterbury have both done in recent days? We cannot (and must not) expect God’s word to be the only one that is spoken in a multifaith and secular world, and it’s not down to us whether people receive or reject it, whether that seed falls on good or poor soil. But we definitely have the responsibility of sowing it.

So we’re back at the soil. And I’d like to finish not just with a plea that we be diligent sowers of God’s word, but also with a challenge for us to make sure that our own minds are good soil in which his word will easily find a place and grow. Those who were here last week may remember Jesus’ condemnation of people who had closed their eyes and hardened their hearts to everything that he was doing and saying amongst them; we could parallel them to the hard-baked soil in which the sower’s seed couldn’t even begin to grow. Are we like that? Or have we allowed ourselves to be obsessed with insignificant frivolities and pleasures which have choked our spiritual vitality and become more important than our discipleship? Or are we so shallow-minded that we skip from thought to thought but never really think our faith through? All those attitudes of mind are found in this little tale.

When we moved into our present house, the garden was in a terrible state as the previous owners had basically used it as a run for their dog.  The soil was heavy, sticky and lifeless, so things would clearly have to change if we were to have a successful garden. Well, I must be honest: we got men in to do the heavy work of enlarging the flower-beds and relaying the patio. They even brought in two tons of topsoil, but that wasn’t enough. We went up to the Dutch Garden Centre and bought many bags of “soil improver” – basically wood chippings – to open up the soil structure. We added compost, manure and grit, all of which I had to dig in; we even contemplated buying in some worms! By the end (and I haven’t even mention aerating the lawn with a fork) my back ached all over; but it was worth it. And we’ve mulched every year since then with the result that, although our soil is by no means perfect, it’s a good deal better than it was six years ago.

I’m sure that God wants to sow the seed of his words into the soil of our hearts and minds; we may need to expend time improving them for that to happen well. But, when we’ve done it, then we too will be sowers, and God will be able to reap in our lives an amazing harvest of goodness.