Good Soil?

A sermon on what God thinks about deservedness

Today’s piece is a sermon I preached just a few days ago in Silver Springs, MD outside of DC. If you’ve read the book, I reference this passage in the conclusion. This sermon gave me an opportunity to expand on what I wrote there. Enjoy!

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Matthew 13:1-9

Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”

In my undergraduate preaching course, our professor taught us to approach a biblical text with the right set of questions. Generally, we tend to look at a passage wondering what it has to say to us. We want the Bible to be prescriptive, giving us life-lessons and direct, applicable instruction. My professor insisted that the Bible is actually first and foremost concerned with who God is. With that in mind, he suggested we read a text in light of these questions: (1) Who is God in this text? and (2) How are we called to respond in light of that?

As a preacher, the easy (and typical) version of this sermon is “What kind of soil are you?” Has anyone ever heard that sermon before? How to be good soil? How to change if you’re bad soil, or worse, how to identify when other people are bad soil. 

Photo by paul mocan on Unsplash

This isn’t a uniquely Christian problem: the impulse to assess who is good and who is bad, who is right and who is wrong, to label, categorize, and ultimately assign differing levels of value to different groups. But I dare say that it is especially a Christian problem, and it’s one that I deal with on a daily basis in my work.

It was actually the impetus for writing my book and having it be primarily about Grace. There was a particularly study that solidified this for me, and I talk about it all the time. It was a Kaiser Foundation and Washington Post study that asked people a question about poverty and then studied their answers based on their demographics. A key question they asked was, “Is poverty the result of lack of effort or unforeseen circumstances.” What the study found is that Christians were more than twice as likely as non-Christians to say that poverty is the result of lack of effort. And this is a problem endemic in our country and beyond: that homelessness is seen as an individual failure, maybe even a moral or spiritual failure. It leads to the obvious but troubling conclusion: people who experience homelessness somehow deserve it–they are “bad soil.”

And let me be clear about the implications of this: the very institutions meant to serve unhoused people in this country operate from a basis of suspicion. Our safety nets are always giving people side-eye. In order to access benefits or any sort of government aid, people have to consistently prove that they are worthy; that they’re working a job or trying to, that they aren’t secretly hiding a bank account or saving too much money in an attempt to gain independence. That they aren’t on drugs, or they’re consistently re-proving that their permanent disability is still… permanent! They erect barriers to screen out as many people as possible rather than to screen in everyone who needs support. 

And many non-profits and ministries operate this way too. A categorization based on who we thinks “deserves” help or “really wants to be helped” versus that other group who “don’t want help” or “just want to be homeless.” And it effects how we treat people, whether or not we serve people or keep serving people, and EVERY. TIME. it is based on assumptions, bias, and our own projections on people rather than a thorough understanding of them and their situation. It’s just us, assessing what type of soil they are and acting accordingly.

But what if this teaching about soil isn’t actually about what type of soil you are?

The soils are not active characters in this story. There isn’t any soil who starts out as one kind and changes itself to another kind.They simply are what they are, and all the actions happen to them. If Jesus was trying to tell people to evaluate what type of soil they were and to perhaps change, he picked a bad metaphor.

So what might this teaching be about instead? While the titles of parables are not themselves in the original text, whomever decided to call this the Parable of the Sower and not The Parable of the Soils was on to something. I return to what my amazing preaching professor taught me to ask first: Who is God in this passage? Most would say that God is the sower, and that’s where this story gets interesting.

Because if you’re a farmer, this is not really how you should disperse seeds–throwing them on all kinds of soil. They would prefer to not waste good seeds, and be picky about sowing them where they know the soil is good and healthy and will be fruitful. In some ways, we could call this The Parable of the Wasteful Sower, or the Foolish Sower. At least by the world’s standards–by the same standards that our world and many of our churches look at unhoused people. But God’s standards are different.

God the sower sows good seeds on every soil. I’m going to say that again, and not just because it’s a bit of a tongue-twister. God the sower sows good seeds on EVERY soil. While the world says, don’t waste precious resources in places that don’t deserve it, God tells a different story.

God the Sower is not concerned with our notions of deservedness that are driven by a mindset of scarcity, but scatters seed on every kind of soil and waits in anticipation to see what will happen. Soil that is deemed good or bad ALL receives good seed, and the opportunity to make something out of it.

Isn’t it amazing how that fundamentally changes this teaching? We all spend our time and energy assessing what type of soil we and everyone else are, when the passage shows a God who is entirely uninterested in that. And THAT’S good news.

How are we called to respond, given that God is like this? If God is a God of grace, who offers salvation, joy, and flourishing to all in spite of what they have done, how are we called to respond to the crisis of homelessness? 

I believe we are called to emulate God in the dispersal of love, care, acceptance, and resources outside of any of our misguided, moralistic categorizations; good, bad, poor, “crazy,” “addict,” “service resistant,” “homeless-by-choice,” “ungrateful.” We are called to emulate God in abandoning these labels and giving both tangible and intangible resources generously and in abundance to all, especially to the most vulnerable.