6-10-24 - Scattering Seeds

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.


A person tosses a bunch of seeds on the ground, goes to sleep and wakes up for many days in a row, and then is surprised to see plants sprouting all around. This is a description of:

1. Organic farming methods
2. A lifelong city dweller’s first experience in the countryside
3. Me with my vegetable garden (see b…)
4. The way things work in the Realm of God

What does the story suggest to you?

It is Seed Week in Bible Camp. I’ve never counted, but it seems that Jesus told more parables about seeds than any other one thing. In the passage just before this, he tells a long story about a sower of seeds and the different results he gets according to where they fall. In this week’s gospel reading we get two more seed parables, short, simple, and – if we harvest them well – yielding manifold meanings and gifts. Here is the first: 

“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”

We meet no sower, just “someone” who haphazardly scatters seed on the ground and then seems astonished that it sprouts and grows. How is this like the Kingdom of God? Is Jesus saying that God is the careless scatterer, hoping that the kingdom values of love and faithfulness and power will take root in some? There appears to be no cultivating, weeding, tending, or watering – just “the earth producing of itself.” Does this suggest that some people are just naturally ready to grow and thrive?

Or are we the ones unwittingly scattering the seeds of the gospel, and surprised when some sprout?

Or am I wrong to equate the seeds with people? Maybe the seeds are simply the movement of “getting it,” grasping the truth that Jesus was trying to communicate about the way the Realm of God is already around, among, even in us. The truth grows in us – we don’t have to study and prepare, simply recognize and accept and live it.

Or perhaps we should focus on the sprouting plants rather than the carelessness or cluelessness of the sower. The realm of God is constantly sprouting new life, grown from seeds we scarcely knew had been sown – and day after day, night after night, this growth continues apart from any effort we make.

What do you see when you play with this one? This is what we do with parables – turn them this way and that, try on different angles and interpretations, see what strikes a spark in us. Come to think of it, parables are kind of like scattered seeds that sprout and grow, we know not how...

© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.

3-13-24 - Seeds

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

When we are faced with doing something difficult, it can help to remind ourselves what good will come of it. That’s what gets me to exercise and keeps me eating healthfully most of the time. But those are pretty superficial examples.

How about a parent who works a couple of jobs to ensure college money for her children? That outcome is a long way off, yet worth the sacrifice. Or “altruistic organ donors” like a Connecticut woman who offered a kidney to anyone who was a match, kicking off a round robin of surgeries in which four couples who were not matches for each other donated kidneys to other’s spouses, resulting in four kidney transplants and eight surgeries in one day.

In this gospel passage, we see Jesus confront his upcoming passion and death, and remind himself why he had so much pain and loss ahead. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, 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.”

In the natural world, whether in our gardens or our bodies, there is no growth without death. New skin grows as old cells die and are sloughed off. Chicks hatch only by breaking their eggs. A baby’s birth wreaks trauma on the mother’s body. Butterflies must demolish their cocoons to get free. And yes, seeds bear fruit only as they are buried in dark earth and broken open so that the new life within can come to fullness.

That is our calling as followers of Christ – to follow him into the dark, allow ourselves to be broken and transformed from a seed into a seedling, and then a plant that bears abundant fruit. That’s pretty much the trajectory of a disciple. Every ounce of energy we spend clinging to what we have, what we love, what we can see, is energy not spent allowing ourselves to be planted, broken, transformed and flourishing. "Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life."

This is also our calling as the Body of Christ, our calling as congregations: to allow ourselves to be broken open, inconveniently, sometimes painfully; our patterns and presuppositions challenged and changed, so that we can bring life and fruit to hungry people around us.

Where are you discerning a call to be like a seed that is planted, broken, transformed and made fruitful? Where are you on that cycle? It’s one we repeat more than once in our lives… sometimes more than once in a week! It can help to remember that we are following Jesus into that dark earth, that he is with us in the seed process. As he said, “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.”

We not only follow him into the dark earth. We live in the promise that, like him, we have emerged into new Life, that Life which never ends. Do all seeds know the glorious outcome of their process? If we must cling to anything, let it be that promise, this Life we have already begun to live.

© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.