A Wasted Ministry? ~ Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 ~ July 10, 2011

Oreo cookies are the best cookies money can buy.

Not only do Oreos taste great; they’re versatile.  Grind them up and make the best ice cream: Cookies and Cream.  They’re even great in pies and pudding.  And there’s more than one way to eat them.  You can eat them whole; you can dip them in ice cream or milk; or you can twist them apart and eat the creamy middle first. 

There’s no doubt that I inherited my love of Oreo cookies from my dad.  When I was no more than three or four, I had my own unique way of eating Oreo Cookies.  I’d lick off the creamy middle, and throw the rest in the trash.  I remember the day my dad caught me “enjoying” the Oreos.  His eyes bulged in horror and disbelief as he saw the remaining two-thirds of his favorite cookies in the trash. 

I learned two valuable lessons that day: 1) I learned to eat the whole Oreo, as indeed the whole Oreo is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. 

The second lesson I learned that day was about waste.  My dad wastes nothing—and he taught me well.  I squeeze every last drop out of my toothpaste tubes.  Any meal that I can’t finish becomes my next meal.  We drive nowhere that we can walk.  We run the A/C only a few hours per day.  And we’re always looking for ways that we can reduce/re-use/recycle. 

I believe I can speak for all of us when I say that we hate waste—because waste hits us in the two places where it hurts the most: our time and our wallets.  Time and money are precious—and we want to have something good to show for them.  We want them to be used in ways that make life better for us. 

So the biggest problem in the Parable of the Sower is all the wasted seed.  Anyone with common sense would sow their seed only in the best soil.  But in the parable, seed is sown in places where it can’t grow: on the hard soil of the pathway, on the rocky soil, and among the thorns.  The results come as no surprise.  We the hearers are left stunned at all the time and money that are wasted. 

But the power of the parable is in its shock value.  (This goes for all of Jesus’ parables).  Jesus wants us to be shocked by the sower’s waste.  Jesus uses that shock to teach us something important about God: and that is that God doesn’t operate by our standards.

Jesus wasn’t just telling the parable of the Sower; he was living the parable.  He preached God’s Word and performed all kinds of miracles so that people would believe that he was God’s Son.  But not everyone believed.  Entire cities rejected Jesus.  The religious leaders were convinced that Jesus had been sent by “Beelzebul, the ruler of demons.”  Even John the Baptist questioned that Jesus was the Messiah.  Like the three kinds of bad soil, there was no great harvest of faith among these people. 

So we wonder: why did Jesus waste his time on these people?  Jesus knew what was in people’s hearts.  He knew the people who were going to reject him—and even knew why they were going to reject them.  But that didn’t matter.  He ministered to them anyway.  He preached God’s Word and loved the people, even though they didn’t deserve it.  That’s what grace is.  God doesn’t operate by our standards.

Even though we see waste, inefficiency, and failure in the parable—much of the sower’s seed did fall into good soil—and the harvest was tremendous: up to a hundredfold return on every seed sown.  In the same way, Jesus’ ministry did create faith.  And we’re not talking small groups of people.  We’re talking large crowds—thousands of people.  And make no mistake—those who did believe were no more worthy of Christ’s love than those who rejected him.  All are sinners.  But by grace, they had faith.  By grace, they believed.

In the same way as this parable was lived out in Jesus’ own ministry, the parable is also lived out in our own lives of faith.  It’s so tempting to think of ourselves as the “good soil” Jesus spoke of in the parable—because we believe, and because we are part of his church.  And that would be true—we have faith only because God’s Word has take root in us.  But that’s not the whole truth…  We are also the hard soil when we don’t believe in God’s promises and fail to obey God’s commands.  We’re the rocky soil when tough times “scorch our faith…”  And we’re the thorny soil when all the cares of our lives and the treasures of the world choke our faith.  We are not always fruitful in living out our faith.  But if you know that you’re heart is not good soil right now, the Parable of the Sower is good news for you.  Jesus never stops sowing his seeds of mercy and hope in us.  There will be a time—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow—that your heart will be the best possible soil to receive the seed of God’s Word.  Jesus will be there to sow the seeds—and your faith will bear fruit.  Keep praying; keep reading the Word and coming to church.  God’s Word will take root in you.

And God’s Word will take root in the ministries of our congregation—but that doesn’t happen any more easily than it happens in our own lives.  We want to invest our time and energies into ministries that will grow us as disciples of Jesus Christ, and help us to attract new members.  But the old saying “if you build it, they will come” doesn’t necessarily apply to the Church.  How easy it is to feel like we’ve wasted our time after we’ve spent preparing for a special event or a Sunday school class—and no one shows up.  That fear of failure; that fear of wasting our precious time and money is one of the biggest obstacles we face as we move forward into our future.  But we must never let that fear deter us from doing what God has called us to do.  Nothing we do to minister the love of Christ will ever be a waste.  If we persist, if we continue to do what we believe God has called us to do, our efforts will ultimately bear fruit by God’s help.  Therefore, we plan our events, we teach our classes, we help the poor, and we invite un-churched people to come with us to church.  We take risks on new ways to grow our witness.  We persist even when things don’t turn out as we hoped.  We do these things assured of the promise God spoke through the prophet Isaiah: “My word shall not return to me empty, but shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”  

Even when our ministries don’t seem to be bearing fruit; when our faith seems non-existent, we can never waste our time doing those things that God wants us to do.  We’re on God’s time—and God’s time cannot be wasted on us.  Therefore let us trust in the promises of God—and let us persist.  Let us never stop seeking God’s Word and God’s presence in our lives; let us never hold back on our witness to Christ’s love for fear of failure or rejection.  God’s purpose for the world is a harvest of people whose lives are caught up in the life of Jesus Christ.  Let anyone with ears listen!