(Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23)

Perhaps you saw the article in the AJC this past week.  A woman, who was pregnant at the time, recalled passing by the campus of Atlanta’s Morehouse College, years ago, while construction was under way, when her eyes suddenly fell upon a mound of red clay.  “My mouth watered,” she said.  In fact, she yearned to eat that clay, said the article; a craving she apparently had had since childhood.  Only now, during her pregnancy, she finally succumbed to it.  Not only that, but today – some 26 years later – she still consumes about 12 ounces of red clay every day!

This practice of eating clay, or dirt, while certainly not common, is not unheard of, however.  And while it most often affects children, women may also develop these unusual cravings during pregnancy.

In fact, the medical condition is called “pica” (pike-a), a term that comes from the Latin word for “magpie,” a type of bird known to eat almost anything.  And people with pica may eat everything from freezer frost to metal coins, said the article.  But the specific practice of eating clay or soil is called “geophagia” (jee-a-fay’-jee-a) or “earth eating.”

Most prevalent in rural, or preindustrial, societies, this craving or desire to eat “earthy” substances, such as clay, apparently develops as a way to augment a scanty or mineral-deficient diet.

Yet the practice endures to this day.

So at the Sweet Auburn Curb Market in downtown Atlanta, for instance, Ziploc bags filled with white chunks of “kaolin,” (Kale-in) that go for $1.49 a pound, are located behind the produce at one vendor, and next to the cigarettes and over-the-counter medications at another.

Kaolin, a type of clay found right here in Georgia, was also formerly the key ingredient in Kaopectate – the anti-diarrhea medicine.  And one of its side effects, apparently, is alleviating nausea; which, of course, is why it then might appeal to pregnant woman.

See – you can learn something new every day!  But eating dirt or clay?  Yechh!

On the other hand, it does remind me of the fact that, according to Genesis 2 at least, human beings were actually made from the earth.  “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7)  In fact, the name “Adam” literally means “man of the red earth.”

And then on Ash Wednesday, of course, when we receive that smudge in the shape of a cross on our foreheads, we are reminded, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Or, even in everyday parlance, when someone is plain and practical and unpretentious in their approach to life, what do we say?  We call them “earthy,” or “down-to-earth.”

I guess what I’m saying here is that, biblically and otherwise, we have something of a symbiotic relationship with the earth and with the soil.  For tens of thousands of years, in fact, we (meaning human beings) have toiled in it.  We have plowed and planted the earth, and then cultivated and harvested the crops that grew from it for our food and sustenance.

If there was one thing, therefore, that people down through the ages could understand and identify with, it was the soil; the soil from which (it was believed) they literally came; and the soil in which they labored for their very survival.

And so if there was one thing Jesus’ audiences could also easily understand and identify with, it was the soil as well.  In fact, in today’s gospel reading Jesus actually tells them that they, themselves, are soil; at least in terms of God’s Word working in their lives.  And he does so, through a parable…

But first, I think, we need to set up the context for this parable.  Dale Allison, a professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, does an excellent job reminding us of the flow of Matthew’s gospel.

For instance, the first four chapters of Matthew, says Professor Allison, introduce us to the main character, Jesus.  “They tell us who he is… how he came into the world, how his ministry got started, etc.”

Then we have chapters 5-7, commonly referred to as the Sermon on the Mount, which is a collection of Jesus’ ethical teachings.  Next come chapters 8-9 where the focus now shifts from “words” to “deeds” and we are introduced to Jesus’ acts of compassion and healing.  Following them is chapter 10, “the missionary discourse where Jesus commissions his disciples and instructs them to say what he has said and to do what he has done…”

Then these chapters on the words and deeds of Jesus (chapters 5-9) and the words and deeds of the disciples (chapter 10) lead up to chapters 11-12, which record primarily the response to both John the Baptist and Jesus.  “Unfortunately,” writes Professor Allison, “it all adds up to an indictment: many of the people, under the sway of their hard-hearted leaders, have decided not to join Jesus’ cause.”

This, then, finally leads us to chapter 13, and today’s gospel, where, according to Professor Allison, the burning question is:  “How is it that so many in Israel have rejected the Messiah?  That is, “How did his own (people) receive him not?”  And chapter 13, which opens with today’s gospel reading – the Parable of the Sower – then addresses this very issue.

But one last point, before we take a look at the parable itself.  In the verses that are not included in today’s reading (that is, verses 10-17), the main issue is the question of why Jesus chose to speak in parables in the first place.  Which then leads into a conversation, as well, about the relative difficulty of understanding Jesus’ parables.

Tom Long, who is a professor of preaching at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, claims that Jesus used these often “confusing” parables in order to force people to think more deeply about the meaning of the gospel.  In others words, Jesus did not want to have people grab the gospel too quickly because such a “quick grab” almost invariably results in a shallow faith that does not last – one of the points that Jesus actually makes, of course, within the Parable of the Sower itself.

To support this claim, Long tells the following story.  The great preacher, George Buttrick, was once flying on an airplane.  And as he sat there, he had a legal pad in front of him on which he was furiously scribbling some notes for Sunday’s sermon.

The man sitting in the seat next to Buttrick noticed this and inquired, “Say, what are you working on there, sir.”  Buttrick answered, “My sermon for Sunday – I’m a Christian preacher.”

“Oh,” the man replied.  “Well, I don’t like to get caught up in the complexities of religion.  I like to keep it simple.  You know, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’  The Golden Rule; that’s my religion.”

“I see,” said Buttrick, “and may I ask what do you do for a living?”  And the man responded, “Why, I’m an astronomer.  I teach astrophysics at a university.”

“Ah, yes, astronomy,” Buttrick shot back.  “Well, I don’t like to get too caught up in the complexities of science, myself.  ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.’  That’s my astronomy.  Who would ever need any more than that, eh?”

Touché.  Point well taken.  Shallowness of any kind, whether in religion or science, or anything else for that matter, is not a good thing.  And so it behooves us, this morning, to give Jesus’ parable here something more than a “quick going over.”

Although actually, at first, it’s really not too hard to understand.

“A sower went out to sow,” said Jesus.  Pretty straightforward, and it doesn’t take too much brain power to figure out that God is the sower here.  And that the seed he’s sowing is his Word.

The first problem, however – especially for modern listeners – is the apparent wastefulness of the sowing.  By that, I mean the sower appears to be throwing his seed around rather indiscriminately, doesn’t he?

Scott Hoezee writes that, today, we might have the same reaction if we heard a story about a farmer who hooked up his planter to the back of his tractor, but then threw the switch to activate the planter even before he was out of his driveway!  “There he is putt-putting down the country lane with corn seed scattering everywhere he goes.  It bounces on the road, some flies into the ditch.  When he finally gets near his field, he first has to cut through a weedy and thorny patch with corn seed still flying out loosey-goosey from that planter that, by all rights, had been switched on way too early.”

Hoezee’s point here, of course, is that no farmer in his right mind would be so careless in the scattering of valuable seed.  It would be the kind of wastefulness that a “frugal and economically-minded farmer would never tolerate.”

Yet, this is exactly what God chooses to do with the seed of his Word.  Jesus says that God is just such a foolish farmer.  “He’s got (apparently) more than enough seed to go around, and so throws it anywhere and everywhere, the odds of success notwithstanding.”

Now the ability of the seed to do what it was intended to do, even under adverse conditions, is something I want to come back to

a little later.  But what I’d like for us to focus on at this point, instead, is the third key element in the story after the sower and the seed; that is, the soil.

Four types of soil, of course, are mentioned: hard-packed soil, rocky, shallow soil, soil filled with thorns, and finally good soil.  And as he sat there in that boat, looking at the crowds packed along the shoreline, it was as if (someone has noted) Jesus was able to “scan” their hearts with a kind of “spiritual MRI.”  In other words, he could see “the hard hearts, the shallow hearts, the thorny hearts, and the pure and unencumbered hearts.”  And so to such an audience he now tells his story…

The “hard-packed soil” on the path is those “hard-hearted” people, isn’t it?  People who have completely shut their hearts and minds to the possibility of God working in their midst.  In Jesus’ day these were undoubtedly the people who found it difficult, if not impossible, to conceive that God might be doing something new and wonderful in the world through his Son, Jesus Christ.

In our own time, it’s perhaps a little different.  The hard-hearted people, in our day, are more likely to be the people who have completely ceased to believe in the possibility that God even exists, much less can actually make a difference in their lives.

Recent best-selling books, written by self-proclaimed atheists, who attempt to make the age-old claim that there simply is no God, are just one example.  But hardness of heart can also be found among those who reject God on intellectual grounds, as well; those who mistakenly believe that a commitment to knowledge or to science somehow precludes any kind of faith.  And, sadly, it can also be found among those people who have been hurt deeply in life, sometimes by the church itself, and now they wonder – even if there is a God – how such a God could have allowed these things to have happened to them in the first place…

Next there’s the “rocky, shallow” soil.  Then, as now, people can often get “side-tracked” by the superficial things in life.  Two items in the news in recent days caught my attention.  One is that the latest statistics show that while serious skin cancer has decreased among young men, it has actually increased among young women.  The reasons aren’t completely clear yet, but the greater likelihood for young women to want to be tan in the first place, even frequenting tanning salons during the winter in order to keep their tans year round, has been cited as one of the possibilities.  The other news item are the reports that people were lining up all over the country, even waiting for days in some cases, in order to buy the new iPhone that has just hit the market.

At a time when global warming, the risk of terrorism, the horror of genocide on the African continent, the AIDS pandemic, rapidly rising gas and food prices, the collapse of the housing and now the banking industries in our own country, all threaten the world and life as we know it, it never ceases to amaze me just how silly and shallow and superficial we can be, at times, as a society.  That is, staying tan and having the latest techno-toy are apparently more important, for many of us, than any of these above-mentioned threats to our planet and to our existence.  Furthermore, there was actually more press coverage, it seemed, of Christie Brinkley’s nasty celebrity divorce than there was over the travesty of justice and threat to democracy and self-rule perpetrated by Robert Mugabe’s regime over in Zimbabwe.

Shallowness, or the lack of real depth in one’s life, is a serious issue, of course, when the tough times come.  Edward Markquart, a Lutheran pastor who grew up in Minnesota, tells the story of working as a canoe guide during his college summers.  And among those they would take on these canoe trips were reform-school kids who had gotten in trouble with the law.  Tough and worldly on the outside, they, nevertheless, had very little experience when it came to the outdoors.

Markquart relates that they would often camp beneath tall pine trees, some reaching 65 feet in height.  But when storms would come and the winds would blow, they would hurriedly get the tents and canoes away from these tall trees.

The reform-school kids would naturally ask why.  And Markquart would tell them, “Because it’s dangerous.  Underneath all this ground is solid granite; and the top soil is only a few inches deep, which means that when the wind comes, it blows these 65 foot tall pine trees right over because they don’t have any roots.

It’s the same with some people, says Markquart.  Inside they’re just as shallow, they don’t have any deep roots, and so when the hard times come – and they will, for all of us – they simply can’t stand up to them.

The third kind of soil is filled with thorns and weeds.  Scott Hoezee says these people “are just plain busy and crowded.” He writes, “These hearts are neither calloused nor shallow.  In fact, there is some real depth to them.  Lots of stuff grows here.  But in the end, it’s too much.  The seed of the gospel comes in and sprouts just fine, but faces stiff competition for light and warmth and nutrients.”

Hoezee goes on to suggest that concerns about 401k retirement plans, Roth IRAs, the kid’s college fund, and their stock market portfolios “absorb a lot of nutrients from the soil of their hearts.”  In addition, youth sports, community involvement, the PTA at school, politics, neighborhood associations and socializing with friends – and it’s mostly all good stuff – still makes people busy, often too busy, he contends.  And so the seed of the gospel simply gets choked out…

Finally, of course, there’s the “good” soil, the soil in which God’s Word can sprout and grow and produce the kind of “fruit” Jesus hoped his followers would always produce.  But these aren’t very good odds, are they?  One out of four; only one soil out of four soils (according to Jesus’ story) produces the kind of growth God is looking for.  Remember, just a little less than one out of four at the plate got Jeff Francoeur sent down to the minors.  And the truth is: it’s not such a hot batting average for Christians either…

And then, of course, we have the inevitable question, don’t we?  Which is simply: What kind of soil am I?  Am I the kind of person who’s become so jaded, or has been hurt so deeply at some point that my heart has been completely “hardened” against the possibility of God working in my life?  Or am I a “shallow” sort of person who jumps at every latest fad, and takes my cues in life from celebrities and whatever else is the most popular thing going at the moment?  Or is my life just so busy, even with good things sometimes, that faith doesn’t even have a chance to grow?  Or is it somehow possible that I am basically “good soil”; that the seed of God’s Word has actually found a place in my heart and, even as we speak, is growing in my life?

The tendency – and the temptation – of course, is to assume that it has to be one of these four possibilities; that we’re either hard-packed, shallow, thorn-infested, or good soil, and that’s it.  One of the above, and nothing else.

But what I would suggest to you this morning is that you and I have been all of the above at one time or another.  That there have indeed been times when our heart was hardened, or times when we have been shallow and superficial, and other times when we were just too busy for God, and yet also times when we were prepared for and even receptive to God’s Word – and that it, therefore, found a home in our hearts.

So the real question then, for me, is not simply “What kind of soil am I?” but rather “What kind of soil am I… today?”  The realization and acceptance of the fact that we are not always good soil for God’s Word, that we actually fall victim to those soil conditions that make it next to impossible for God’s Word to take root.  But also that the soil of our hearts changes as we change, and as we face the various challenges and temptations and difficulties of life.  Which takes us back to the ability of the seed to do what it’s intended to do; a topic I said we’d get back around to… eventually.

I once came across a story about some archeologists who were excavating, a number of years ago, in the courtyard of a medieval monastery.  And during the period of time while they were digging, some seeds that had been dormant for over 400 years had actually begun to grow.  King Henry VIII had closed this particular monastery back in 1539, and the herbs tended by the monks had died.  But now they had sprouted to life again after the archeologists has disturbed the earth in which they were buried.

The point is this: if seeds in nature can do it, why can’t the seed of God’s Word?  In other words, if we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that sometimes we’re not very good soil for God’s Word to take root in and grow.  Maybe even for a long time, we aren’t.  But then something happens, something to change our heart and our mind, and the seed that has lied dormant in our lives suddenly, and finally, begins to sprout.  When that happens, it’s called grace.

Fred Craddock, another well-known preacher, tells a story about the time he got a phone call from a woman whose father had just died.  She had been a teenager in one of the churches he had served as pastor some 20 years before, and he would have sworn that if there ever was a person who never heard a word he said – it was that teenage girl!  She was always giggling with her friends in the balcony, passing notes to boys, and drawing pictures on her bulletins.

But yet when her father died, she had looked up her old pastor and gave him a call.  “I don’t know if you remember me,” she began.  “Oh, yes, I remember,” thought Craddock.  “When my daddy died, I thought I was going to come apart,” she continued.  “I cried

and cried and cried.  I didn’t know what to do.  But then – I remembered something you said in one of your sermons…”

And, at this, Craddock was simply stunned.  She had actually remembered something he had said in one of his sermons?  It was proof enough to him that you can never tell how the seed will fall, or where it might even take root.

Maybe it’s also a reminder of why the farmer in Jesus’ parable kept lobbing seeds at even the unlikeliest of targets.  As Scott Hoezee writes, “It’s not that the farmer doesn’t understand the long odds.  It’s just that when you’re talking about salvation by grace, it’s not finally about the odds, but about the persistence of the Holy One who won’t stop (trying).  Ever.”  Amen