“The Hundredfold Harvest”

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

How appropriate this morning’s text is today, the day when we commission our Mission Trip participants prior to their journey to the Atlanta area to work with immigrants, many of whom have never heard the Gospel. Today’s text and this sermon are together a four-fold reminder that: One: not every heart is receptive to the good news of Jesus, Two: even those seeds that take root do not always yield an immediate harvest, Three: the harvest is ultimately in God’s hands not ours, and Four: the seeds of the Gospel can produce a bountiful harvest even in the most unlikely places.

To reinforce them, let us turn to the words of the Apostle Paul as found in I Corinthians 3:6 and 7: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” God is in control. Our task is to sow the seeds and place the growth of them in his hands.

And as we sow these seeds we should not focus on good efforts that fail, but celebrate the abundant harvest that is produced. Some words of wisdom from J. David Waugh and Ted Wardlaw. Wrote Dr. Waugh, “… the kingdom of heaven is like a bountiful crop produced in spite of what seem to be overwhelming setbacks.” Wrote Dr. Wardlaw, “… is [there] any place or circumstance in which God’s seed cannot sprout and take root?”

As we sow the seeds – as we share the Gospel – we must do so in faith, always trusting the outcome to our God, a God of abundance not scarcity. Wrote Tabitha J. Arnold, “This passage is often called the parable of the Sower, sometimes the parable of the Soils. Maybe it should be called the Hundredfold Harvest. Even if the harvest were only thirtyfold, this story would end with a miracle. Sevenfold meant a good year for a [Judean] farmer, and tenfold meant true abundance. Thirtyfold would feed a village for a year and a hundredfold would let the farmer retire to a villa by the Sea of Galilee.”

Sevenfold is good. Tenfold is abundant. Thirtyfold is spectacular. A hundredfold is beyond comprehension. Maybe a lot of the seeds will never sprout or take root, but those that do often yield miraculous returns. As evangelists – as those who sow the seeds of the Gospel – our focus needs to be on such God-given abundance rather than the failures that are part and parcel of Christian discipleship. We also need to remember that rejection of the Gospel makes neither the Gospel message wrong nor our efforts to proclaim it foolish. Rejection is simply a fact of life. It happens.

Our focus needs to be on the abundant gifts of God, including the gifts of faith and fruitful discipleship. As novelist Bebe Moore Campbell writes, “Some of us have empty-barrel faith. Walking around expecting things to run out. Expecting that there isn’t enough air, enough water. Expecting that someone is going to do you wrong. The God I serve told me to expect the best, that there is enough for everybody.” We cannot do evangelism, or carry out any other facet of discipleship, from a negative perspective. We have to joyfully and expectantly believe that God will use our efforts, feeble though they may be, to advance his Kingdom. It bears repeating: we are to sow in faith and leave the results in God’s hands.

The text makes it clear that evangelism is a high-risk endeavor. We scatter as many seeds as we can in as many places as we can, knowing that many will be rejected. Adding to the risks of evangelism is the reality that all of it is out of our control. We have no control over how people respond to the Gospel. We have no control over how God ultimately uses our efforts.

But we modern Christians in America and other places still insist in trying to exercise control, to make ministry and mission as risk-free as possible. We do that by trying to manage both the process and its outcome. It is, after all, the American way. This way is described thusly by Ted Wardlaw: “If you ever set out to plant a new church, plant it in a carefully scrutinized, sure-to-grow neighborhood. If you ever decide to develop a new missionary opportunity, choose one where the odds are good and the possibilities are promising. If you ever decide to double your church’s membership, then craft your message for a promising demographic and reach out to people who are motivated and purposeful and driven enough to receive and do something with it. Be strategic about location – like any self-respecting hamburger [franchise] or gas station or grocery chain – and maximize your effort toward the arena of greatest result. Find the good soil and throw seed on it! It’s just good business.”

I recently read Eugene Peterson’s autobiography The Pastor. In it he is scathingly critical of the minister as manager approach. Some choice quotes: “They could use advertising techniques to create an image of church as a place where Christians and their friends could mix with successful and glamorous people… Marketing research quickly developed to show just what people wanted in terms of God and religion. As soon as pastors knew what it was, they could give it to them… The ink on my ordination papers wasn’t even dry before I was being told by experts, so-called, in the field of church that my main task was to run a church after the manner of my brother and sister Christians who run service stations, grocery stores, corporations, banks, hospitals, and financial services. Many of them wrote books and gave lectures on how to do it. I was astonished to learn in one of those best-selling books that the size of my church parking lot had far more to do with how things fared in my congregation than my choice if texts in preaching. I was being lied to and I knew it… This pragmatic vocational embrace of American technology and consumerism that promised to rescue congregations from ineffective obscurity violated everything – scriptural, theological, experiential – that had formed my identity as a follower of Jesus and as a pastor… It was a blasphemous desecration of the way of life to which the church had ordained me…”

Discipleship is not a business. Evangelism is a lot more than good marketing. We cannot pre-package our missionary efforts in ways that guarantee success. True discipleship is about faithfulness not success. Sometimes we are called to plant churches in the riskiest of neighborhoods. Sometimes we are sent out to be missionaries in places that are obviously hostile to the Gospel. Sometimes we take off on short-term mission trips to do ministry among people who have never heard about Jesus. We plan. We prepare. But we have no idea how either we or our message will be received. It’s called stepping out in faith; sowing the seed as best we can and trusting the results to God, never forgetting that our God works miracles.

As a denomination the PC(USA) needs to start doing the same thing. The old notions of new church development no longer work. We have neither the time nor the resources to scout out sites in the right neighborhoods with the right demographics and then invest a lot of years and a lot of dollars in building an attractive church plant. It’s time we took some lessons from our Baptist brothers and sisters.

The Southern Baptists have for years been planting new churches knowing that over half of them will fail. They know that much of their seed is going to fall on rocky ground, but still they sow it. Why? Because they trust that the God of abundance will bless 40% of their efforts with seven-, thirty-, and even one hundred-fold growth.

We Presbyterians are just now figuring out how to plant churches on faith, sometimes in unlikely places. We’re finally beginning to scatter the Gospel seed more widely, with less rigidly defined parameters of what a new church development should look like. We’re more and more stepping out in faith, no longer depending on our tried and trusted ecclesial safety nets to catch us if we fall. Some plant. Some water. All trust the growth to God.

To quote Jesus, “Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold…” Some seeds fall on good soil. But it’s not our prerogative to either designate or define this good soil. We scatter the seeds. We share the Gospel, never forgetting the words of Ted Wardlaw’s earlier quoted question: “… is [there] any place or circumstance in which God’s seed cannot sprout and take root?” No, there is not. Amen