All the Kefelta You Can Eat

August 2, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

Millions of sermons have been preached over two millennia of the feeding of the five-thousand. Most of them stress how utterly miraculous it is to feed five-thousand hungry people.

Naturally we are in awe of the man who could instantly multiply a few crumbs into a banquet. For the rest of us, that requires strategic planning and a substantial fortune, as anyone who has planned a wedding reception or a bar mitzvah knows.

Few sermons ask why the crowd was hungry. Why did so many people leave home that day without adequate provisions for snacks? Was it an epidemic of poor planning?

And even fewer sermons ask why the people were hungry in the first place. Of course, Jesus was concerned about the poor and hungry and he talked about them all the time. But when Jesus stuffed his sizable congregation with loaves and kefelta fish that day, was he also making a point about endemic poverty and systemic hunger?

That’s an interesting question. Some will say no. At the same time, when the sermon of the loaves and fish is preached in Christian churches this Sunday, worldwide hunger will be the specter at the feast. As we meditate about the careless five-thousand, 795 million persons live on the edge of starvation. 

In the very recent past, American largesse and USAid were around to support people living with famine or natural disaster or war. Most of that munificence was cancelled in early 2025 by the Department of Government Efficiency and no one knows how many deaths resulted from those cuts.

Today there are millions of hungry people displaced by wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. 

Although the civil war in South Sudan has disappeared from our daily news feed, more than 25.6 million people are facing crisis levels of hunger. Both sides in the on going conflict, now in its fourth year, have restricted aid delivery, and both sides are accused of using starvation as a weapon of war.

Save the Children reports that 75 percent of children are now going hungry each day.

Writing in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof painted a chilling picture of one woman dying of hunger. 

As I was driving into this city, a woman was lying inert on the road. She was Nyanjok Garang, and she said she hadn’t eaten for three days. She had set out to look for work, maybe washing clothes, in hopes of keeping her two children alive. After a day of fruitless walking she had collapsed. “My children are hungry,” she said. “I’m hungry. There’s not even a cent left to buy bread.” Her husband is a soldier in the government forces fighting in South Sudan’s civil war, but she doesn’t even know if he is still alive. So she left her children with a neighbor and set out in hopes of finding work — “and then I blacked out.” 

Multiply that woman by five-thousand, and are we closer to the point Jesus was making when he multiplied loaves and fish?

What should we be thinking about as we read these verses in Matthew 14? Many puzzling passages are included, beginning with the fabulous feeding and climaxing with Jesus’ flabbergasting feat of walking on the rolling waters of Galilee.

Some theologians speculate that the walking-on-the-water scene appears out of chronological order, that it is more likely something that happened after Jesus’ resurrection. Their reasoning is that this feat of aqua-levitation matches the abilities of Jesus’ post-corporeal body, which walked through walls. 

Regardless of when the disciples witnessed this astounding event, it is certainly a tale they would have told and retold for the rest of their lives. Theologians speculate that evangelists writing about Jesus three centuries on, looking for ways to illustrate his godliness, may have dropped the story into their narratives without regard to its context.

Interesting. But the pleasant thing about theological speculation is that no one really knows for sure and everyone gets to do it.

There’s a lot of theological speculation about the feeding of the five-thousand. Again, millions of sermons have attempted to offer miraculous or logical explanations for the event.

The most dramatic explanation is that Jesus caused the existing bread and fish to replicate miraculously. This is the theory my Sunday school teachers embraced, and it is heartwarming to imagine: mundane food stuffs replicating supernaturally as hungry people stuffed their mouths. One of my favorite writers, Father James Martin, is among the scholars who believe this was an out-and-out miracle. I tend to agree with Jim, perhaps more than a Lutheran ought, so count me in on the side of miracle.

Other theologians look for a more practical explanation. In their view, people in the crowd were so moved by the generosity of a little boy who offered his lunch that they followed his example. As Jesus blessed the food and offered the meager helping of bread and fish, a handful of people pulled out extra morsels from their own packs and offered them to their neighbors. Soon scores followed suit, then hundreds, then thousands were sharing their lunch, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

That explanation does make logical sense, but this level of impulsive generosity would require a miracle far greater than supernatural fish splitting. In the long history of the world, the miracle we humans have failed to accomplish is the miracle of sharing our wealth so no one will starve. 

Many have tried.

One of the stranger events at the outbreak of World War II was the formation of a Federal Council of Churches commission aimed at preventing war from happening again. The Federal Council’s Program for a Just and Durable Peace called for a democratic redistribution of power and wealth to guarantee future peace. The program called for a controlled international bank to make money available worldwide “without the predatory and imperialistic aftermath so characteristic of large-scale private and governmental loans.” 

The Just and Durable Peace Program also called for worldwide freedom of immigration, the elimination of tariffs and quota restrictions on world trade, and a universal system of money controlled to prevent inflation and deflation.

Any one of these radical proposals could have prepared the framework for a program to eliminate world hunger.

But the proposals were too radical for most, and it’s tempting to wonder what kind of left-leaning socialists could offer such sweeping proposals in the dark opening days of global conflict. Wierdly, the chair of the conference was an active ecumenist and Presbyterian layman named John Foster Dulles – the same who, a decade later, would be named Secretary of State by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Other members of the conference were Harvey Firestone the tire manufacturer and John R. Mott, Methodist layman and future winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s no surprise is that the Just and Durable Peace Conference was a failure. The New York Times and TIME magazine excoriated the conference and suggested it was both unpatriotic and socialist. There was no impetus then or now to reorganize the world’s governments or its economies to provide greater safety, justice, and opportunity for all people. 

If the five-thousand of Jesus’ day were fed because every heart was opened to share with others, that was a greater miracle than the Justice and Durable Peace Conference could manage. No one will ever know if its ideas would have made future wars less likely.

But still the world asks: will the miracle ever happen?

Both the five-thousand persons on the hill and the dramatic walking-on-water scene point to Jesus’ readiness to use his moral authority and divine power to serve persons in need. 

I'm curious what we would learn if we could organize the five-thousand into demographic categories. Except for the boy with the basket of food, we don’t know the age or economic classes that were present that day, although we can deduce they were all male. Even the most open-minded gospel writer would not have seen the need of counting the women present. When both genders are factored in, it’s possible Jesus fed ten-thousand that day.

Whoever and how many they were, we know beyond doubt that Jesus never turned his back on any one in spiritual, mental, or financial need. 

And we can be certain that, because society in Jesus’ day was organized much like ours – that is, 1 percent of the people held most of the wealth – Jesus’ primary concern was for persons living in poverty.

In that sense, the five-thousand were a microcosm of the world we live in today. The difference is that today, when we ask ourselves how we are going to feed hungry crowds, we’re facing millions, not thousands.

We tend to put those millions of hungry persons out of our thoughts because we don’t see how we can help them. We take comfort in Jesus’ observation that the poor will always be with us because it almost makes poverty seem like an acceptable reality. We share the disciples’ despair as we count all the mouths to be fed and wonder where the bread was coming from.

But God had a way then. And God has ways to feed the millions who are hungry today, assuming we don’t let the complications of domestic and international politics get in our way.

The feeding of the five-thousand was the result of a management miracle by the God of Love and the Prince of Peace, working through the Holy Spirit to convince single persons in a crowd that they are intimately connected to the individuals who surround them. 

The feeding of the five-thousand illustrates the power of the Greatest Commandment, to love God with all our might as we love our neighbors the way we need to be loved.

The feeding of the five-thousand is a timely reminder that though the poor will always be with us, God doesn’t expect us to ignore them.

And the feeding of the five-thousand is the scriptural impetus to keep pushing ourselves and our politicians to end the poverty that kills throughout the world.

It’s tempting, always, to share the despair of Philip and Andrew, to look at the enormous needs of the world and the small basket in our hands, and ask, “But what good is this for so many hungry people?”

Jesus’ plan is as workable now as it was then.

The end of killing poverty throughout the world is an achievable goal.

God grant us the faith and the will and the political courage to make it happen.

Seeds and Pearls

July 26, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

Have you ever heard a rock song and didn’t understand the lyrics?

I often don’t understand the lyrics of songs on the Z100 Hit Music Station. Usually I need Martha to interpret them for me. Perhaps this is an aging issue (I turn 80 in September) but I have taken cognitive tests and they’ve all been perfect. It’s just that some lyrics are hard to understand.

The most famous example of incoherent lyrics took place during my high school years. The Kingsmen's 1963 hit “Louie Louie” was banned by several radio stations and the state of Indiana because slurred, unintelligible lyrics led panicked parents and politicians to believe the song contained hidden, sexually explicit messages. In reality, the poor audio quality was due to a cheap recording session where the lead singer had to shout into a high-hanging microphone. 

Because lead singer Jack Ely’s vocals were so difficult to make out, teenagers began inventing and circulating their own "dirty" lyrics.  Indiana Governor Matthew Welsh banned the track, and the FBI launched an official investigation. For over a year, federal agents studied the lyrics line-by-line, slowed the record down, and even played it backward searching for profanity. 

Finally, the FBI concluded the lyrics were unintelligible but not obscene, and issued a written transcript of song:

Louie Louie, oh no, you take me to where ya gotta go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, baby
Louie Louie, oh baby, take me to where ya gotta go
A fine little girl, she waits for me
Me catch a ship across the sea
Me sailed that ship all alone
Me never think I'll make it home
Louie Louie, oh no no no, take me to where ya gotta go, oh no|
Louie Louie, oh baby, take me to where ya gotta go

Whatever that means.

The point is, if you don’t understand something the first time, get a written clarification or keep listening.

In Matthew 13, Jesus is making sure his parables are understood by employing a classic teaching method:

Tell them what you’re going to tell then.

Tell them.

Tell them what you told them.

“Every preacher knows the terror of the metaphor that does not work,” writes Zina Jacque, Board Chair of National Senior Communities in Washington, D.C. “You build a whole sermon around an image, and you watch it sail clean over the heads of half the congregation. A metaphor is only as powerful as its audience’s capacity to understand it. Jesus knows this. So he does not offer one parable and move on. In rapid-fire succession, he offers five, with each one hoping to land the metaphor for a different pair of ears.”

In the wildly hilarious and often offensive musical Book of Mormon, a group of missionaries are sent to Uganda to preach their faith and win converts. 

One of the missionaries, Elder Cunningham, is at a disadvantage because he has never read the Bible or the Book of Mormon. But he has read Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring and he has considerable expertise in Star Wars and Star Trek. 

While other missionaries are preaching about Jesus and Joseph Smith, Elder Cunningham regales his listeners with stories about Mordor and Middle Earth and Darth Vader and the attack of the Sith. The people love the stories and begin to call Elder Cunningham a prophet. But when he has Boba Fett turn people into frogs, the other missionaries have had enough. They accuse him of lying.

Not so, a Ugandan woman replies scathingly. “It’s a met-a-phor.”

It turns out the Ugandans are not so naive as to believe Elder Cunningham’s stories. They understand them as allegorical promises that their life of misery will not last forever and there is hope on the horizon. And that is a prophetic message indeed.

Metaphors can be very powerful and very confusing. Christians who believe Bible stories are literally true may be perplexed by claims that Adam and Eve were not real people, or that Eve is not merely a morphing of Adam’s rib. For many, the Song of Songs seems like poetic eroticism between a man and a woman and is not immediately understandable as a metaphor of God’s love for creation.

Jesus’ use of parables to teach higher truths may also be confusing. Even the disciples had occasion to ask him what he meant. And sometimes the fictitious characters Jesus made up – the Prodigal Son, the foolish virgins, the rich fool, the woman’s lost coin – seem very real. I was once in a bible study class when a student exclaimed, “Wait. The Good Samaritan wasn’t real?”

Not real? Of course the Samaritan becomes real every time people reach out to one another in love, every time we come to each other’s aid, every time we have each other’s backs. But a real person? 

Sorry. It’s a metaphor.

Yet in Matthew 13, notes Zina Jacque, whichever parable draws you in, the message remains the same: the kingdom of heaven is immeasurably valuable, active even when unseen, and demands your full commitment.

Despite their surface differences, all five parables follow a shared pattern. 

First comes hiddenness: the mustard seed vanishes into the soil, the yeast is mixed into three measures of flour, the treasure lies buried in a field, the pearl must be discovered, and the fish remain beneath the sea. Jesus insists that the kingdom of heaven is not immediately obvious. It does not arrive with fanfare; it works below the surface and must be sought by those who long for it.

Second comes disproportion: a tiny seed grows into a tree large enough for nests; a bit of leaven transforms enough flour to feed more than 100 people; and one discovery in a field is worth selling everything. The kingdom does not follow ordinary expectations. It is expansive, abundant, and extravagant.

Third, the parables call for a complete response. The man who finds the treasure sells everything; so does the merchant who discovers the pearl. These are not lessons in smart investing, but stories of people who encounter something so extraordinary that they reorder their entire lives around it. As John T. Carroll observed in his 2023 Working Preacher commentary, these parables ask every listener the same question: “Are you all in?”

Looking back at Jesus’ parable of the sower, we hear the question put another way. Jesus uses the parable to describe opposition to his ministry. The seeds he is planting bear the fruit of love, salvation, eternal life, peace, and justice. But not all these seeds will germinate. The Devil grabs some seeds and crushes the life out of them. Some people briefly embrace Jesus’s words but soon get bored and wander away. Some people are so emersed in the thorny minutia of their own lives that they can’t hear Jesus’s words.

Sometimes we are so unkind as to call such people buffet line Christians or Christmas and Easter Christians or part time Christians. They are not “all in” as members of God’s Kingdom. This is not to suggest that such Christians are lost because God’s love is eternal and unconditional. But if they’re only along for the ride, others in the community have to work harder.

Happily and perhaps miraculously, some seeds – metaphorically – do get through to rich soil. 

The final promise of all these parables is that opposition, denial, and indifference to Jesus’s message of love and salvation will not prevail. 

The life blood of the church are people who are “all in,” who walk the walk and talk the talk at home, at work, at play, and at church.

Lord, we pray each of us will be “all in” at this crucial time in history.

And may we all proclaim the good news.

Heaven – metaphorically – has come near. Come and enjoy the ride.

Good Plants and Audrey II

 

July 19, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

Last Sunday, in another church, I waxed nostalgically about my country roots.

“I grew up in rural Central New York where the stars were vivid at night, where thousands of tiny tree frogs peeped loudly when you tried to sleep, where you were surrounded by endless fields of corn, where cattle grazed on a thousand hills, and where slow moving tractors clogged the roads. 

“My father was a school teacher not a farmer, but my siblings and most of my peers were emersed in the agrarian culture. Just about every kid I knew joined the 4-H club. The H’s stood for Head, Heart, Hands, and Health and the purpose of the cooperative was to mentor young people by engaging them in agricultural projects. Many of my friends did projects on the farm they lived on. My projects took place in my father’s garden.”

I hated every one of them.

My family lived on a small plot of land on a quiet street in Morrisville, N.Y. My father borrowed the neighbor’s Merry-Tiller and, with his pipe clenched in his teeth and sweat dripping off the tip of his nose, plowed the back third of the lawn into furrows of dirt. 

“This is our garden,” he told my siblings and me.

By the end of the summer the garden yielded corn, peas, beans, tomatoes, lettuce, and asparagus. 

But it took a lot of work to get there.

The soil in Central New York is extremely stony. Stones impeded shovels and hoes, got jammed in rakes, and had to be removed. My father brought a wheelbarrow to the edge of the garden and started filling it with stones. Clearing the stones was a daunting task and he drafted my siblings and me into the work.

I won’t speak for my sibs but I hated it. To keep my mind occupied, I took time to examine each stone. Some were round and smooth. Some had chunks of pyrite which looked like gold but wasn’t. Many were fossils of trilobites, brachiopads, and crinoids embedded in shale 390 million years ago. I spent many hours meditating on rocks but, as I am sure my siblings remember, tossed very few of them into the wheelbarrow.

Then there were weeds.

Weeds. The scourge of every garden.

Dad wanted the weeds cleared immediately and suggested that would be a good job for me.

I sank to my knees and made a good effort to subdue the dreaded green monsters but I was soon overwhelmed by the task. New weeds rose up to replace plucked weeds and if roots were broken off they would surge to menacing size like Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors. My discouragement knew no bounds and I tried to convince Dad that dandelions and milkweeds were beautiful plants that deserved to live.

Little did I know that my early years were lived in a Twilight Zone version of Jesus’ parables of seeds and weeds.

Earlier in Matthew’s gospel there was the Sower whose seeds fell on rocky ground, thorny ground, shallow ground, and finally on fertile ground where they bloomed and thrived.

The parable of the Sower is more than an allegory of planting. It’s a metaphor of life’s cycles of bad days and good days, defeats and victories, successes and failures. 

Jesus uses the parable to describe opposition to his ministry. The seeds he is planting bear the fruit of love, salvation, eternal life, peace, and justice. But not all these seeds will germinate. The Devil grabs some seeds and crushes the life out of them. Some people briefly embrace Jesus’s words but soon get bored and wander away. Some people are so emersed in the thorny minutia of their own lives that they can’t hear Jesus’s words. 

But all is not lost. Despite the opposition to Jesus’s ministry, some seeds do get through to rich soil. The final promise of the parable is that opposition, denial, and indifference to Jesus’s will not prevail. The kingdom of God will not be put off. God will make it happen.

Now we have the parable of my own personal hell: the bad weeds intermingling with the good plants.

Jesus tells a story about a man who plants good seed in a field. But in the middle of the night, while he is sleeping a bad man sows weeds among the good seeds.

Why anyone would do that is a mystery, but we remember that these are not real people. Jesus is making them up to make a point.

The wheat and the weeds come up hopelessly entangled. Appalled, the man’s servants suggest they attack the weeds immediately.

“But (their master) replied, ‘No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’” (Matthew 13:29-30)

I wish, 65 years ago, I had thought to suggest this solution to my Dad.

Jesus explains the parable this way:

“The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” (Matthew 13:36-43)

The parable offers some hints as to why God allows evil to exist, or why bad things happen to good people.

In this life we will always coexist with good and bad people and before the end of the age it may appear that the bad people are winning. 

But at harvest time God’s justice will prevail.

New Testament scholar Jennifer T. Kaaland writes that in Matthew’s Gospel, “the kingdom of heaven delineates differences between the realm of God’s kingdom and the kingdom of Roman emperor. As the people in the first century Mediterranean would have experienced it, the emperor’s kingdom is on earth. The kingdom of heaven is where God reigns. The act of Jesus coming into the earth represents the in breaking of the God’s kingdom on the earth. 

“This makes explicit that the gospel, is indeed, a political document. The writer is proposing an alternative understanding of the world, one that would directly oppose the political leaders of his time. As such, clear lines needed to be drawn. Which kingdom will prevail? Whose empire will you participate in?”

What are the political weeds and tares that are choking our world today?

Millions of Americans who can no longer afford health care because federal subsidies have been eliminated to lower taxes for the rich? 

Thousands of innocent, nonviolent people harassed by aggressive ICE agents who sometimes break into their homes and sometimes kill them? 

Ignorant and authoritative politicians who say climate change is a myth and scoff at energy derived from solar power or wind turbines while promoting the use of coal and oil and other fossil fuels?

Obtuse politicians who believe racism no longer exist sand that white men are better suited for promotion and authority than women or people of color?

Megalomaniacal office bearers who lead us into unnecessary and illegal wars without considering the costs in human lives, economic stability, and international trust?

Indeed it often feels like we are being strangled by the volume and apparent indestructibility of the weeds that surround us.

Jennifer Kaalund offers these words of assurance:

“In Romans 14:17, Paul describes God’s kingdom as righteousness, peace, and joy. In order for us to see a world that can be characterized as such, we must acknowledge that the causes of sin are not simply our personal struggles, but more so our societal ills. For instance, the causes of poverty — war, greed, selfishness, etc. — are sin. 

“It is not for us to judge one another or to separate ourselves from each other. If our spiritual wallet is to contain a license issued by the kingdom of God, we must live peaceably and compassionately with all, recognizing that we (the good and the evil) are necessary for each other’s survival.”

And at harvest time, God’s justice will prevail.

Scatter Some My Way

 

July 12, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

One of my favorite books is Jesus: A Pilgrimage by Father James Martin, S.J. an account of his visit to biblical sites in the Holy Land. Father Martin says a visit to the Holy Land is like a “fifth Gospel” because seeing the places where Jesus walked gives new meaning to what happened there. 

Father Martin writes: 

“One hot day, standing in the place where Jesus most likely preached the parables on the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, I looked around and noticed that the surrounding landscape included rocky ground, fertile ground, and thorny plants. Immediately I thought of Jesus’s parable of the sower, in which a farmer spreads his seed on just those kinds of terrains. For the first time I realized that when Jesus was preaching, he may not have been describing abstract plots of land (as in ‘Try to imagine rocky ground’), but what his listeners were standing on. I could envision him pointing and saying, ‘Look at that ground over there.’  

I grew up in rural Central New York where the stars were vivid at night, where thousands of tiny tree frogs peeped loudly when you tried to sleep, where you were surrounded by endless fields of corn, where cattle grazed on a thousand hills, and where slow moving tractors clogged the roads. 

My father was a school teacher not a farmer, but my siblings and most of my peers were emersed in the agrarian culture. Just about every kid I knew joined the 4-H club. The H’s stood for Head, Heart, Hands, and Health and the purpose of the cooperative was to mentor young people by engaging them in agricultural projects. Many of my friends did projects on the farm they lived on. My projects took place in my father’s garden. 

Among the things I learned is that not every seed grows where it is planted. Corn quickly exhausts the soil of nutrients so it can’t be planted in the same place every season. Other seeds get suffocated by weeds and I rarely took the time to clear the weeds. And some seeds give yield to spectacularly healthy plants for no apparent reason, like my father’s tomatoes, which were huge, red, and juicy. I had little to do with those tomatoes except watch them grow so I remained modestly silent when the 4-H club presented me with a special gardening ribbon. 

Jesus’ parable of the Sower of seeds has an interesting echo in this week’s lectionary which tells the story of Jacob, Esau, and the prolific seed of the Patriarchs. (Genesis 25:19-34). 

Jacob and Esau, as we recall, were bitter rivals right from the beginning. 

According to Genesis, the brothers’ sibling rivalry began earlier than most: when they were still in Rebekah’s womb. The boys wrestled and twisted so violently that Rebekah thought she was going to die. In the days before obstetricians, she went directly to God with her complaint, and as with many modern doctors, God was only partially helpful. God did give her prenatal information that went far beyond the gender or health of the fetuses: 

Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger. 

On the other hand, God did little to ease her violent cramping. The wrestling continued until the time of labor. Esau burst out first. He was startlingly red and hirsute, so they named him Esau, which of course means Hairy. His brother, struggling for the advantage down to the wire, is dragged out grasping his brother’s heel. They named him Jacob, which means Heel. As it turned out, both names were appropriate. 

The boys’ bitter rivalry was exacerbated, as often happens, by parental favoritism. Rebekah, whose postnatal soreness must have lasted for months, loved Jacob because he was smooth-skinned and liked to hang around the tent with his mother. Jacob loved Esau because he liked his meat and Esau the hunter had more slabs on him than a Lady Gaga dress. 

In a sorry show of sibling rivalry, Jacob covers his body with hairy animal pelts and deceives his blind father Isaac into believing he is Esau and tricks him into blessing him.  

The parable of the Sower is a helpful metaphor to keep in mind as we re-encounter the familiar histories of the old Patriarchs. When God first approached Abraham and told him his seed would conceive a nation as populous as the stars in the sky, God didn’t mention how turbulent that sowing would be.  
 
The Patriarchs were not perfect. Many of them were distractingly quirky, and it’s easy to get angry at Jacob every time you read of his cruelty to his brother and his deceit of his father. Some of the seeds the Patriarchs sowed fall on rocks, others on thorns. But God remained faithful to their covenant, and in the end their seeds grew incalculably more than a hundredfold. The Patriarchs, imperfect as they were, remind us that God’s seeds have also been planted in us – and as imperfect as we are, God has promised to bring forth a sumptuous harvest. 
 
When I became a man I edited a national church magazine and the parable of the Sower took on new meaning for me. Each year we would send out thousands of letters urging people to subscribe. Some of the letters got lost amid the glut of advertising fliers at the post office and were never seen again. Others were summarily rejected by people who replied, “Cancel my Subscription, I never read it.” And slightly less than a third of them brought forth checks and subscription renewals. 

The parable of the Sower is more than an allegory of planting. It’s a metaphor of life’s cycles of bad days and good days, defeats and victories, successes and failures. 

Jesus uses the parable to describe opposition to his ministry. The seeds he is planting bear the fruit of love, salvation, eternal life, peace, and justice. But not all these seeds will germinate. The Devil grabs some seeds and crushes the life out of them. Some people briefly embrace Jesus’s words but soon get bored and wander away. Some people are so emersed in the thorny minutia of their own lives that they can’t hear Jesus’s words. 

But all is not lost. Despite the opposition to Jesus’s ministry, some seeds do get through to rich soil. The final promise of the parable is that opposition, denial, and indifference to Jesus’s will not prevail. The kingdom of God will not be put off. God will make it happen. 

Just why anyone would hear the Good News and reject it is anyone’s guess. Some will hear and not believe. In fact they are legion. We who do hear and believe can be grateful to God, but that is not a matter of pride. Martin Luther pointed out that faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit that we neither merited nor earned. 

Pastor Jennifer Pietz, assistant professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary, offers this helpful summary of Matthew 13: 

Faith in God is a gift from God. We cannot understand exactly how it occurs, but we are called to share the riches we have been given and strive to persevere in faith, guided by God’s word and the Holy Spirit. 

 

Christians are not to feel superior to those who have not embraced the gospel. We do not fully comprehend God’s work in the world. The kingdom is not yet here. The church is called to continually preach the gospel in word and deed, to all, leaving the results to God (for example, 1 Corinthians 3:6). 

Threats to the gospel flourishing in people’s lives persist. While the church cannot eliminate all threats, it can help people navigate them. For example, Christians can accompany people through tragedies that make them doubt that God is real.  

 

And we can help each other recognize the enduring temptation to place our trust in money and possessions instead of in God. The parable creates space for naming the particular challenges we face to persevering in faith or to doing the work of the gospel. 

 

Amid bleak news cycles, unexpected hardships, and acknowledgment of our own weaknesses, we can trust that God is working to bring about God’s purposes of life and abundance.