August 9, 2026
The Sower and the Soil
Matthew 13:1-23
Summer in the mountains is a perfect season for a hike. So, imagine we’re going on a small hike this morning.
We park in a gravel lot and head off down a trail packed hard by thousands of feet before ours. Nothing grows where we’re walking, and nothing will grow on this hard path as long as it is packed down.
But further on, the trail climbs, and the soil thins because we’re heading to the ridge. The rock is close to the surface up here, and what does grow, grows fast in the summer heat. It blooms, bears fruit, but then dies back just as quick, because there’s nothing beneath for the roots to hold on to.
Coming back down the other side of the ridge, the trail disappears for a stretch into a thicket, and rhododendron and laurel have grown so dense we have to duck and push through. Nothing else has room to grow in there but those shrubs.
And then, without much warning, the trail opens into an old forest along the side of the mountain, where the soil is dark and deep. It’s built up from hundreds of years of leaves falling and decomposing in the ground to create soil. Ramps and foamflower and Solomon’s seal grow there in season, and ferns proliferate, and everything is thriving.
Now, come back to the car. We’ve walked that whole hike without naming a type of soil. But you already know how it connects to today’s parable. Jesus told the story on a hillside by the sea, to a crowd so large he had to preach from a boat.
A sower went out to sow. Some seed fell on the path, and the birds ate it. Some fell on rocky ground, sprang up fast, and withered in the sun for lack of root. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns choked it out. And some fell on good soil, and it produced a harvest beyond counting.
This is a hard time in Jesus’ ministry. He is drawing massive crowds, but the religious leaders in his culture have turned against him, and they would like him gone. His own family thinks he has lost his mind and they would like to have a word. The disciples have left everything to follow him and are wondering what they’ve gotten themselves into, and they would like an explanation for why things aren’t going smoothly.
So Jesus tells a story about a farmer sowing seed, and it becomes his way of explaining what’s happening to him, and to them, and eventually to us.
One way of telling this story is as a parable of different types of people. Some people are path people — they are just hard and crusty and lifeless. Some of people are shallow people — they just want a quick fix, and sometimes they get it, but nothing lasts long. Some people full of brambles — they always overcommit, take on too much, never focused. And some of people are good soil where God’s mercy and love takes root and grows a harvest.
Matthew’s own interpretation leans this direction. Matthew gives us that reading a few verses later, tying each soil to a kind of person to explain why some people receive the word of the kingdom of God and some do not.
But I want to try something else this morning. Not to replace that reading, but to add to it. What if we don’t need to sort people into categories to take this parable to heart? What if – instead of four soils for four kinds of people – we can imagine four soils for four possibilities in life?
The hard, beaten-down path is a season can recognize even if we have never called it that. This what happens when we go through life with a suit of armor. We grow a tough shell around a tender heart and live with defenses. Defenses are usually built for a good reason. Maybe because we carry shame, or have gone through a loss, been betrayed or disappointed, or we’re afraid of being “found out.” So we wear armor in order to not be wounded. But inside of that hard exterior, in the ground of who we truly are, no love or mercy or grace can take root and grow.
The rocky ground is a season we also know. It is the season of newness, and real joy and enthusiasm, but it is untested. Falling in love is like that: this is the best relationship and the greatest person ever! A new marriage is like that. A new job can be like that. A new friendship, a new town. It catches like a roaring fire, all at once, we’re in love, and none of it is fake. But the roots are shallow. We don’t know yet how deep they will grow, and sometimes it ends faster than we hoped.
The thorny ground is the long middle stretch of life most of us know best. It isn’t full of bad things. It’s full of good things, but it is full: a career, kids at home, parents who need us, a mortgage and car payments and college and retirement, a community that wants our volunteer hours, a world that wants to be cared about but overwhelms the heart. None of it is wrong. But there is so much of it that the one or two things which are “kingdom of God life” get crowded out and wither. Not because the soil of our lives is bad, but because there’s no room left in the calendar, or in the heart, for those good seeds to grow.
And then there’s good soil. What makes for good soil? It’s tempting to picture good soil as a patch of ground that got lucky, that was spared whatever the other soils went through. But think about what actually makes soil rich. A farmer plows a field on purpose, tearing up packed ground so that light and air and water can reach where it couldn’t reach before. A farmer amends the soil with nutrients so that good things will grow and tends the soil carefully so that unwanted things don’t choke out what is wanted.
Think of that forest floor we walked through on our hike: centuries of things falling, branches and leaves, breaking down, dying, becoming the deep, dark ground that can hold a hundredfold. The richness didn’t happen by accident, and it didn’t happen because the ground was spared anything hard.
It happened because the ground kept getting broken open, because things were added, because things died in it, and something new took root every time.
I’m drawn to this way of reading the parable and the soils. It is too easy to sort people into categories. We look at someone who seems hard, or shallow, or crowded with the wrong priorities, and it’s easy to write them off: to decide they’re simply thorny people, hard people, lost causes. If there is a besetting sin in our culture, this may be it. But every one of us, in the very same week or month or year, might be any one of these soils.
The surprising twist in this story is not actually about the soils. It’s about the wild and reckless sower. If you wanted to farm today and make a living, you wouldn’t sow the way this farmer does, scattering seed everywhere. Modern agriculture has an amazing tool for this problem. A farmer today can run a robotic sensor across a field, sending an electrical signal into the ground, to read the electrical properties of the soil beneath the surface.
The farmer can then build a map, zone by zone, of exactly where on that farm the ground is rich and where it isn’t. So that the computer controlled tractor which plants the seed can read the map in real time and adjust itself as it moves, dropping more seed where the soil can support it, and less, or none at all, where the soil can’t. It is efficient and smart and it doesn’t waste a single seed on ground that was not going to produce a harvest.
But that is not what happens in this story and that is not how the kingdom of God works. That is not the character of God.
The sower in Jesus’s parable has no sensor and wouldn’t use one if he had it. He walks the field and throws seed everywhere. On the path. On the rocks. Into the thorns. He sows into ground that, by any reasonable calculation, is a poor investment. And he does it anyway, not because he’s careless, but because that’s who God is. God scatters seed everywhere and indiscriminately, but God has an infinite supply of good seed.
That is the good news of this story. It is not ultimately about the soil, it is about the wild goodness of God. God does not run the numbers on us. God does not scan us first and decide where we are worth the effort. God keeps sowing in the hardest ground we’ve got, the shallowest season we have, the most crowded life we can cobble together, because for God there is no such thing as a wasted seed.
It is never too late for any of us to become good soil. There is no window we might miss, no morning when the sower will not return. God keeps coming back because God has more seed than we have ground.
That is the good news. What do we do with that?
I wish I had a clean answer, with three steps to becoming better soil: aerate, amend, fertilize. But Jesus the great teacher doesn’t offer us easy steps, and life doesn’t work just like that.
Some of us are living the thorny season right now. A full calendar of things that all matter: a job that asks everything, a family who needs you, a future you need to prepare for, a world that needs your service and care. None of it is wrong to carry. But all of it together can choke out the one or two things that actually give kingdom of God life. What is needed is not one more thing that will help manage the crowded schedule and make it all click together. What is needed is the ancient spiritual discipline of subtraction: to carefully discern among the many commitments what is needful, and what can be let go, on purpose, to make room.
Some of us are living behind a hard shell we’ve built for good reasons. Something wounded us, or betrayed us, or made us afraid. So we built defenses, and the defenses worked: they kept us moving. But a shell that once protected you can start to suffocate your life; because the guarded version of yourself is false and can’t stand in for the real you. We do not need to tear the defenses all at once. That would not be wise. But we can loosen the grip. Take off some armor. Make room for the seeds of grace.
And some of us are living in ground that’s been broken open already, not by our choice, and not because it was fair. Grief. Loss. Deep disappointment. These will break open the ground of our lives. God does not do it to us, but I can tell you with confidence, as a pastor and a person, that when the ground is broken open by suffering we are more ready to receive the grace of God than we have ever been. Something can take root deeply that could not grow before. That’s not a reason for what happened but it is a promise about what God’s grace can redeem.
A sower went out to sow on the hardened path, on the rocky ridge, in the thorny thickets, and in the good soil. You may recognize yourself in any one of those today; and it may be different tomorrow. That’s not a verdict on you. That’s just where you are right now.
The Sower is scattering seed today, wherever you are. This is the gospel: the Sower is always coming by, and God never runs out of seed.