Dear Friends in Christ, grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The votive ship hanging over the baptismal fount is a copy of the 1825 Restauration that brought the first Norwegian emigrants to America from Stavanger, Norway. Surprisingly, the majority of the passengers aboard the Restauration were not Lutherans. They were Quakers.  During the Napoleonic Wars, the Danish-Norwegian Kingdom sided with France and many sailors were taken prisoner and incarcerated on English ships.  In 1808, “the Meeting for Sufferings among the Quaker Friends in England was informed that there were about 2,700 Norwegian- Danish prisoners of war.” The Quaker Friends paid a visit to these ships, and though “they could not, then, at all converse intelligibly with each other, yet by signs, in love and friendship, they understood a little of each others’ feelings.” More visits followed; books were given by the visitors, including books on Quakerism and for the study of the English language. The visiting Quakers were finally allowed to hold meetings on board…and so Norwegian- and Danish sailors came to be Quakers, not by birth, but learning about their faith on a ship. The model of the Restauration serves a symbol of one of the many possible places where faith can be taught.

On the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, there is a small horseshoe shaped bay referred to as the Cove of the Sower where tradition states that Jesus taught from a ship. It is just below the hillside commemorated for centuries as the Mount of the Beatitudes where Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount. Sound generally travels better over water than land. This is primarily because water is denser than air, allowing sound waves to travel faster and with less energy loss. The bay itself, however, forms a natural amphitheater, which is perfect for the projection of sound. This unique location and topography caught the attention of 1954 Harvard graduate B. Cobbey Crisler. One Christmas, while he and his wife were visiting prominent sites of antiquity in Palestine, Cobbey tested ideas about the natural acoustical properties on hillsides where large crowds could gather to listen. The results were so compelling able to persuade a Cambridge, Massachusetts acoustics firm to send a sound specialist to electronically test the sites. The tests along with a commentary by Crisler were published in the 1976 edition of the Biblical Archaeologist under the title “The Acoustics and Crowd Capacity of Natural Theaters in Palestine.” Crisler estimated that between 5000-7000 people could hear a single voice speaking in the cove either from a rock projection or a boat floating in the water.

In Matthew’s gospel, the evangelist writes, “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.”  Jesus always used parables in his teaching.  Some of the most famous were the story of Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Good Shepherd, and the Ten Foolish and Wise Bridesmaids. They provide important lessons in how we are to act faithfully and to treat one another.  But Jesus’ parables about nature are often a bit more complicated and troubling. This was certainly true of the Sower and the Seed. It is perhaps only when you walk along the shore of the Cove of the Sower looking out over the Sea of Galilee, that you marvel at the true context of the parable. Beneath your feet, you see the trampled pathway, the fertile ground, the stony ground, and even a huge thorn bush. Of course the crowds who followed Jesus saw where they were standing.  They knew that no one had planted the thorn bushes there, or carted in good topsoil, or landscaped the rocks to give the right background for the parable.  They were simply there.

From the boat, Jesus said to the crowds, “Consider the Sower who casts the seed to the wind. He tosses the grain indiscriminately onto the earth. Some seed is eaten by birds, some dies from the heat, or is restricted by the weeds, and some grows exponentially.  No doubt, the crowds were wondering what they were supposed to do with such a teaching?  Was Jesus speaking about the soil or the seed?

It is just as true for us today in meditating on the parable. Wouldn’t we all prefer to sow good seed in a field of rich, fertile soil where the seed brings forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty and some thirty?  Of course we would. That would mean success in every venture in life. But unfortunately, that’s not what life offers. Far more often, your life and mine is like the shore of Cove of the Sower where Jesus was preaching. It is a veritable patchwork of good and rocky soil, and amid scrubby thorns and dried pathways. Life is  a patchwork of joys and sorrows, pains and regrets, mistakes and miscalculations.

My friends, if we are honest and understanding, we can probably see the same variety of patches of soil in the lives of our families and in our congregation. We live at a time where all around us “the cares of the world and the lure of wealth” seem to be choking people in their faith.  For others, their faith is shriveling up in a soil where they can find no depth for their roots to take hold. There are others whose faith is crushed like a fallen seed on a well-travelled pathway where everyone is running back and forth to get the newest and latest and the greatest. So it is noteworthy that Jesus does not use the parable of the Sower and the Seed to exhort his followers to “be good soil,” as though you and I could make that happen.  No, if there is any hope in Jesus’ teaching, it is his promise that he himself is the Sower, and he will keep sowing generously, and extravagantly, even in the least promising of places.

Yes, Jesus shows his mercy and love carelessly, recklessly, seemingly wasting much of the seed and his efforts on ground that holds little promise for a fruitful harvest. Jesus invests in his disciples who look similarly unpromising. He squanders his time with tax collectors and sinners, with lepers, the sick and needy, the demon-possessed, and all manner of outcasts. Yet he promises that his sowing of the word will ultimately produce an abundant harvest.

The witness of the Norwegian Quakers who emigrated to America in 1825 and launched a wave of nearly 900,000 people, mostly Lutherans, is the living testimony of the English Quakers to sowing seeds in unlikely places.  One Norwegian prisoner of war wrote to his English captors, “By occasion of the war, I am put in this confinement and restrained of my bodily liberty; but feeling myself to be in a sweet liberty as to my soul, I thank God heartily, who has been so kind to me, and brought me here to receive his divine blessing, and has used you as a means to save me.”  A Norwegian captain who converted wrote, “I will say, for my part, that it was the best voyage I have done over sea, that time I came to England; for then I found God my real Father and Preserver.”

My friends, as those entrusted with Jesus’ mission today, you and I must ponder the implications of this parable.  How often do we play it safe, and only sow God’s word where we are confident that it will be received well?  Jesus’ call to mission is quite at odds with the play-it-safe instincts of this world.  Instead, Jesus gives us the encouragement and freedom to take risks for the sake of the gospel. He advocates extravagant generosity in sowing the word, even in perilous places. And even though, we may question the wisdom of his methods, he promises that there will be a plentiful harvest one day. Amen.

May the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.