Listen To Yourself
Preaching
Preaching the Parables
Series IV, Cycle A
Object:
Sometimes the best way to start reading your Bible is with the footnotes. Sometimes even in English the Bible seems like it's still written in a foreign language. In a way it is. Not just in Hebrew and Greek with a smattering of Aramaic, but even in English it is still in a "language" 2,000 years or more removed from you and me. The language of the Bible reflects the life of the Bible's people and we don't live there. So we need help if we're going to go there in our mind's eye and hear clearly what was being said when it was being said.
Most of us are not farmers, and most farmers now don't "sow," that's "s-o-w" the way a farmer in Jesus' day did. So, we need to put ourselves in shoes someone walked in 2,000 years ago if we're going to get anyplace with the parable Jesus told saying, "A sower went out to sow."
This week I went first to the Scottish theologian, William Barclay, and then to the footnote in my study Bible for guidance. Barclay wrote,
In Palestine there were two ways of sowing seed. It could be sown by the sower scattering it broadcast as he walked up and down the field. Of course, if the wind was blowing, in that case some of the seed would be caught by the wind and blown into all kinds of places, and sometimes out of the field altogether.
The second way was a lazy way, but was not uncommonly used. It was to put a sack of seed on the back of an ass, to tear or cut a hold in the corner of the sack, and then to walk the animal up and down the field while the seed ran out. In such a case some of the seed might well dribble out while the animal was crossing the pathway and before it reached the field at all.1
Barclay argues elsewhere that the parables of Jesus are extemporaneous stories that catch the listeners in a teachable moment, that they are not well researched term papers (or sermons!). So there is a good chance that while Jesus was sitting in that boat, he could point his hearers to a sower (as Barclay described) sowing seed on the hillside and say, as it says in the Greek, not "a" generic sower, but "the" sower2 -- that sower, the one over there, "went out to sow." "We know that much," said Jesus. "There he is doing it. Let's look ahead a bit at some likely results of what he is doing."
And then Jesus goes on with his story. But why a story? Why not just say it straight out? Just say what he wanted to say? I did, a while back, in a sermon on this text preached in a very different context. This is what I said: "The parable says some seed fell on rocky ground. Those are those hard-headed people who just don't get it. Some fell on shallow soil. They get it, but when things get tough, they get going. They burn out fast. Some seeds fell among thorns. They really seem to have it together; then things get scratchy and they give up altogether. Some seeds fell on good soil. But even among these, there is a disparity of yield. Some do more than others. Some seem better than others. Some give better than others."
In case you can't guess, I was talking about people in the church. Matthew was, too, in his gospel. Matthew's audience was also people in the church. But Jesus' audience was his friends and neighbors, relatives, and a good number of people who didn't like him. The parable was for all of them. But why a parable? I found the answer to that in a footnote!
In The New Oxford Annotated Bible that I use for study, the footnote to this parable, which really pertains to all Jesus' parables, provides some guidance. First it says: "Parables are stories describing situations in everyday life which, as Jesus used them, convey a spiritual meaning."3
This is not just a story about farming. And Jesus wasn't really talking about the farmer sowing in the distance, but about the listeners sitting right in front of him. He was getting personal. He was getting in their space and even in their face. That's something preachers sometimes do, sometimes to their peril.
Then the footnote says: "In general the teaching of each parable relates to a single point, and apart from this the details may, or may not, have particular meaning."4 In other words, don't go making stuff up! Don't get too creative with your interpretation.
Most of the time Jesus told his little stories without explanation -- he let them speak for themselves. This one, though, some verses later, has an "explanation." Why this one, and not each of them, is not entirely clear. What is clear is that we need to look for Jesus' meaning; make Jesus' point, not use his words to make ours.
Then the footnote says, "Jesus used this method of teaching because:"5
(a) it gave vivid, memorable expression to his teachings;
Jesus' hearers were far better than you or me at retaining what they heard. They lived long before the "sound byte" and "Sesame Street." But still, Jesus used stories -- preachers called them "illustrations" -- to make his point and make it stick. It's easier to take home a good story and retell it the next week, than to absorb three points and a conclusion.
(b) [Jesus told parables because] it led those who heard to reflect on his words and bear responsibility for their decision to accept or oppose his claim;6
In the military, the dictum for getting something across, or so I'm told, is:
• Tell them what you're going to tell them.
• Tell them.
• Then tell them what you told them.
That's one tactic. Jesus took another. Tell them just enough to get them to tell themselves. Telling stories can do that. And what better way is there to get to your point, than to have your hearer get there before you? You can watch that happen with a story.
I watch faces when I preach. Sometimes I see someone asleep. That's okay. We are a sleep-deprived society, and if this is the only place you can doze off go ahead and do it! But sometimes I see someone who is clearly a step ahead of me. Or better yet, someone takes a step I don't, either because I don't have time, or I didn't think to go there.
More than once in many years of preaching, someone has come out and commented on some point I made that I didn't make! The first time that happened I went back and checked the recording of the sermon to be sure. And I was right; I hadn't said that. Whatever I actually did say was translated into what someone needed to hear. It's enough to make you believe in the Holy Spirit. Jesus did. And Jesus trusted that Spirit to speak through his stories the truth about his hearers.
And "(c) [Jesus told parables because] it probably reduced specific grounds for contention by hostile listeners."7
How could anyone get upset hearing an itinerant storyteller sitting in a boat talk about a farmer sowing seed up on the hill and musing about what might happen to the seed? People did get upset. They got upset when the light bulb went on, probably on the way home, and they realized that Jesus had been talking not just to them, but about them.
Sometimes on a Sunday morning, people heading out the door will remark on the sermon. It's always nice to hear it was a nice sermon. It's even nice to be gently corrected -- it means they're listening! It's especially nice, though, as I did last week, to get a note a week later saying, "Pastor, what you had to say about that, said this to me, and I wanted you to know." It says elsewhere in Mark's gospel that "the common people heard [Jesus] gladly" (Mark 12:37 KJV); "... listen[ed] to him with delight" (Mark 12:37). But what they heard with delight, others heard with disgust or disdain. They heard him, all right! But how could they catch him at it when all he did was tell stories?
One of the best storytellers I know of is Marj Carpenter, former moderator of the Presbyterian Church General Assembly. Marj likes to tell the story of an old woman in North Carolina who turned 100.
Reporters come and ask you, when you get to be 100, how you got to be 100. And the woman said, "I don't know. I just woke up and was 100!"
You could tell the old lady and the reporter got kind of crossways. One of the things he asked her was "Do you go to church?" She said, "Of course I go to church! I've always gone to church! I'm Presbyterian, and I go to church!" And he said, "Oh, and if you weren't Presbyterian what would you be?" She said, "Well, I'd be ashamed!"8
You can tell that one to your Methodist or your Baptist friends! Don't explain; just smile. Sometimes stories make the point better than sermons, or taking ourselves so seriously that others only see red, instead of truth.
Author Philip Pullman, in his Carnegie Medal acceptance speech, said, " 'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever."9
Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, who encourages reading stories out loud to children would understand what Jesus was doing. Trelease has said, "Story is the vehicle we use to make sense of our lives in a world that often defies logic."10
If you prefer your sermon quotes to be from theologians, Robert McAfee Brown has said, "Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today."11
Jesus thought so. He told a lot of them. And the power of them is their ability to transcend the moment of their telling to tell us something about ourselves.
This is the rare, if not the only parable which Jesus told that gets explained.12 We read the explanation. There is scholarly debate about who's explaining -- Jesus, or maybe Matthew. It's a good explanation. It's a particularly good explanation, I think, of life in the church, which may explain why Matthew included it. But perhaps the "explanation" is not so much what Jesus said as what the church heard -- how the early church explained Jesus' little story.
It's a familiar story, the church's interpretation. I quoted my own take on it earlier. This is John Buchanan's take. (John is the pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago -- the church in which I was baptized, the church in which I became a Presbyterian.) I think John reflects this parable in the preface to his book, Being Church, Becoming Community. John writes of our church:
Our numbers are down. So are our financial resources. Once-viable neighborhood churches struggle with a devastating combination of deteriorating buildings, declining and aging congregations, and skyrocketing costs of everything from postage to health care for the minister. Our national structures are attacked by zealots of the left and right who, with the currently fashionable style of discourse -- short on civility, long on strident melodrama -- want us either to revolutionize the oppressive structures of society or to withdraw to a pious cloister foreswearing political/social movement of any kind ... The Presbyterian Church (USA) spends an enormous amount of its energy and resources responding to, attempting to mollify, and arguing with its extremes of left and right, and it continues to watch its financial base slip.13
That's not a happy story! In some ways we are an exception here in Georgetown. Looking at you makes me feel old (and I'm only 59!) -- and we do lots more baptisms than funerals. But denominationally, the seeds aren't sprouting, the farm's not thriving, and sometimes it seems the donkey has run off with the seed.
And lest it sound like "our" problem, our story alone, for our Methodist, Lutheran, and Episcopalian brothers and sisters in Christ, the story is the same. Jesus would feel right at home.
Correction. Jesus is right at home, with the likes of you and me, who on the best of days can be as hardheaded, shallow, fickle, and only sometimes faithful, as anyone else. Individually and denominationally we have problems. Sometimes we are the problem.
But, "So?" says Jesus. "Let anyone with ears listen!" (Matthew 13:9). Listen to what? Listen to the story. And listen, especially in this story, to what Jesus didn't say. He didn't condemn anyone. He named names, but he didn't call names. That's what you and I do.
Jesus just looked at the seed falling from the hand of the sower and said, "Life is like that. Sometimes it goes to seed. Sometimes it flourishes." It is like that, isn't it? We forget that Jesus had compassion for that.
It's easy to read this parable, and then the explanation of the parable, and read into them our anger and our frustration and our righteous indignation at the obvious failures of others -- in church and out. We all do it. God knows (and he does) in the church we do it to each other. Better that we should hear the parable call all of us to hear again the call of Jesus Christ in our own lives. Jesus calls us to look at our lives to discern where we have become hard or shallow or fearful in our faith and in what ways we need to be rerooted in it.
One way to do that will take a little work on your part. It is to simply read the parable the way Jesus told it. Close your eyes. In your mind's eye, go sit in the boat. Look on the shore at your friends and neighbors and relatives and a smattering of people who don't like you. All people like you, with their own problems. Tell them the story. Tell it the way you think Jesus told it.
Careful. Don't tell it the way you think he should have told it, especially to him or to her, but the way you would hope he would tell it to you. What's he telling you to tell them? What he told them? That he loved them anyway? You can open your eyes, assuming that you followed directions and closed them!
Go home and read the parable and the explanation. Stand and look at yourself in a mirror as you do. Read them angrily. Then read them compassionately -- even sadly. Then do what Jesus said: "Listen" (Matthew 13:3) to yourself.
____________
1. William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible, The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975), p. 58.
2. Ibid, p. 57.
3. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Thanks to Marj Carpenter.
9. http://www.aaronshep.com/storytelling/quotes.html.
10. Ibid.
11. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/robertmcaf177916.html.
12. The New Interpreter's Bible, Matthew (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995). See note 293 on page 305 for a short discussion of whether this text is from Jesus or from another source.
13. John Buchanan, Being Church, Becoming Community (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), p. xi.
Most of us are not farmers, and most farmers now don't "sow," that's "s-o-w" the way a farmer in Jesus' day did. So, we need to put ourselves in shoes someone walked in 2,000 years ago if we're going to get anyplace with the parable Jesus told saying, "A sower went out to sow."
This week I went first to the Scottish theologian, William Barclay, and then to the footnote in my study Bible for guidance. Barclay wrote,
In Palestine there were two ways of sowing seed. It could be sown by the sower scattering it broadcast as he walked up and down the field. Of course, if the wind was blowing, in that case some of the seed would be caught by the wind and blown into all kinds of places, and sometimes out of the field altogether.
The second way was a lazy way, but was not uncommonly used. It was to put a sack of seed on the back of an ass, to tear or cut a hold in the corner of the sack, and then to walk the animal up and down the field while the seed ran out. In such a case some of the seed might well dribble out while the animal was crossing the pathway and before it reached the field at all.1
Barclay argues elsewhere that the parables of Jesus are extemporaneous stories that catch the listeners in a teachable moment, that they are not well researched term papers (or sermons!). So there is a good chance that while Jesus was sitting in that boat, he could point his hearers to a sower (as Barclay described) sowing seed on the hillside and say, as it says in the Greek, not "a" generic sower, but "the" sower2 -- that sower, the one over there, "went out to sow." "We know that much," said Jesus. "There he is doing it. Let's look ahead a bit at some likely results of what he is doing."
And then Jesus goes on with his story. But why a story? Why not just say it straight out? Just say what he wanted to say? I did, a while back, in a sermon on this text preached in a very different context. This is what I said: "The parable says some seed fell on rocky ground. Those are those hard-headed people who just don't get it. Some fell on shallow soil. They get it, but when things get tough, they get going. They burn out fast. Some seeds fell among thorns. They really seem to have it together; then things get scratchy and they give up altogether. Some seeds fell on good soil. But even among these, there is a disparity of yield. Some do more than others. Some seem better than others. Some give better than others."
In case you can't guess, I was talking about people in the church. Matthew was, too, in his gospel. Matthew's audience was also people in the church. But Jesus' audience was his friends and neighbors, relatives, and a good number of people who didn't like him. The parable was for all of them. But why a parable? I found the answer to that in a footnote!
In The New Oxford Annotated Bible that I use for study, the footnote to this parable, which really pertains to all Jesus' parables, provides some guidance. First it says: "Parables are stories describing situations in everyday life which, as Jesus used them, convey a spiritual meaning."3
This is not just a story about farming. And Jesus wasn't really talking about the farmer sowing in the distance, but about the listeners sitting right in front of him. He was getting personal. He was getting in their space and even in their face. That's something preachers sometimes do, sometimes to their peril.
Then the footnote says: "In general the teaching of each parable relates to a single point, and apart from this the details may, or may not, have particular meaning."4 In other words, don't go making stuff up! Don't get too creative with your interpretation.
Most of the time Jesus told his little stories without explanation -- he let them speak for themselves. This one, though, some verses later, has an "explanation." Why this one, and not each of them, is not entirely clear. What is clear is that we need to look for Jesus' meaning; make Jesus' point, not use his words to make ours.
Then the footnote says, "Jesus used this method of teaching because:"5
(a) it gave vivid, memorable expression to his teachings;
Jesus' hearers were far better than you or me at retaining what they heard. They lived long before the "sound byte" and "Sesame Street." But still, Jesus used stories -- preachers called them "illustrations" -- to make his point and make it stick. It's easier to take home a good story and retell it the next week, than to absorb three points and a conclusion.
(b) [Jesus told parables because] it led those who heard to reflect on his words and bear responsibility for their decision to accept or oppose his claim;6
In the military, the dictum for getting something across, or so I'm told, is:
• Tell them what you're going to tell them.
• Tell them.
• Then tell them what you told them.
That's one tactic. Jesus took another. Tell them just enough to get them to tell themselves. Telling stories can do that. And what better way is there to get to your point, than to have your hearer get there before you? You can watch that happen with a story.
I watch faces when I preach. Sometimes I see someone asleep. That's okay. We are a sleep-deprived society, and if this is the only place you can doze off go ahead and do it! But sometimes I see someone who is clearly a step ahead of me. Or better yet, someone takes a step I don't, either because I don't have time, or I didn't think to go there.
More than once in many years of preaching, someone has come out and commented on some point I made that I didn't make! The first time that happened I went back and checked the recording of the sermon to be sure. And I was right; I hadn't said that. Whatever I actually did say was translated into what someone needed to hear. It's enough to make you believe in the Holy Spirit. Jesus did. And Jesus trusted that Spirit to speak through his stories the truth about his hearers.
And "(c) [Jesus told parables because] it probably reduced specific grounds for contention by hostile listeners."7
How could anyone get upset hearing an itinerant storyteller sitting in a boat talk about a farmer sowing seed up on the hill and musing about what might happen to the seed? People did get upset. They got upset when the light bulb went on, probably on the way home, and they realized that Jesus had been talking not just to them, but about them.
Sometimes on a Sunday morning, people heading out the door will remark on the sermon. It's always nice to hear it was a nice sermon. It's even nice to be gently corrected -- it means they're listening! It's especially nice, though, as I did last week, to get a note a week later saying, "Pastor, what you had to say about that, said this to me, and I wanted you to know." It says elsewhere in Mark's gospel that "the common people heard [Jesus] gladly" (Mark 12:37 KJV); "... listen[ed] to him with delight" (Mark 12:37). But what they heard with delight, others heard with disgust or disdain. They heard him, all right! But how could they catch him at it when all he did was tell stories?
One of the best storytellers I know of is Marj Carpenter, former moderator of the Presbyterian Church General Assembly. Marj likes to tell the story of an old woman in North Carolina who turned 100.
Reporters come and ask you, when you get to be 100, how you got to be 100. And the woman said, "I don't know. I just woke up and was 100!"
You could tell the old lady and the reporter got kind of crossways. One of the things he asked her was "Do you go to church?" She said, "Of course I go to church! I've always gone to church! I'm Presbyterian, and I go to church!" And he said, "Oh, and if you weren't Presbyterian what would you be?" She said, "Well, I'd be ashamed!"8
You can tell that one to your Methodist or your Baptist friends! Don't explain; just smile. Sometimes stories make the point better than sermons, or taking ourselves so seriously that others only see red, instead of truth.
Author Philip Pullman, in his Carnegie Medal acceptance speech, said, " 'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever."9
Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, who encourages reading stories out loud to children would understand what Jesus was doing. Trelease has said, "Story is the vehicle we use to make sense of our lives in a world that often defies logic."10
If you prefer your sermon quotes to be from theologians, Robert McAfee Brown has said, "Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today."11
Jesus thought so. He told a lot of them. And the power of them is their ability to transcend the moment of their telling to tell us something about ourselves.
This is the rare, if not the only parable which Jesus told that gets explained.12 We read the explanation. There is scholarly debate about who's explaining -- Jesus, or maybe Matthew. It's a good explanation. It's a particularly good explanation, I think, of life in the church, which may explain why Matthew included it. But perhaps the "explanation" is not so much what Jesus said as what the church heard -- how the early church explained Jesus' little story.
It's a familiar story, the church's interpretation. I quoted my own take on it earlier. This is John Buchanan's take. (John is the pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago -- the church in which I was baptized, the church in which I became a Presbyterian.) I think John reflects this parable in the preface to his book, Being Church, Becoming Community. John writes of our church:
Our numbers are down. So are our financial resources. Once-viable neighborhood churches struggle with a devastating combination of deteriorating buildings, declining and aging congregations, and skyrocketing costs of everything from postage to health care for the minister. Our national structures are attacked by zealots of the left and right who, with the currently fashionable style of discourse -- short on civility, long on strident melodrama -- want us either to revolutionize the oppressive structures of society or to withdraw to a pious cloister foreswearing political/social movement of any kind ... The Presbyterian Church (USA) spends an enormous amount of its energy and resources responding to, attempting to mollify, and arguing with its extremes of left and right, and it continues to watch its financial base slip.13
That's not a happy story! In some ways we are an exception here in Georgetown. Looking at you makes me feel old (and I'm only 59!) -- and we do lots more baptisms than funerals. But denominationally, the seeds aren't sprouting, the farm's not thriving, and sometimes it seems the donkey has run off with the seed.
And lest it sound like "our" problem, our story alone, for our Methodist, Lutheran, and Episcopalian brothers and sisters in Christ, the story is the same. Jesus would feel right at home.
Correction. Jesus is right at home, with the likes of you and me, who on the best of days can be as hardheaded, shallow, fickle, and only sometimes faithful, as anyone else. Individually and denominationally we have problems. Sometimes we are the problem.
But, "So?" says Jesus. "Let anyone with ears listen!" (Matthew 13:9). Listen to what? Listen to the story. And listen, especially in this story, to what Jesus didn't say. He didn't condemn anyone. He named names, but he didn't call names. That's what you and I do.
Jesus just looked at the seed falling from the hand of the sower and said, "Life is like that. Sometimes it goes to seed. Sometimes it flourishes." It is like that, isn't it? We forget that Jesus had compassion for that.
It's easy to read this parable, and then the explanation of the parable, and read into them our anger and our frustration and our righteous indignation at the obvious failures of others -- in church and out. We all do it. God knows (and he does) in the church we do it to each other. Better that we should hear the parable call all of us to hear again the call of Jesus Christ in our own lives. Jesus calls us to look at our lives to discern where we have become hard or shallow or fearful in our faith and in what ways we need to be rerooted in it.
One way to do that will take a little work on your part. It is to simply read the parable the way Jesus told it. Close your eyes. In your mind's eye, go sit in the boat. Look on the shore at your friends and neighbors and relatives and a smattering of people who don't like you. All people like you, with their own problems. Tell them the story. Tell it the way you think Jesus told it.
Careful. Don't tell it the way you think he should have told it, especially to him or to her, but the way you would hope he would tell it to you. What's he telling you to tell them? What he told them? That he loved them anyway? You can open your eyes, assuming that you followed directions and closed them!
Go home and read the parable and the explanation. Stand and look at yourself in a mirror as you do. Read them angrily. Then read them compassionately -- even sadly. Then do what Jesus said: "Listen" (Matthew 13:3) to yourself.
____________
1. William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible, The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975), p. 58.
2. Ibid, p. 57.
3. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Thanks to Marj Carpenter.
9. http://www.aaronshep.com/storytelling/quotes.html.
10. Ibid.
11. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/robertmcaf177916.html.
12. The New Interpreter's Bible, Matthew (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995). See note 293 on page 305 for a short discussion of whether this text is from Jesus or from another source.
13. John Buchanan, Being Church, Becoming Community (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), p. xi.
