Abundant Fruit from Mixed Soil

Each of the six sister institutions on the MEF campus (UCZ Theological College, Anglican Seminary, YWCA, Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation, Copperbelt Presbytery and TEEZ) are invited to come together on the first Friday of the month for a joint worship service. The institutions rotate leadership each month, and TEEZ was in charge of leading the service in November. Molly preached, and Ryan helped lead worship, along with others from our office.

The following is the text from Molly's sermon. Read Mark 4:1-20 first.

Abundant Fruit from Mixed Soil
By Molly Dowell Baum
TEEZ-led ecumenical chapel, Kitwe, Zambia, 5 Nov 2010

"Anyone with ears to hear, listen!" This refrain echoes throughout Mark 4. It is an appeal for hearing. It is directed 1) to the crowd, 2) to Jesus’ inner circle of followers, and 3) to us, the readers of Mark. But there is a major problem: the hearers don’t get it! And Jesus says: If you don’t understand this parable, “how will you understand all the parables?” (13). Jesus’ question is about their ability to hear, to comprehend, to shape their lives entirely according to God’s will.

Even the disciples don’t get it! When we study Mark's gospel, we find this theme of the disciples failing in their ability to hear, comprehend, and shape their lives according to God’s will. Constantly they question and doubt. It can be pretty comical how block-headed they are- and boy does it frustrate Jesus! The disciples are the epitome of failed hearing. They are the members of the inner circle, to whom Jesus "explained everything privately" (4:34) yet Judas betrays, all the disciples flee at Jesus’ arrest, Peter denies—even the faithful women run frightened from the tomb and "say nothing to anyone" (16:8).

In a huge way, it was the disciples who can be identified as the ones in vs. 12 who:

may indeed look, but not perceive,
and may indeed listen, but not understand;
so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.

Jesus was quoting Isaiah, who was speaking of Israel, the chosen people, the insiders. And in fact, the “outsiders” Jesus refers to were also the insiders, the disciples, the very same to whom "the secret of the kingdom of God" has been given (4:11). The disciples don’t get it. Their soil doesn’t produce much fruit.

But the disciples are not alone. They are not the only disciples to fail in their ability to hear, comprehend, and shape their lives entirely according to God’s will. They are not the only soil that produces little fruit.

We don’t get it either. We get it wrong when we want the stuff God can give us, more than we want God for Godself. In that moment, the word is choked by thorns. We get it wrong when we are so concerned with talking about God the right way, using the right model, having the right liturgy, that we forget ministry is about relationship and service with God’s people. In those moments, our roots are not deep enough, struggling on rocky soil. We get it wrong and fail to hear, comprehend, and shape our lives entirely according to God’s will when we are overly critical of those who are different from us, or when we are short-tempered with our loved ones and neighbors, or when we are just too tired from all the good ministry we are doing. In those moments, the word sown in us is immediately snatched away. In these and countless other ways, we are too often the disciples who fail.

Even Mother Teresa didn’t fully get it. Mother Theresa, the little old nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity and was an inspiration to the world. She worked tirelessly with love and joy caring for those who are called untouchables in India. She didn’t fully understand, didn’t feel confident in her faith. Some call hers a “crisis of faith,” others a “dark night of the soul.” It spanned for forty years--during the entire time of her ministry, until the day she died. Her smiling face showed a woman confident of her faith, but her personal letters showed otherwise. She wrote:

The damned of Hell suffer eternal punishment because they experiment with the loss of God. In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist.

In another letter to a spiritual confidant, she wrote

Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ...

Even Mother Teresa felt that she did not hear. She identified herself as the one outside, without understanding of the secret of the kingdom of God. Just as in Mark’s gospel, today we see that every disciple has failed to hear in some way.

But failure is not the last word in this text. Imagine again in your mind the sower going out to sow. The field is one of a group of miniature fields, sandwiched next to the house, around the lean-to where a few animals sleep, upon a steep hill, and right up against the path leading to the village square. There is a shortage of plowland in ancient Palestine, so the family must plow and sow every bit of land that might grow seed—even the more rocky part near the hill, and around the island of thorny bushes too deeply entrenched and prickly to be removed with bare hands or primitive tools. So with one swing of the farmer’s arm, some seed is sown on the unplowed path, some among the thorns, some on the rocky ground, and some on the good soil.

Most of the seed likely fell on the good soil--the loss of seed was not THAT great. Furthermore, the seed that fell on the good soil was abundant! Vs 8 says the good soil “yielded thirty-, sixty- and a hundred-fold” (4:7). A hundredfold yield per seed was a rich harvest. It was certainly beyond the every day, but not beyond the possible. This parable that Jesus tells could have been the actual experience of a Palestinian farmer listening. The planting area was mixed overall—though some soil was fruitless, some was abundantly fruitful. This is good news.

We can think of the field as the whole area in which seed landed, as a complete unit. Likewise, the word is sown in the complete unit of a person—a person who has within her or himself some parts which are fertile soil, while other parts are rocky, unplowed, or thorny.
The disciples were not merely rocky ground. They were fields of mixed soils. If all the disciples fled, and told “nothing to anyone” then how can we explain the existence of Christianity to this day? The same disciples who failed according to Mark’s gospel, were nevertheless successful in passing on the tradition of Jesus’ life and ministry. Their fruit was abundant. They were given some measure of success in hearing, understanding and living out the good news. And the measure they gave was given back—and MORE!

We could certainly say the same of Mother Teresa—now called Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, on her way to sainthood. She was fruitful despite her failure. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her humanitarian work. And her Missionaries of Charity continued to expand—at the time of her death it was operating over six hundred (600) missions in one hundred twenty-three (123) countries. There is no doubt that overall, Mother Teresa bore fruit far more abundant than the failure she felt. Certainly all disciples are a field of mixed soil, and the word that falls on good soil produces abundantly.

Now, we probably don’t consider ourselves on par with Mother Teresa, but that doesn’t undermine the fertile soil that is producing fruit within us. Yes, it can be painfully obvious to us the ways we fail in our ability to hear, to comprehend, to shape their lives entirely according to God’s will. But we who are the outsiders who don’t get it, are at the same time the insiders to whom Jesus is giving the secret of the kingdom of God. We are fields of mixed soil. We are hearers of the word. The sower has only the miniature field to work with. God has only imperfect humans. But, with God’s help, that is enough to produce abundant fruit. So let us go out— forgiven through Christ in the ways we fail, nurtured by the Spirit to be fertile soil in which God’s word will produce abundant fruit.
Amen.

My exegesis and understanding of this parable was greatly influenced by Luise Schottroff's book, The Parables of Jesus, Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, 2006.