Scripture: Matthew 13:1-9; Matthew 13:18-23; Genesis 25:19-34
Preaching on the Parable of the Sower alongside Jacob and Esau, Wilson argues that Jesus’ agricultural parables resist one-to-one decoding and instead provoke faithfulness. Drawing on Fukuoka’s One-Straw Revolution and a critique of industrial agriculture’s fragmentation, he reframes the church’s task not as sowing (which belongs to God alone) but as tilling and caretaking the soil — small, patient, unglamorous acts of love, service, and invitation that prepare people to receive grace, countering modern hesitancy to share faith at all.
Illustrations: texas-industrial-farming-peaches, western-north-carolina-farm-plots, fukuoka-one-straw-revolution, berry-and-jackson-agrarians, one-solution-three-problems, tortoise-and-the-hare, door-to-door-salesmen-evangelists, reverse-parable-of-the-sower
July 12, 2026
Ordinary Time
Genesis 25:19-34 Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Genesis 25:24-34
When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red, all his body like a hairy mantle; so they named him Esau. Afterward his brother came out, with his hand gripping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them. When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob. Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. Esau said to Jacob, “Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!” (Therefore he was called Edom. ) Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.” Esau said, “I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?” Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank, and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!” “Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”
I did not grow up on a farm. The scale of farming in Texas today is so vast and industrial that the only time it ever feels personal is stopping to pick up peaches on the side of the road, and many of those peaches come from huge, industrial orchards anyway.
I went to graduate school in North Carolina and driving around Western North Carolina especially, I still remembering noticing how small plots of agricultural land was. People owned an acre here, a few acres there. Very few owned 1000 acres contiguously. The rivers and mountains and history of the land forced these smaller plots.
At seminary, my Old Testament professor had us read Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson and other American writers but it was a Japanese farmer, Masanobu Fukuoka, who really helped shape a different way to think about agriculture in his book The One-Straw Revolution. It’s a fascinating account of the transformation of the plots of land that he was looking after. He tells his own story of farming, of bringing rice and grain and chickens and fruit back together with a little straw binding the cycle.
This is something that influenced many agrarians in the United States. The idea is that modern agriculture basically took one solution and created three problems. Farmers and ranchers of years ago had cattle and crops next to each other, and they would rotate the cattle and the crops. The crops they grew also would not be monocultures. But we have one solution that turns into three problems, because we took farming away from ranching and added chemicals so we wouldn’t have to weed. They add chemical fertilizers so they only have to rotate if it is legally required
So now we have farms of monocultures that need to be weeded constantly with pesticides. Those pesticides go down, enter the waterways, pollute the waters, make it hard for farm animals to drink the waters downstream. We put farm animals in fields and have to buy hay for them. We took ecosystems that fit, and forced industrial ecosystems that don’t — that lie on the precipice — in order to maintain scale and profitability. We took the plantation and sharecropping system and replaced the abusive labor with chemicals. We pump in chemicals and chemically processed feed and water because the regular water is too toxic from all the chemical run off.
Because the way people justify it is, “Oh, we need modern agriculture to feed the billions of people.” When the reality is, modern agriculture makes it hyper-profitable for enormous conglomerates to feed the billions of people. So the food and the land — it’s completely abstracted from the people who consume it. Except in small, charming ways: farmers’ markets, farm-to-table restaurants, things of that nature.
If you grow up in a city, farming is a hobby. People retire and get certified as master gardeners. The land was not so distant from the reality of daily life when Jesus walked and taught. His parables, over and over again, come back to agriculture.
Jesus rarely explains his parables. He leaves it to his audience to figure out what is going on. But here, in Matthew 13, he tells us exactly what’s going on.
What he leaves unsaid is the real question: who are the sowers, and who are we? He gives us a great picture of what the different landscapes represent. We know what the road represents, the bushes, the good soil — we’re given all this. But what is the seed itself?
At first glance, it’s slightly confusing. A lot of Jesus’ parables, especially in Matthew, he prefaces by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like blank The kingdom of God is like blank.” He doesn’t, here. In this one, he just tells a parable and then tells us what it means.
When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”
As so often is the case, when Jesus answers our question: what does this mean? the answer does not often lead to greater clarity but to more questions.
A sower who sows — is God the Father the sower? Is it the Holy Spirit? Is the seed the gospel? Like all the parables, finding one-to-one comparisons is not the most helpful exercise. It wouldn’t be a parable if it were a one-to-one analogy — it would just be an analogy. The parable lives in this strange genre between analogy and metaphor and story. And even in explaining it, we don’t get any closer to the truth of it.
The parable is about provocation — provoking us toward faithfulness, toward holiness, toward new life. Parables aren’t for us to process like sports score. They aren’t about winning or losing even when some of the results are positive and some negative.
There is a freshness to the parables — you can preach them again and again, and each Sunday take a different angle. You can’t exhaust the meaning-making potential of a parable. Whereas you could, of Aesop’s fables. I think of the tortoise and the hare: there’s only so many ways you could describe and explain the tortoise and the hare. The parable of the sower, we can come back to again and again.
But what I want us to think about today is: what are we supposed to do? Because I think the parable of the sower actually gives humans a lot of agency. Not to save people, not to be the gospel, not to be sowers — but to be tillers, to be caretakers of the soil.
If sowing was all you needed to grow anything, it would be the easiest job imaginable. If all I had to do to grow a bunch of crops was throw some seeds around and then wait a while and pick them up — gosh, that’d be a wonderful way to live. But that’s not— that’s not how you do it. That’s not how it works.
Soil needs to be cared for. Good soil doesn’t just wake up one day good. It has to be watered and fertilized — usually naturally, at that point — offered minerals and nutrients that would make a home for that seed, so it can grow. Rocky soil has to be supplemented with other materials. A road, if you’re gonna grow on it, needs to be broken up, softened, supplemented. If there are thistles and thorny bushes, they need to be chopped down.
This is gets us back to Fukuoka and the one straw revolution. Like the life of the farm, the life of faith can be split into a number of different facets that take one solution and turn it into three problems. We split up the life of the church and the life of Christians, we split up religion and spirituality. We split up our obligation to God from our obligation towards our neighbor. We have split up who we call our neighbor.
We have separated out being a member of a church, having these responsibilities, from growing in our faith on a daily basis, so that our understanding of God is fuller today than it was a year ago, or a week ago. We have separated out. How we answer and respond to questions of the faith. By keeping these experts on hand that we can look to, but we don’t have to think too deeply about.
And finally we have separated sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. You have something worth sharing or else you would not be here this morning. Yet hesitancy is understandable in our modern world where literally door to door salesmen modeled their behavior on door to door evangelists. There can be an understandable squeamishness around sharing the faith. What if people misunderstand you? What if people already have at church? What if you do it wrong, all these anxieties are built up.
In some ways, we have created this reverse parable of the sower, so that instead of spreading the seed on the road, and in the bush, we hesitate to spread it anywhere, for fear of the road, or the bush. The model Jesus gives us is to share that good news, but also to be caretakers of the soil in which it falls, to not separate things out, to not indiscriminately act in this world. .
We are to be provoked towards faithfulness, by the parables and the gospels, and by our own experiences, and understanding of faith, that God has shared something unique with each of us that is worth sharing with others. The point is not to all have best practices. But to realize that if God has changed your life, God can do it for another, and they should be offered that opportunity of new life in Jesus Christ.
Often today the first step in faith is not a prayer, it is serving with another person. It is giving. It is listening. We aren’t going to know how the Holy Spirit reaches another soul beforehand. We did not all connect with God in the same way. It isn’t just coming on Sunday morning. Sometimes it is inviting someone to dinner. Sometimes it is inviting to serve together.
There is the freedom of an amazing humility to still be found in this parable. I think what the parable of the sower shows us is what our labor as the church in this life is really about. No human can bring another to faith. It’s not going to happen. Faith is a response to God’s action in someone’s life. Faith is there because of God, all the way down. Faith comes from an individual encounter that cannot be marketed or contrived.
But what we can do — what you can do — is till the soil a little bit. And when I say a little bit, I mean it. If you have a field that’s rocky, full of weeds and thistles, and on your own you try to get it ready for planting season in one day, you will fail. You will fail, and you will feel horrible about yourself. Instead, if you start picking a few weeds, picking a few rocks, putting a little water out, putting a little peat — it will transform. If you do it together, the soil will transform faster.
But also: that good soil doesn’t just grow stuff on its own. It still needs to be cared for. It still needs to be looked after. Caring for it is loving it. Loving the dirt and the rocks. Being patient with the birds and the briars.
So we are left today with the question for our selves and for our neighbors: what are the things that we can do for the people in our life in need of grace and mercy — We can till their soil a little bit. We can add a little organic matter. We can pull a weed. We can serve with them. We can pray with them. Not the great radical thing, but the still, small thing.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.