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.
