Seeds, Soil and the Kingdom

It’s sometimes said that “Jesus came preaching the Kingdom of God and what he ended up with was the church.”

I wonder how you react to that statement. Like it or loathe it, there’s probably more truth in it than we’d care to admit.

Just out of curiosity I did a quick search through the gospels looking for the words ‘Kingdom’ and ‘Church’. The word ‘Kingdom’ appears 118 times in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Anyone like to have a guess how many times the word ‘church’ appears? Twice – both in Matthew’s gospel. Church is not a word that was often found on Jesus’ lips, largely because it hadn’t been invented yet. He tended to speak about the Kingdom, which is shorthand for the whole idea of God’s benevolent reign making itself felt on earth.

When Jesus teaches us to pray “Thy Kingdom Come” in the Lord’s Prayer, he goes on to explain those words in the next clause – “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”. Wherever God is acknowledged, wherever his will is done, knowingly or unknowingly, you have a little outpost of the kingdom.

It’s only as we get further into the story and further into the New Testament that the word ‘church’ begins to appear more regularly as Christian communities begin to form in towns and cities across the Mediterranean world in response to the story of Jesus. But the word Kingdom stays on the radar, appearing a further 36 times in the remainder of the New Testament.

So from the very beginning, there were two things in view. The big idea of the Kingdom – which was what Jesus came to preach and teach about; and the church, which was the local community of men and women who were trying to live as citizens of the Kingdom. The Kingdom is the ‘end’. The church is one of the means to that ‘end’.

These pictures might help make sense of it. Venn diagrams.

The Kingdom – God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven – that’s the big idea Jesus came to preach about. That’s what God wants for the world. And the church is a subset of the Kingdom. A group of people called to live by the values of God’s Kingdom in a world that more often than not doesn’t appreciate them. The church exists to serve the purposes of the Kingdom.

But here’s the thing. Too often we’ve done that poorly. Read any of the New Testament letters and you’ll see just how quickly the ideals of the Kingdom get messed up or ignored by the church. Scandal, disputes, greed, arguments about status – none of these things have any place in the Kingdom, but where two or three are gathered together in God’s name and call themselves a church, they’ll be right there in the midst.

Here’s what that Venn diagram looks like. There’s still much in the church that’s of the Kingdom – area of overlap. But there’s much of it that’s not. And that’s why it’s important for us to take some time over the next few weeks to remind ourselves what the Kingdom’s about, and reflect on the ways in which we, as individuals and as a congregation, need to change so we can become more rooted within it.


What we have before us this morning is a parable of the Kingdom and as I’ve been thinking about it this week I’ve come to the conclusion that the powers that be have given this story the wrong name.

It’s often called the Parable of the Sower, but the sower isn’t really the focus.

This parable’s all about the soil and if you keep that in mind, that will help you understand what’s going on in this story.

The sower sows the seed, we’re told, and the seed is the word of God.

Now who’s the sower? If you’d asked me a week ago, having heard this parable for years, I would have said “God”, but Luke never says that. And neither do Matthew and Mark in their versions of the story. The sower is never identified with God. The sower is anyone who brings the word of God to someone else.

But of course that leads us to another question – what do you mean by “the word of God? “Now straightaway some of us might be thinking “it’s the Bible”. But it can’t mean that here because the Bible wasn’t written when Jesus was telling this story!

And throughout the Bible, we read of the “word of God” coming to people in a host of different ways – as they pray, as they converse, as they listen to prophets and preachers speak, as they look around them and reflect on what they’re seeing or experiencing. The word of God is more than the written word.
It’s when something of the truth of God moves us in a personal way. When we hear something or read something or see something that feels like it was meant for us. Like God’s trying to get us to understand something. That’s what it’s like when the word of God comes to us.

The real question is, will we receive that word when it come to us? Will the soil of our lives be prepared enough to accept it?

Luke tells us that Jesus was speaking to a great crowd, and within that crowd he discerned four kinds of people. Four kinds of soil.

Some seed fell on the path, he says – on the hard soil. In those days there were often paths and rights of way through the fields, and they were trampled hard by the passing of feet.

And when the seed falls on the path, it just bounces off and lies there. There’s no receptivity. The birds have a field day.

Are some of you like that, Jesus asks? Have you hardened your heart against the message because you don’t want to think about it or the implications it might have for your life? That’s a dangerous game to play.

CS Lewis wrote a wonderful book called the Screwtape Letters, in which he takes on the persona of a Senior Devil, advising a Junior Devil how to lead astray the human he’s been assigned to. Read a wee bit of one of the letters to you.

Bear in mind that in this passage “The Enemy” is God, the ‘patient’ is the human, and “Our Father” is the devil himself.

I once had a patient, a sound unbeliever, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of
thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment, Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter.

If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I would have been undone. But I was not such a fool, I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had most under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter suggestion (you know how one can never quite over hear what he says to them) that this was more
important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said 'Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning", the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added “much better to come back after lunch and go
into it with a fresh mind", he was already half way to the door.

Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a number 73 bus going past and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come
into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books , a. healthy dose of "real life" (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that sort of
thing" just couldn’t be true, He knew he'd had a narrow escape and was fond of ridiculing that experience in the years to come. He is now safe in our Father’s House.

Is that the game you’re playing this morning? You know God’s word is coming at you, but you keep putting it off and putting it off because you just don’t want to engage with it. That’s a dangerous game to play because in the end you might just win it.

Some seed falls on the path, says Jesus – and gets stolen away. But other seed falls on rocky ground.

Now rocky, here, doesn’t mean filled with pebbles and stones. There were swathes of the countryside which looked fertile but were really just topsoil on a thick bedrock of limestone. Things could grow there, but not flourish because there wasn’t enough moisture and the soil was too thin to give them deep roots.

There are some, says Jesus, who hear the word gladly, but it doesn’t sink deeply enough into them, and when the time of testing comes they fall away.

How deep does it go? I guess that’s the question here.

That was a live issue not long after Jesus’ day when Luke and the other evangelists were penning their gospels. At first the Christians were kicked out of the synagogues, then they were actively persecuted by the Jewish authorities, and latterly the Romans got in on the act too.

You don’t get through those times without deep, deep roots.

And though we don’t face the same kinds of persecutions in this country – though others do elsewhere – for all of us there come times when our faith is sorely tested. Spells when things get decidedly rocky.

Someone falls ill, or dies. A situation spirals utterly out of control. Circumstances conspire to kick us when we’re already down. We get a hard time at home or at work because we believe. I’ve seen men and women come through those times of testing with immense courage and dignity. And I’ve seen others whose faith has crumbled under the pressure.

Same circumstances – different outcomes. What’s the difference? Well it seems to me that those whose roots go down deepest are the ones best equipped to weather the storm. That’s not deep theology. It’s just common sense. Walk through a forest after a gale and see which trees stand and which ones have toppled.

So a key question from this part of the parable is “What am I doing to root myself deeper into God? What do I need to do to take responsibility for my own spiritual development?”

Hard soil; Rocky soil and then thorny soil.

Jesus tells us that some of the seed falls among thorn bushes, and though it grows, it never bears fruit because the place it’s growing is so congested.

And what interested me when I read this part again are the things that Jesus says lead to this unfruitfulness. Worries, riches and the pleasures of this life. Strange bedfellows in a way; so why does he lump them together? What have they got in common? Worries, riches and pleasures?

As I thought about it, I realised that the common denominator is that they all have an amazing ability to distract us.

When I’m worrying, my focus is on my problems and not on God. When I’m well-off my focus is on how to protect and enlarge my wealth, and not on God When I’m pursuing my pleasures, my focus is on what I want and what I think I deserve and not on God.

Sunday by Sunday as we come together and listen to the word, seeds are sown here of another way of living – a Kingdom way that brings perspective to our worries, and frees us from slavery to wealth and inspires us to live for more than our own pleasures.

But unless we take time to tend the soil of our lives those little seeds will never come to fruition. They’ll be choked by all the other things we give priority to – things that seem far more urgent, but in the long run are shown to be far less important.

So the question Jesus wants us to face is “How am I living? What are my priorities? And are they the right ones for my faith to grow and become fruitful?”,

Because that, in the end, is what it’s all about. That’s the reason the sower sows. He wants a harvest.
And when the seed falls on good soil – soil that’s prepared and receptive – the fruitfulness comes. The soil doesn’t have to try hard. It doesn’t have to strain and struggle. It just has to do its job by holding on to the seed and letting it grow.

Carter had a seed of an idea from God way back in 1994, and the soil of his life was ready to accept it. Carter is 75, African American, and a taxi driver in Washington DC. He’s nothing special, in the eyes of the world anyway.

And this is his story as it’s told by author Brian McLaren.

Excerpt from “The Secret Message of Jesus” – p 87-88

“I don’t do any of this by myself. God is doing it through me”.

Remember what I said earlier? The soil doesn’t have to try hard. It just has to do its job. If it’s receptive, the fruitfulness comes.

In your orders of service you’ll find six questions that will help you reflect on what we’ve talked about this morning, but the most important one is the last.

What is one thing will you change in response to what you have heard this morning?

Maybe it’s time to dig up that hard soil; or put down deeper roots into God; or find different ways of living so that your spiritual life’s not choked by all your other priorities.

God’s word has gone out today through this parable, just as it did all those years ago. Seeds have been sown. What kind of home will they find in the soil of your life?

The Kingdom

We’re not quite sure whether it’s arrived yet. It might be here, and then again it might not. It’s kind of hard to say.

We’re not very clear about who’s bringing it, and what will happen when it arrives, but we’re fairly sure that it’s going to be a good thing.

We’ don’t really know what it’s going to look like, but we keep praying for it to arrive anyway.

So what on earth am I talking about?

It’s that elusive reality called the Kingdom of God.

Every week, when we gather together and say the Lord’s Prayer as part of our worship, we’re invoking the Kingdom. “Thy Kingdom Come” we pray, week in and week out. But what exactly IS the Kingdom of God?

Well, the natural place to start would be with what the Bible has to say, but the problem there is that the Bible itself seems to contain contrasting ideas about what the Kingdom is:

On one hand Jesus tells us that we’re to seek it out. But he also says that it doesn’t come with our careful observation.

He tells us to try and enter the Kingdom; but then he tells us that somehow it’s already within us.

He tells us that it’s near; but elsewhere he says it’s not of this world.

Small wonder we’re confused!

Making sense of all this is a bit like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle when you don’t know what the picture on the box is. And we might be tempted to give up and not bother if it weren’t such an important thing to try and understand.

Because it is important! According to Mark, after years of thought and prayer and preparation, the first words Jesus spoke at the beginning of his public ministry were these: “The right time has come and the Kingdom of God is near”. According to Jesus, that’s the gospel message.

And as he hangs, dying on a cross at the end of his ministry, the last words that he hears are spoken by a thief being crucified alongside him “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom”.

And in between those two extremes, Jesus spoke constantly about the Kingdom. He used parables to explain it; he drew a child into the middle of his hearers to exemplify it.

He sent the disciples out two by two to preach it. And when Pontius Pilate drew him aside and subtly suggested that he might be able to save his hide if he stopped talking like he was Jewish royalty, Jesus flatly refused. He was a King; but his Kingdom was not of this world.

It’s a puzzle all right, but it’s not one we can afford to pack up and throw into the back of the toybox. It’s actually the very core of the message that Jesus wanted us to hear. And over the next few weeks we’re going to be immersing ourselves in the some of the parables and the teaching that Jesus used to try and convey the essence of the Kingdom.

But we won’t hear and understand them clearly unless we know a little about the world in which Jesus lived and ministered, and that’s what we’re going to do this morning.

Israel, 2000 years ago, was occupied territory. The Jews in those days probably felt about the Romans the way Palestinians feel about Israelis in today’s world.

They were God’s chosen nation; they believed that they had a special place in God’s purposes for the world. So why on earth had they been subjugated? Why had God let this happen to them?

And more pressingly, perhaps, what could they do about it?

Broadly speaking, there were four typical responses to the problem of Rome, represented by four groups that you’ll have heard of as you’ve engaged with the gospels over the years.

The first group were the Zealots. They were the self-styled freedom fighters. “The reason we’re oppressed is that we’re too frightened” they said. “We need to rise up! We need to fight back against the oppressors and show them the same kind of ruthlessness they’ve shown us. If we start putting our lives on the line, then God will see how earnest we are and intervene”.

Jesus had at least two Zealots among his twelve disciples – Simon the Zealot (the clue’s in the name) and Judas, whose nickname Iscariot is thought to come from the little dagger called a Sicarii that one class of Zealots was known to carry.

So the Zealots were the Freedom Fighters.

Then there were the Herodians: so named because they supported Herod, the Jewish puppet King placed there by Rome. Their view was pure pragmatism – “Rome’s too powerful” they’d say. “There’s no point even thinking about resistance. We’d be far better to play the game and co-operate and try to make the best of it.

The Sadducees, who you’ll have heard of in the gospels, tended to align themselves with the Herodians.

A third group, the Pharisees, put forward another way. The way of purity. If we really observe God’s law, they said, everything will go well for us. If there’s less sin and more piety among our people, then God will intervene and liberate us. We need to crack down on sin and sinners.

And that, of course, led to the Pharisees’ obsession with the minutiae of the law.

A fourth group, the Essenes, thought that the Zealots, the Herodians and the Pharisees had it all wrong. As far as they were concerned, the only way to please God was to distance yourself from the corrupt political and religious systems and create an alternative society out in the desert. And that’s exactly what they did. They established communes in the Judean wilderness, and it was in one such community, in Qumran in 1947, that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.


So those were the four options available to you if you were a first century Jew wondering how to live with Rome on your back.

• Fight for freedom – Zealots,

• Compromise – Herodians

• Purify – Pharisees

• Withdraw – Essenes


But then one day, you’re out and about when you see a crowd gathered beside a small hill. And there’s a young man speaking to them. He has them in the palm of his hand.

“Turn away from your sins.” He proclaims, “The Kingdom of heaven is near”.

Now you know enough to know that any talk about alternative Kingdoms is very unwise in the present political climate. Kingdom is an inflammatory word in Caesar’s Empire. And sure enough, a Roman soldier strides over and starts to break up the crowd roughly when he hears the discourse going in that direction.

It could get nasty – hackles are raised. But the young man doesn’t rise to the bait. You watch as he calmly defuses the situation, and gets folk to disperse in peace.

‘Who is that guy?’ you wonder. The part about turning from sin sounds like the Pharisees, but the Kingdom stuff sounds far more like the Zealots. But if he were a Zealot there’s no way he’d have taken that from a Roman soldier. He’d have been spoiling for a fight.

You’re intrigued. So when you hear that he’s speaking to a large crowd outside town the following week, you tag along.

“Do you want to know who’ll be blessed?” he says. “Not the powerful ones with lots of money and weapons. No – the poor will be blessed. Not the ones who can shout the loudest and get their way. No – the meek will be blessed. Not the ones who kill their enemies, but those who are persecuted for doing right. Not those who play it safe, but those who stand up for the sake of justice. Not the clever and sly, but the pure in heart. Not those who make war, but those who bring peace.”

Now you’re more confused than ever. He can’t be a Zealot because he’s preaching peace instead of revolution. And he can’t be one of the Herodians because he’s speaking out against the rich and powerful. He can’t be an Essene, because they’ve given up on everyone else. Maybe he’s a Pharisee of some kind?

But then word reaches you through a friend that he can’t be! Apparently he rounded on the Pharisees one day - called them whitewashed sepulchures to their faces because they look good from the outside, but are full of death and decay on the inside. And then later that week he was seen at a party with prostitutes, drunks and Roman collaborators. Not the kind of place a good Pharisee would be found.

This man, whoever he is, seems to be a bundle of contradictions.

Either that, or the way he’s proclaiming is so new and radical that no-one’s been able to grasp it yet.

What he seems to be calling people to is a new political and social and spiritual reality that he calls the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of heaven.

It’s a Kingdom not of this world, but invading this world. Setting itself up in direct opposition to the rule of Rome. But if you’re part of this kingdom you won’t overcome by slitting Roman throats like the Zealots. On the contrary – if a soldier slaps your face, you offer him the other cheek. If he forces you to go one mile, you go two. You choose a better option than passive submission or angry retaliation. You choose the kingdom way.

If you’re part of this kingdom, you won’t join the Pharisees in cursing and damning sinners to hell. And you won’t run from them to the desert in disgust like the Essenes. You’ll refuse to judge them, and treat them with the kind of gentleness and respect they deserve as children of God, however troubled. You’ll be less concerned about their polluting influence on you than the possible healing and reconciling God might bring through you.

If you’re part of the Kingdom, you won’t settle for the status quo. You won’t turn a blind eye to injustice as long as your own nest is feathered. That’s the Herodian way. Instead, you’ll make radical decisions about how you live that will be a sign to others that you don’t march to the beat of the world’s drum.

If you’re part of this Kingdom, you may well be thought weak, naïve or stupid. They’ll dismiss you as a crank or crucify you as a threat. But the one thing they won’t do is ignore you.

And on that note, here’s a thought to end with. Have you noticed that for many people in our part of the world church is little more than an irrelevance?

We’ve just had a week’s very public discourse about the rights and wrongs of the Pope’s visit to Britain, and the relevance of Catholicism in today’s world.

Isn’t the tenor of that whole debate a sign that somewhere along the line the church has veered away from the radical Kingdom way Jesus was proclaiming? Isn't there a huge irony in the fact that most of the debate has centred around the wealth and power and violence of the church, when these are the very things the Kingdom of God seeks to undermine?

For many people in our part of the globe, Christianity's become an irrelevance. Why is that? Is it because we've compromised too much, like the Herodians, and become indistinguishable from the world around us? Is it because we've retreated into our safe ecclesiastical havens, like the Essenes? Is it because we've grown angry and embittered like the Zealots? Is it because we stand and carp on the sidelines like the Pharisees, instead of getting on with the costly business of learning how to demonstrate love in a fallen world?

Were the teacher to come among us and examine our lives as individuals, as a congregation and as denominations, would he see signs of the Kingdom he came to proclaim? Or would he remind us once more that when the salt loses it’s saltiness, it’s no longer fit for purpose?

Jesus came to open up to us this mystery called the Kingdom. In the weeks to come, may God help us understand more than ever just what that means for you and me.

Amen