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Not too long ago I was in a garden shop and I bought a "meadow in a can." Have you ever seen one? It's a rather clever form of marketing. The would-be gardener has only to purchase a can about the size of a large frozen orange juice can. But it's not frozen and there's no orange juice in it. Inside the can is a huge variety of wild flower seeds. The idea is that the would-be gardener is to spread these seeds over an unsuspecting meadow. Then all that is needed is the waiting, while the stretch of lawn is transformed into a riot of color, a magazine cover example of beauty and grace.

Well, the can of seeds came home and was spread judiciously around the meadow. We waited. And waited. We waited one year, and nothing happened. Then we waited two, and three, and finally on the fourth year a goodly number of wild flowers appeared in the field. It was really quite beautiful. The names and groupings escape me now, but it was quite impressive. I turned to my dad and said, "Did our little meadow in a can do that?" He looked at me and smiled, and shook his head as he headed back into the barn. It wasn't until later that I learned that seeds very likely wouldn't last four years out in the open, and that the appearance of the wild flowers in that field was God's own wonderful action in wind and the movement of all things.

I had obtained something which our parable doesn't cover. Bad seed. We had, or so I was certain, excellent soil. No rocks or thorns, no thorns or thistles, just good soil. But those seeds. They were a bad lot.

In a world such as ours, so little is certain. We stand this morning with the sower, watching seed spill out on all manner of landscapes, only, as the parable tells so well, to see them baked, choked, or cut down in their prime. Occasionally, some land on good soil, and a harvest of plenty proceeds. But sometimes, even when luck is with you and the good soil is targeted, you find that you've got bad seed. Sometimes even the unlikely chance of defeating the odds and finding good soil won't save you, because you bought "meadow in a can."

And once in a great while, in spite of all the barriers and problems, good seed finds good soil, and amazing things happen. Sometimes the fit is just right. Sometimes the harvest is amazing.

In seminary, we were told never to tell our congregations what the seeds represented. We were warned never to try to assign identity -- metaphorical or otherwise -- to the thorns or rocks or shallow soil. Instead, we were challenged to let the parable tease the hearer, to tell them as Jesus did by letting those who have ears hear the power of what is being offered in the story.

None of us really liked this idea. In fact, we wondered if Jesus had really said, "Let anyone with ears, listen." After all, these stories beg to have values assigned to them, don't they? It's almost impossible to avoid telling you who I think the shallow soil turns out to be. It's all I can do to keep from blurting out certain politicians' names when I hear about the seeds being choked by the thorns. And the birds, eating up all the seeds? Have I ever got a few ideas on that one! And then there's the place that Jesus didn't even go! What if, what if the seed itself wasn't viable! Hmmmm. What if this seed wasn't going to grow no matter where it landed? Do you have any ideas about that seed? Do you have any notions of what it might represent?

Don't you see why we rebelled against interpretation in seminary? Do you see how hard it is simply to let the story speak?

It is indeed difficult. But that is precisely what Jesus called his people to do. And it is what we are called to do if we wish to enter the beauty and grace of the parables. When we hear a parable today, the last thing we need to do is to begin assigning values and names to the things we wish to be symbolic.

Parables were a kind of teaching story used by many rabbis in Jesus' day. This seminarian was quite surprised to find out that Jesus didn't invent them himself. But they were commonly used, not as symbolic moral tales, but as creative stories designed to invite the hearer into the world of the story -- the world of God's Kingdom. The people of Jesus' day would have understood the idea of a sower tossing seeds all around the place. That, quite simply, is how farming was done in those days. A farmer would walk about casting seeds as he went, and then come back later to harvest what had grown up. And indeed, the seeds did land in a multitude of locations, with only a fraction of them ever producing fruit.

Fine. No potent symbolism, no hidden political meaning; just the story and -- what is it that Jesus says? "The ears to hear"?

So it falls to us to ask today, who were the people listening to Jesus? What was the context of their being? What truths could be revealed by Jesus sharing what to most of them was an obvious story. They knew, after all, how seeds were sown. They also surely knew about the randomness of their falling, and the resulting harvest or lack thereof. What do you think they heard? What truth did the early Christian community uncover from these simple, powerful stories?

What do you hear? What, in this style of first century agriculture, in this random tossing of seeds and occasional growth and harvest, do you hear? Where does this speak to your life? How does it speak to the community of faithful? What is it we hear in this parable as we sit down together to plan for ministry, to engage in "making disciples of Jesus Christ" (Matthew 28:19)? How can we mine the gold of Jesus' parables without attaching our own agendas and twenty-first century issues to his stories? How can we gain the ears to hear?

A first step might be for us to come clean about our issues, about the values and symbols that pop into our heads as we read a parable like this. It's likely that a conversation about this would be very revealing indeed. And as we share all of our pieces of applied meaning and agenda, we just might begin to empty ourselves. We just might begin to share a bit about the people to whom Jesus was talking. We might, in abandoning our issues, be able to enter the world of the people who originally heard these stories.

And as we go deeper, we might become aware of the struggles of the early Christian community; aware of how this story might have truly touched and spoken to them. Then, perhaps we might have ears to hear. Then perhaps we might touch some of the wonder of the Kingdom that Jesus shared in these powerful stories.

Or we might try to tell the story in a way that we could understand. We might take the familiar pieces of our life and fashion them into a story that would speak truth to us in a new and different way. How would you tell it? Maybe we could give this a try.

One day a computer programmer took a new program to the university to download into all the computers in the classroom. And as he went along downloading the software, some of the computers were not compatible, and were unable to read the program. Others had hard drives that were crashed. Still others could receive the software, but when a user tried to run it, the whole system would crash. And then there were a few computers that accepted the program perfectly. The software ran well and allowed the students to do a great many things in their studies.

If you have ears, hear. Amen.