Sam Bush, “The Parable of the Relief Pitcher”

Some of you know the account of William Faulkner who, when teaching at UVa, called on a student with a raised hand. The student said, “Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?” Faulkner simply replied, “Read it four times.” Whether it’s The Sound and the Fury or a children’s book, a good story is worth revisiting. And that’s what we’re going to do with the Parable of the Sower. 

At this point in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus has already done his fair share of teaching. He has also healed throngs of people. By now, he’s developed quite a following. The passage says “great crowds gathered around him.” Everybody is all ears. This would be a great time to clarify who he is and what he’s all about. He says, “Listen!” and then launches into the Parable of the Sower, a story with no obvious moral lesson or takeaway. 

After he’s done, the disciples come over and say, “Jesus, that was great! Loved the part about the birds and the thorns, but, um, we’re a little confused as to what that was all about.” They ask him, “Why are you speaking in parables?” 

Jesus is usually fine with leaving his audience hanging, but this time he spells it out for them. He offers the Cliff Notes (the birds are the devil, the thorns are the allure of wealth). And yet, his explanation does not make the story easier to understand. He might have put the puzzle pieces together, but the image of the puzzle itself is like one of those magic eye pictures (you might remember those from the 90s). I could never see any of them. It was infuriating. 

Even after two-thousand years, we are still hardwired to misinterpret this parable. People often treat it like a personality test. Are you the rocky soil or are you more of a thorny person? Unlike the Enneagram or Myers Briggs, there’s a clear right answer. You better be the good soil. And so we often take this parable as a call to action, either to advance God’s kingdom and sow seeds for Jesus or to till and weed and take care of our own little raised bed.

But do you see the problem with this interpretation? Soil, being what it is, can’t really do all that much. It is completely subject to external forces - sun, rain, weeds - it cannot protect itself nor enhance itself. It is literally where living things go when they die. 

Seemingly out of nowhere, a seed comes along. Jesus says the seed is the word of God. Unlike dead soil, the word of God is alive. It activates. Genesis says, “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” From the beginning, we have always been the soil, completely reliant on God’s breath to give life. 

With that in mind, all signs point to God being the sower. How exactly does the sower go about the planting process? Well, there’s no land preparation, no irrigation. He’s not taking soil samples. He scatters the seeds recklessly (or generously, depending on how you look at it). Rather than painstakingly planting each seed, most of the seeds seem to be spilling out of his bag. His word is shared freely, to all and to everywhere. 

There’s hostility to the Word, of course. There are other forces at work against the Sower. Birds snatch the seeds away. Competing thorns attempt to choke them out. And yet, the sower is undeterred. The birds may come to eat the seeds, but even animals ingesting and digesting seeds is a cleverly effective way for them to successfully germinate. In other words, the resistance is part of the process. The sower is not wringing his hands about the thorns; he is unbothered by what appears to be defeat. You see the heart of Christianity is much closer to passivity than activity. We were never meant to be more than soil, to let the word do its work, to receive it, trust and watch it grow. 

OK, even after we’ve sorted out the main characters, it’s still probably hard for farming imagery to resonate with today’s audience. I’ve been to a lot of wedding receptions in barns; at the same time, our society has also successfully manufactured produce to not contain any seeds. So what does this parable have to say to you and me today? 

Well, it being summer, let me tell you the parable of the relief pitcher. Daniel Bard is a major league baseball pitcher for the Colorado Rockies and the subject of a remarkable piece in The New Yorker a few weeks ago. Sixteen years ago, at the age of 22, Bard was a rising star; striking out hall-of-famers, winning clutch games, getting all sorts of good press.

Sadly, he was plagued by an anxiety disorder known in sports as “the yips” which is when the brain starts to overthink to the point where you can’t function. The yips can happen to anyone whose work involves fine motor skills (surgeons, musicians, etc). Bard’s career quickly starts to tank. He tries everything from taking time off to whispering mantras to hypnosis. Nothing works. After getting traded six times in four years he retires and gets a job as a mentor for minor leaguers, sitting on the bench and giving tips on everything from pitching grips to girlfriend problems. It’s a humiliating downgrade. 

But these young players flock to him because he’s humble and approachable and he actually listens to them. He counsels them while playing catch, like a father would with his son. After a couple years, throwing doesn’t feel difficult for him anymore. One day, someone asks him to demonstrate a certain pitch and, somehow, he throws a ninety-m.p.h. strike in his running shoes. It had been seven years since he was in the major leagues, but, after a remarkable comeback, Daniel Bard, at 37, was one of the best closing pitchers in baseball last year. He’s not cured by any means. He has already spent a few weeks on the Injured List for anxiety which he says comes and goes. But this is a man, who was, to the baseball world, good as dead, who experienced rebirth long after he had given up. And he gives credit to God. In one interview he says, “God has a plan for me, it’s not all in my hands.” As Jesus says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” 

Now, I know for a fact that none of you are major league baseball players, but you can probably relate to the reality that sometimes you are your own worst enemy. Where are you experiencing the yips? Maybe it’s in your dating life or your marriage. Maybe it’s parenting or simply being stuck in a cycle that you can’t get yourself out of. If you can relate at all, the parable of the sower is for you. Now, you might be enjoying a fruitful harvest these days - I hope you are - but there’s a good chance that, somewhere in your life, it feels like your crops are getting slashed and burned. 

In ancient Israel, after the crops were harvested, the fields were set on fire so the minerals from the ash would fall back into the soil. Afterwards, animals would be allowed to roam the land and rummage for food, leaving behind manure and fertilizing the soil. You see, the remains of decomposed deadness are where a seed feels most at home. A seed seems so small and insignificant. It works in the dark, beneath the ground, in secret. All the while, it is at work through the Spirit.

Today’s message is that God is at work in your life even when it looks like the total opposite. The more we can get out of the way and let God do the work the better off we’ll be. But even when that is too much to ask, even as we fail to understand this story, we can trust in the storyteller himself. 

After all, this story is told by the Word himself, who came down from above and to whom the world responded with hostility. Thorns encircled his head as he died on a cross. Like a seed, he was buried in the earth. But the death of the seed was only the beginning of the eternal life he ushered in when up from the ground he arose. 

As the great Easter hymn “Now the Green Blade Riseth” proclaims: 

Forth He came at Easter, like the risen grain, 

Jesus who for three days in the grave had lain; 

Quick from the dead the risen One is seen: 

Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.