A sower went out to sow.....matthew 13.1-9

Mea culpa!  Mea culpa!  Which essentially means, in Latin, it's all my fault!

I looked back and I have been very lax in writing to my friends and readers.  Can't say it won't happen again, but I will try to be more alert.

This Sunday we are graced with a familiar Bible story/parable about the sower who sowed his seed everywhere, regardless of the potential fertility of the soil.  Rocky ground, dry ground, thorn-y ground all got a share of the precious seed.  Only the good soil was able to bring forth any harvest, but boy, what a harvest!  100 times or 60 times or 30 times the amount of seed sown.  A normal harvest might bring about 15 times the seed output.

So is this a parable about the ground or about the seed or abou the sower?  Yes! 

The wonderful thing about parables are that they have multiple levels of meaning simultaneously.  Generally the storyteller takes a very familiar scene and twists it just enough to cause us to wonder - to marvel - to become angry - to confess.....you take your pick, but the twist in the familiar scene is intended to lead us in several directions at the same time.

One commentator calls this 'enigmatic' speech.  I like that word 'enigmatic' so much I'm using it in Sunday's sermon too!  It means 'puzzling'   Some enigmatic speech is not intended to puzzle the hearer - it just does (think about ambiguous speech).  But parables are intentionally enigmatic - that is the twist that causes us to linger and consider the multiple messages coming our way.

Remember, this is not an 'allegory' - a literary term of a story where each character/ thing in the story is intended to represent something else.  The Lion and the Wardrobe is an allegory and each character has a parallel identity.  Rather a parable is constructed to throw you off, not to give you a precise picture.

So I will leave you with these thoughts as you find your Bible and read through this story again.
Where is God in this story?
Where are believers/disciples in this story?
What is wrong with this farmer that s/he wastes all that seed?

A little more tomorrow I promise.  But for now, do not let all you ever knew about this story keep you from asking some new questions.
Pax.