By Reverend Laurie DeMott

So let’s begin. Part 1:

1. Name two of the three men who were awarded the Nobel prize for Economic Science last year.

2. Name two Heiseman Trophy winners ….. from the 1990s. (By the way, the Heiseman trophy is given out for college football, if that helps.)

3. Name three directors that won Oscars for any movie made in the 1970s.

4. Name Time magazine’s Person of the Year …. when you were ten years old

I’m guessing that so far there are a lot of blank papers so let’s move on to Part 2 and see if your scores improve.

1. Name two teachers who aided your journey through high school.

2. Name three friends who have helped you through difficult times in the past.

3. Name a person who taught you a new skill.

4. Who was your best friend when you were ten years old?

How’d you do? Did anyone get any of the answers to part 1? I’m sure that the competitive types among you want me to give you the answers to Part 1 so that you can check yourselves – especially if you actually knew some of the more obscure answers like the names of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences – but the fact is, I don’t really know the answers. I mean, I googled the questions to make sure there were answers but I didn’t write them down because if you haven’t guessed by now, the purpose of this quiz is not really to test your fund of knowledge. It’s to point out the difference in difficulty between part 1 and part 2. While we might throw up our hands and say, “How am I supposed to remember the Heiseman trophy winners from twenty years ago?”, it’s easy for us to remember teachers that we had twenty years ago. Friends who helped us through tough times, people who taught us new skills, our childhood teachers and best friends leap readily to mind even if we haven’t thought about those people in twenty years, thirty years, or half a century ago. Moreover, thinking about them again brings a smile to our faces and makes us feel good. In fact, this is probably a very dangerous way to start my sermon because I may lose many of you who, instead of listening to what I have to say, are going to spend the next fifteen minutes remembering that friend you had when you were ten and re-living in your mind all the stuff you did together. But try to stay with me!

Our society likes to celebrate achievement, and every sport and discipline has a form of acknowledging the best of the best. Whether it is the Grammy Awards or baseball’s MVP, the Pulitzer prize or Forbes richest people in America list, we regularly trumpet the accomplishments of people at the top of their profession. We have heated debates with co-workers about who deserves to win the Wooden Award for best player in college basketball. We rush home to watch the final episode of “American Idol”. Winners become instant celebrities: they work the talk show circuit and grace the covers of magazines, but for all of the excitement, in the short space of a few years – sometimes just a few months – most of us won’t even be able to recall their names! The people we do remember – the people whose faces come readily to our minds and who easily traverse the decades – are the people who taught us, the people who loved us, the people who have shaped who we have become. Part 1 of the quiz is tough because it asks us to remember people who were flashes of bright light for a mere second in our vision but Part 2 of the quiz is easy because it asks us to remember the people who planted seeds in our hearts that took root, grew, and blossom still.

But let’s go back to that quiz for a second. What would happen if I took the questions in part 2 and flipped them around? When I asked you to name two teachers who aided your journey through school, for example, what would happen if I went to those two teachers and asked them to name a student that they had helped. Do you think that they would have named you?

Maybe. Maybe some of you had unique mentor-mentee relationships with certain teachers but most of us know that we remember our teachers much better than they remember us because we were just one of hundreds of kids who passed through their doors. And even if they do remember us, they can’t be certain of how many of their lessons really took root, how many of their words live on in us and in other students now grown. How could Mr. Rinefleish, my Driver Ed teacher when I was 17, possibly know that 36 years later I still hear his voice every time I parallel park? Teachers might hope, but they cannot know. All they can do is sow the seeds and trust that something will find fertile soil to grow.

Bishop George Anderson of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, once reminded his congregation that even if we cannot always see the results of our work, it doesn’t mean there are no results. He said, “I once sat at a table in Germany with a group of air force chaplains as they relaxed and traded stories about military bases around the world where they had served. It turned out that two of them had served on the same base, one after the other. Naturally, they soon began to play ‘Did you know so-and-so on that base?’ Among the names they knew in common, one couple stood out. The chaplain who had been on that base first described the difficulties and despair those two people had wrestled with. He ended by saying, ‘I worked with them as best I could, but nothing seemed to help. I wonder if they are still together.’

"'Together?' the second chaplain said, ‘You should see them now. They are the mainstays of our program there, and they speak so highly of the way your words made a difference in their lives.’". The sower sowed the seed and it yielded a hundredfold.

Last week, I preached on Jesus’ command to dust off your feet. I said that we cannot rescue the entire world but can only offer our help and give people the freedom to accept or reject it. So too, the parable of the sower teaches a similar lesson in its story of a man who sows an awful lot of seeds that never sprouts. Seeds wither in the sun; seeds are eaten by birds; seeds are choked by thorns. The warning of last week’s passage that you can’t save the world at first feels even bleaker in this parable when you do the math. Jesus warns that ¾ of the seed the sower sowed never took root. That’s a lot of slammed doors in your face and an awful lot of dust you are going to have to wipe off your feet! But Jesus doesn’t want us to focus on the ¾ of the seed that fails – he wants us to fix our eyes on the ¼ of the seed that takes root.

“Look at that seed,” he exclaims. “In the end, it will yield 30, 60, even a hundredfold! So don’t give up; keep sowing.

We have probably all heard a million sermons on this parable that focus on the types of soil that Jesus’ describes:

“Are you rocky soil?” the minister asks, “Is your heart as cold as stone? Do you need to clear the thorns out of your life so that God’s word can take root?” I’ve got to confess that when I read this parable, I’m not really captivated by those horticultural questions of proper soil preparation.. What I love in the story is the picture Jesus’ paints of this man striding doggedly across the field sowing his seed with abandon. When he gets to the path where most of us would take a break, he keeps sowing. When the field gets rocky, he doesn’t miss a beat. When the thorns pull at his feet, he strides on, his hand continually reaching into his bag and throwing out that seed. It’s as if he can’t stop sowing; as if he is determined to sow that seed anywhere and everywhere just in case there is a little good soil unseen to the eye where one seed might just take root. See the problem is that we hear this parable and in our mind’s eye, we divide the field up into these neatly defined quadrants – rocks in the north forty, thorns in the south forty, hard path to the west, and nice fertile soil to the east – and then we ask, “Which quadrant do you belong to? but Jesus doesn’t say the field is neatly divided. I mean, the world isn’t neatly divided. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was? “Over there in the north forty, that’s where we keep all of the block heads and there in the south forty are the self-centered greedy types. You’ll want to stay away from that section.” How easily we could sail through life if we had a map showing us where all the good-natured friendly folk live and we could just head that way but the world is a jumble of good and bad. For crying out loud, our own hearts are a jumble of good and bad and if we segregated the world into sections like that, we’d be constantly packing and unpacking as we moved from self-centered to loving to blockhead and back to self-centered again!

So let’s take a close at that field as Jesus might have meant us to see it. The good soil is all mixed in there with the rocks and the thorns and the hard trodden earth, but it doesn’t matter that the field is a mess. That sower is determined to find the good soil wherever it might be hiding. He will sow and sow and sow some more in the hope that even one seed might burrow down into a crevice between some of those hard rocks and find a home where it can grow. And when it does, Jesus promises, its beauty and bounty will make all of the failures fade into insignificance.

Jesus’ parable of the sower tells us to be patient and persistent. Maybe ¾ of what you do won’t make a difference but that ¼ that does will make all the rest worth it. You may not win a Nobel prize or make Forbes top ten list but you might just change the world in ways you can never know, may never even see, because you were stubborn enough to persist in sowing kindness and love in even the most unlikely of conditions.

I want to end with another parable told by John Dillenger in an issue of the Atlantic Monthly about the days of the great western cattle rancher. The article said: "[In those days, when the ranchers had a wild horse they needed to break, they would often harness it to a little burro.] Bucking and raging, convulsing like drunken sailors, the two would be turned loose like Laurel and Hardy to proceed out onto the desert range. They could be seen disappearing over the horizon, the great steed dragging that little burro along and throwing him about like a bag of cream puffs. They might be gone for days, but eventually they would come back [and when they returned,] the little burro would be seen first, trotting back across the horizon, leading the submissive steed in tow. Somewhere out there on the rim of the world, that steed would become exhausted from trying to get rid of the burro, and in that moment, the burro would take mastery and become the leader. And that is the way it is with the kingdom and its heroes, isn't it? The battle is to the determined, not to the outraged; to the committed, not to those who are merely dramatic.”

We are the burros, we are the determined sowers, out there tramping across the fields stubbornly sowing seeds of kindness, and persisting in our acts of compassion even in the most unlikely of circumstances. While others whine and rage, hate and fume at the injustice of the world, we doggedly work on insisting on believing that there is good soil to be found in every heart – yes even our enemies. While others collapse in despair at the folly of it all, we walk on, committed to God’s promise that there is always resurrection on the other side of the tomb. The battle is to the determined, not to the outraged; to the committed, not to those who are merely dramatic. We will not win the Nobel prize for our efforts nor will our faces ever grace the covers of Time magazine, but we will be remembered perhaps in ways we will never know. The seeds of kindness and compassion that you sow in dogged persistence will occasionally fall in just the right place at just the right time to burrow down into someone’s aching heart where it will take root and begin to grow quietly, eventually producing thirty fold, sixty fold, even a hundred fold. You may never see it, you may never know of it, but believe it because this is the promise of your God, the God of persistent, steadfast, dogged, and ever abundant love. Amen.

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1. This quiz is based on a quiz that a blogger claimed illustrated the philosophy of Charles Shultz, creator of “Peanuts”. It was not clear whether Shultz himself wrote the original quiz or the blogger. I’ve modified it quite a bit anyway.

2. http://day1.org/891-and_the_seed_will_grow