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.