What is the most important thing in your life? In other words, why do you spend your time doing what you do? (Tuck that question away. We’ll come back to it again later.)
One day Jesus told a crowd a story about a farmer who took his bag of seed out into his farmland and started throwing seeds toward the ground. Some landed on the footpath and were eaten by birds. Others feel on stones and tried to sprout but died. Others disappeared into patches of wild weeds never to be seen again. And some landed in fertile soil and turned into a wonderful harvest. He used farming, a subject they understood, to introduce a different planting for the future he wanted them to consider.
Day after day, they were used to waking, planting, eating, and sleeping. Jesus used such images in parables to help listeners understand how God plants the seeds of his love in our hearts and minds. His goal is to bring to fruition bountiful lives that not only satisfy our needs but allow us to be gifts of his light and love to each other, allowing us to plant as he has planted in us. His gift of faith feeds us, keeps us alive, and assists us in sharing his blessings like seeds in the lives around us.
Every life is like a field that can either receive or reject God’s gifts. Selfishness, greed, anger, and despair are like parched earth, rocks, or weeds that will receive God’s gifts but not allow any chance they will make a difference. Some open their hearts but not their minds. Some open their eyes but not their ears. Some neglect to nurture, nourish and care for the gifts God has made available to each and every life.
Everyone’s choices reveal the soil God has to work with. How one receives and responds to God’s love is as diverse as the types of soil on this earth. How we respond affects what we reap. That is why some who have everything they want are often unhappy, while some who face incredible adversity find the secret of peace. God’s gifts are like seeds genetically modified by his love to be successful beyond belief.
The poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, once spoke with a man who said, “he didn’t believe in giving children any religious instruction – that it was best just to let them make up their own minds.” Coleridge listened in silence then asked the man to walk with him in his garden. The man agreed. Coleridge took him to a place where only weeds were growing. The man said to Coleridge, “this is no garden, it is nothing but weeds!” Coleridge replied, “Well, I did not wish to infringe upon the liberty of the garden.” I was giving it a chance to express itself and to choose its own production.” Faith calls us to trust that God will bring life where we cannot, but also that we will plant what God has given us to plant.
What is the most important thing in your life? How does that affect choices you make, gifts you welcome, and the harvest you offer to those around you? People of faith understand there is more to life than meets the eye, and more to living than what I can do by myself. God’s forgiveness and servant love equip us to be more than what we are left to ourselves and offers to walk with us no matter what each day brings. What will you do to make your dreams come true? What seeds are you planting? What seeds have been planted for you? In many ways God plants faith, hope, and love in our lives. Will those gifts flourish and become productive or will they lie dormant and hidden? The choice is yours!
If faith allows us to trust that God’s life will do what it does, then our lives have the potential of being receptive and fertile and God will make the impossible happen. If we ignore or reject God’s promising potential, it is the same as a farmer who leaves a field fallow, or rejected, and the Word has no place to grow and dies on the vine, is choked by other priorities, or lies unused and forgotten.
Even for people of faith there are times God’s guidance can’t break through our busy-ness. Selfishness or laziness can choke faith as if by weeds. Distractions are like birds stealing seed off the bare ground. Some are so certain they all the answers, they refuse to receive or plant new seeds! Jesus’ parable is a reminder that like is true for farmers, there is always more work ahead of us.
Life isn’t always easy, predictable, and like the changing conditions any farmer must face, we often fail where we thought we would succeed. God doesn’t promise that faith in him will make every harvest perfect or ensure that every seed we plant will grow. What he does promise is that he plants himself in us, out of love, so that no matter what we face will be blessed by him. And the God who created a beautiful creation out of nothing has the power to follow through on what he has promised and keep us close to his love forever.
God has shown that the most important thing in his life is each of us. That is why he planted himself as a baby in a manger who would grow to reveal the harvest of his love in the forgiving and servant love of Jesus. He embraced Calvary to plant himself in a tomb, where nothing can grow. Easter revealed how true life can result from his planting as he brings a joy and peace that will never end.
One winter I started tomato plants under the lights of my workbench. The plants came up but I transplanted them too soon, when the soil was too cold, and they died. Another year I took acorns I had kept in refrigerator, planted them in cups, and soon seedlings emerged. I took them outside in pots to begin planting mighty oak trees, but in one day they were all stolen away by squirrels. Life had begun, but I neglected to protect that life – and it was lost. That became my parable which parallels what Jesus taught as he understands what we often forget and succeeds were we often fail.
Because of God’s love even in the midst of death, we can celebrate life! And even in the midst of life, we prepare to embrace death as the seed for the greatest harvest ever!
The writer, Anne Lamott, grew up in San Francisco in the 1960’s with parents who were alcoholic, atheists, angry, and divorced. In college, she read Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” which retold the story of Abraham and Isaac.in which Abraham was asked by God if he would surrender the greatest gift of his life, his very own son. It hit too close to home, she writes, reinforcing negative feelings about God as “parent,” but she kept listening, and later wrote: “Abraham understood that without God’s love and company, this life would be so empty and barbaric that it wouldn’t matter whether his son was alive or not. And since this side of the grave you could never know for sure if there was a God, you had to make a leap of faith, if you could, leaping across the abyss of doubt with fear and trembling.” … She was beginning to be opened to faith. “I was cracking up,” she said, and “that’s how light gets in.”
Her realization that God can bring life even to parched and empty lives brought joy and peace she had never felt before. And while her living was not always perfectly in sync with God’s guidance, as is too often true with each of us, she began, more and more to trust what God was planting and how he was changing what she could not. That is the message of the Gospel, that God plants love beyond what the world can achieve or understand. And that love is a gift planted in us, to enable us to follow in his footsteps.
If someone asked you, in one sentence, to explain the purpose of your life, what would you write? Consider what you have planted in your life and what kind of garden you wish to grow? Think about what God has planted and whether or not there is room for that seed in your life. Take some quiet time to find a that balance and trust that God can and will help you with the seeds and soil of your living. What is the purpose of your life, for that is how you will then evaluate your relationships, job, marriage, parenting, joys and sorrows in the light of the seeds of God’s love.
The Word of God has become flesh and is planted among us. Your purpose is nothing more or less than the seeds you wish to plant. Faith is the garden of that gift and the life that we nourish until harvest.