From Our Associate Pastor: Sewing Seeds, Harvest, Failure, and the Good News.

Late fall was always an important marker for my family growing up as November officially marks the end of harvest season. The first 18 years of my life moved via the ebbs and flows of farming. Season after season my family would plant and tend and gather, whether it was the oceans of soybeans stretching out on the
prairie or the tomatoes my mother planted in our yard.

Some of my most visceral memories from my childhood and youth come from my time doing farm chores and gardening. I spent hours in the garden with my mother as a child, carefully pulling weeds and watering via the complex web of hoses and sprinklers my father affectionately dubbed our “redneck watering system.” My least favorite task was something called picking rock. My sister and I would sit in the bucket of a tractor as my dad went up and down our fields. We’d throw our hands in the air any time we saw a rock bigger than a softball, pry it from the prairie dirt and throw it in the bucket and continue the process until we filled the bucket or my dad decided we were done – whichever came first.

And yet despite that work, despite those hours of watering, weeding, planting, tending and picking, we were often unsuccessful. You name it, it has happened to the family farm: weeds, floods, too little rain, hailstorms, tornadoes, frost. Sometimes the fruits of our labor failed to appear come harvest time; all that rock picking for nothing.

Many of the stories Jesus tells are about farming, and one of my favorites is the parable of the sower. In the story, a farmer goes out into a field and spreads seed on different types of soil – some rocky soil, some thorny soil, some good soil. Naturally, some of the seeds don’t quite make it. The seeds that fall in a path are eaten by birds. The seeds that fall upon rocky soil wither away in the sun, and the seeds that fall among the thorny part of the field are choked out.

The parables of Jesus always have some strangeness to them, and the twist in the parable of the sower is that despite all the failure, there are a handful of seeds that yield an exceptional harvest. The surprise of the story is that there is life changing abundance right next to commonplace failure. This kind of a bountiful
harvest was successful in a way that no amount of rock picking or watering or weed pulling by human hands could ever bring about. This was a miracle.

So what’s the good news in this mixed bag of a harvest? It’s that God’s grace will continue to surprise us. It’s that plentiful bounty is God’s plan for humanity, not failure, not oppressive systems, not despair. The Good News is that even in the worst of circumstances, God is still with us. The Good News is that resurrection means that failure never gets the final word.

Every time we planted a garden, my mother and I would always plant marigolds. We’d plant the marigolds every year from the previous season’s dead and withered flowers. Year after year new life would burst forth from the previous decay, from the previous year’s frailty. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those seeds were a gift from God. As we enter into another new season, may we here at the Peoples Church keep our eyes peeled for the ordinary miracles all around us, come what may.

Yours in Christ,
-Haley Hansen