Upside Down Kingdom: Seeds

Aug 16, 2015 by: Sam Hestorff| Series: Upside Down Kingdom
Scripture: Matthew 13:1–13:23

What does your relationship with God look like? I know that's a personal question, but it's one I want you to consider as we continue this series about living in the tension where God’s kingdom intersects with our kingdom.
Some of you chose to follow Jesus a long time ago and - like all relationships - it's had its up and downs, but if we went out for coffee or something, you could go on and on about who God is and how you're connected to Jesus.
Others would say you don't have a relationship with God or maybe that you believe in God, but you're not sure about this whole Church thing.
And then there are the rest of us, somewhere on this spectrum. We believe in God. We've chosen to follow Jesus. And we're trying to figure out what it means to be a part of the Kingdom of God.
And over this summer, we've been listening to the stories that Jesus told about God’s kingdom.
And today’s story is all about our relationship with God . . . about how we're all in different places on that journey. With this story, Jesus calls us to examine our lives and determine what is keeping us from fully embracing God's new life . . . the upside kingdom.
A word of warning: Jesus' culture was agrarian, so he used a lot of farming metaphors. I'm not much of a farmer, so if you're not either, don't worry. We'll dig at it together.
READ Matthew 13
So we have a farmer who's out sowing seed. Ancient farmers wore sacks around their torsos, and they walked their fields casting out the seed.
In Jesus' day, this would've been a very familiar image - most of his listeners had probably done this very thing at some point in their lives.
The seed falls on four different kinds of soils, with four different results. A couple of details stick out:
• First, the sower is very irresponsible with the seed. In a time, when rain and sun were unreliable and crop yields unpredictable, every seed was precious. Each seed represented potential food and income for your family. So farmers were very careful with their seed and they did everything that was in their power to give their seed the best chance to grow.
Not this farmer. He's out in his fields, got his ipod on shuffle, jamming to tunes and just throwing seed to the wind. Any of Jesus' early listeners would've marveled (or scoffed) at this farmer's generosity (or recklessness) with his seed.

• The other surprising detail is the yield of the good soil - 30, 60 or 100 times what was planted. For these farmers, the best yield they would ever hope for would be 30 times as much grain as was planted. A 30-fold harvest would be so huge, so big and so rare that it'd be the one all other harvest would be compared to.
But this farmer gets a minimum of thirty? That’s just crazy.
So we have an irresponsible (or generous) farmer who's rewarded with an unimaginable (or miraculous) harvest. Which is really cool . . . but what does all of this mean?
To understand, we have to put in to its context . . .
Jesus is this “rockstar” Rabbi . . . very popular, lots of friends on facebook, packs out the house every time he speaks . . . He’s been preaching and teaching, and healing and casting out demons . . . and everywhere He went, thousands of people followed him and they are really excited about what he is doing. They resonate with his words and they love his compassion for people. They think that this is a great movement that is going to change the world and they want to be a part of it.
And so Jesus, seeing the crowds, goes out on a boat and he sits down to begins to teach them. Now when a Rabbi sits, it means that he’s getting ready to tell you something very important. So, I would imagine that everyone was shushing each other.
And then he begins telling them this story about this irresponsible farmer who is throwing seed all over the place . . . and I’m sure that there were a lot of people in the crowd thinking to themselves, “What is he talking about?”
In fact, the disciples wanted to know . . . but I love that they try to play it off.
“Jesus, some of the . . . uh . . . other people were wondering why you use parables instead of just coming right out and saying something. We definitely get what you're saying. But why don't you tell us so we can go tell them.”
So Jesus tells them why he uses parables, and it's pretty shocking: he quotes what God told the prophet Isaiah to claim that his parables are intentionally confusing and that they are the perfect delivery system for his teachings.
• Jesus knows that there will always be people who aren't interested in God's Kingdom - usually people with too much to lose. So, if you don't want to hear him, then you can write them off as cute stories about being a good person - not terribly different from fables or fairy tales.

• But if you really want to be a part of God's Upside down Kingdom, if you're hungry for something new, the parables are an invitation to wrestle with how willing you are to welcome God's coming.
In other words, the parables make you work for it.
Here's where Jesus' farming metaphor starts to pay off. Because any farmer or gardener knows that cultivating life isn't push-button. It takes careful, constant attention; Lots of love and care and work.
And Jesus says that his parables - and God's kingdom - are the same. If you want it, you're going to have to work for it.
And that can be difficult for us to hear because we live in an age where easy is better. That's what advertisers know: the harder someone has to work at something, the less likely they are to stick with it.
If you want people to buy your product, you have to make it as easy as possible.
So we hear Jesus say, I teach using these stories so that all these people who are following me . . . have to work at it, and we want to rush to his side “You can't do that! If you make it too hard for people to come to God, they just won't”
And to us, as to his disciples, Jesus responds by explaining the story to us; Showing us how to do the hard work of digging at a parable.
As we explore his story, let's consider what sort of soil we are:
Here’s this farmer, just throwing seed all over the place and the seed falls on four different kinds of soils, with four different results.
The farmer is Jesus himself, sowing seed that is God’s kingdom.
That first soil, the hard, packed soil of the footpath, is those who are not open to God's kingdom; those who - like everyone else - receive the invitation to be a part of what God is doing but don't even consider it.
I'm confident a few of us here recognize this hard-packed soil in our own hearts. You hear about Jesus and God’s kingdom and honestly, all it really does is cause you to question it.
Many of the more intellectually curious among us have been told the Church isn't a place for questions, that faith has no room for doubt, that doubt and God are enemies.
To you, may I say that faith and doubt are not enemies; In fact, my own doubts and questions have deeply strengthened my faith.
Ask your questions. Doubt your answers. But also know that, evidence can only take you so far. Every life requires faith.
The rocky soil is also familiar to us, and it demonstrates the danger of that cheap, easy faith. An easy faith is quickly embraced and just as quickly discarded . . . because it's not real. It doesn't have roots. The life we have in Christ doesn't actually have any substance.
The rocky soil is a faith that is all about emotion, and mountain top experiences and entertaining worship services and bouncing from one church to another, just trying to be a part of the next new and exciting thing in town.
But like a cheap ring that turns your finger green the day after you got it . . . a faith that costs too little soon reveals itself as shallow and false.
And so when we experience the pain that life always brings, and when all that joy and excitement that you were experiencing just can’t be found . . . we just walk away from God and his Church . . . usually shaking our fists.
Some of us have lied to ourselves, claiming that God loves us so much that if you just ask Jesus into your heart then you get some kind of special protection from bad things.
But Jesus never made such promises. He said, if you want to follow me, pick up a cross and let's get going. He said, if you want to find your life, you have to lose it. He said a shallow soil doesn't yield any harvest.
If the shallow soil doesn’t resonate with you then maybe the thorny soil will hit home. This soil is the most dangerous because it's healthy soil: plants grow in it very well. But this soil is full of weeds.
Jesus identifies them as the cares of the world and the lure of wealth.
Some of us know this soil all too well. We know what it feels like to be trapped in our lives, to want to follow Jesus but to be immobilized by mortgages and college funds and paychecks that don't seem to go far enough and the exhaustion of a schedule that never quits.
You're a good spouse, parent, friend, employee, and Christian. And that's the problem: there're so many good things in your life how can you possibly say no to any of them?
To you, Jesus says that when you allow anything to overshadow God's work in your heart, they become weeds. They choke out the new life God has birthed in you.
Any farmer or gardener can tell you that weeds are a constant, insidious danger. You pull them once only to return later that week to pull them again. Weeds require constant vigilance.
So it is with these good things in our lives. We must pay constant attention to how we are ordering our lives, ask if we are attentive to how the Spirit desires to form us wherever we are, whatever we're doing.
Not everything that grows is good. We must root out the weeds so that God's new creation can grow in our lives.
This final soil, then, stands as the promise for all of us hard, rocky and thorny soils. If we will do the hard work to cultivate the soil of our souls, then God's good news will take root in our lives.
But here is the most beautiful part of this story . . .

Jesus is the farmer, casting the gospel across the world with reckless extravagance. He's not worried there's not enough. He's not concerned that the wrong people might hear it because there's no such thing as a "wrong person" in God's Upside Down Kingdom.

Whoever you are, whatever the condition of your soul, God has cast his invitation to new life to you. It's free, but it's not easy.

  • To say yes to Jesus' gospel means to embrace both reckless faith and honest doubt.
  • To say yes to Jesus' invitation means enjoying the good times, the easy times, but it also means knowing that painful times come, and cultivating your life, your faith to weather that pain.
  • Embracing Jesus' new life means giving thanks for all the good things in your life but also recognizing that any of those good things can become potential weeds.

The good news is that if we are willing to cultivate our lives, God's new life will produce a miraculous harvest in our lives. We will become a miracle in our ordinary, everyday lives. The Gospel transforms every aspect of our lives.

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