The church is packed, and instead of asking the disciples to turn people away, Jesus moves his pulpit to the sea. I have tried to think of a modern day equivalent but somehow the image of Jesus preaching from the back of a duck boat doesn't seem to quite work. At any rate, Matthew leaves no doubt that Jesus has quickly obtained a significant reputation as a preacher. What remains partially untold, however, is how the poor son of a carpenter could have gained a following so fast? The sermon Jesus delivers offers some hints. From the beginning, it becomes apparent that Jesus has mastered the first lesson of effective preaching: know your audience. Jesus knows that his audience comes from the laboring class who constitute roughly 90% of the population in the Roman Empire. Many of this laboring class work as peasant farmers, and all of this laboring class can readily identify with the toil and unpredictable hardship of the common farmer. The farmer's life represents the epitome of a perilous and uncertain fate. Like others, the farmer has to pay rent, tithes, taxes, and tolls. These aspects of life in the Roman Empire make survival difficult enough. Compounding matters for the farmer are the uncertain tides of the harvest season. The farmer can never count on harvesting enough to pay for last year's debt, this year's provisions, or next year's seed. The ultimate fate of the farmer only rests partially in the farmer's hands. Nature's whims combine with the demands of the tax collector, the money lender, and the landlord to control the rest. So it is that Jesus uses the image of the sower to connect with the imagination of his audience. Just as the sower's existence represents the struggle to survive and subsist, Jesus uses the sower's image to represent his own struggle to cultivate the life-giving force of the gospel. By knowing his audience, Jesus makes the gospel message relevant to their lives.

Some of you might say that this image of the sower might have been good for Jesus' audience but what about us? The last time I checked Old South did not have very many peasant farmers on its membership rolls. While this is true, it is also true that all of us here bear very real connections to the peasant farmers of today. If you drank coffee this morning, you could very well have a connection to a farmer in Latin America. These farmers know the agonizing life of the sower. The Wall Street Journal this past week reported that 600,000 coffee workers in Mexico and Central America have lost their jobs in the past two years, while 1.5 million peasants in this region lack food. The Journal accurately pointed out that this catastrophe resulted primarily from changes in international trade agreements made under the leadership of the United States.

If you don't drink coffee, I suspect that you might wear cotton. Again The Wall Street Journal has reported some pertinent facts. In West and Central Africa, cotton cultivation employs more than two million rural households. The Journal interviewed one farmer who lives Mali. Along with his clan of 86 people, he lives without electricity, without telephone service, and without running water. He ploughs with a 22-year-old tractor but he plants, fertilizes, and picks with his bare hands. His entire clan awaits even harder times as our country's most recent farm subsidy package drives down cotton prices along his clan's means of subsistence. Meanwhile, a cotton farmer in the Mississippi Delta can reap more than $750,000 in subsidies and still be allowed to plant for additional profit. In the interview with the farmer from Mali, the farmer expresses his feelings about this situation: "For us, all farmers, in the U.S. and in Mali, are members of the same family. We shouldn't let one group of brothers make all the profits while the others get nothing." This farmer would be able to identify with the sower struggling to survive in the Roman Empire.

And it is for farmers such as him and people concerned about the plight of peasant farmers that Jesus' message has particular kind of resonance and thereby a particular kind of relevance. Jesus explains that the parable of the sower relates to how people receive "the word of the kingdom." A more accurate translation would be "the word of the empire" for Jesus proclaimed the good news of an empire diametrically opposed to the Roman Empire. In God's empire, the last are first. The slave, the peasant farmer, and the artisan rise from the bottom of society to the top. In other words, the majority of society gain control of their own lives.

Being a relevant and astute preacher, Jesus knows that the promise of God's empire alone fails to suffice for his audience. In their situation of relative powerlessness, they want to know how their present world of suffering could ever lead to God's empire. What evidence would suggest such a fantastic thing? What could they possibly stake their hopes upon in the here and now? For the farmer, hope in the here and now rests upon sowing with an eye toward the harvest. In his parable, Jesus refuses to deny or gloss over the dismal realities faced. He recognizes that some simply won't hear the gospel message, while others won't have the rooting necessary to endure hardship and persecution. Those without roots see the injustice of the Roman Empire but when the going gets rough they don't have the wherewithal, the relevant resources, to confront it. Meanwhile, others get caught up in the lures of the world. They chase after wealth. They allow themselves to become corrupted by their environment. They too lack the relevant resources to remain true to the gospel message. Finally, however, some do receive the gospel message and they bear yields of thirty to a hundred-fold. For a peasant farmer averaging seven-to-eleven fold, such a yield would have seemed the makings of a fortune.

Through the form of a parable, Jesus makes the gospel message immediate and tangible. Fittingly, this is gospel music Sunday. As the name indicates, gospel music translates the gospel message into song. Like the sermons of Jesus, gospel music has flourished because it makes the good news relevant to its audience. What we know today as gospel music first originated as a result of the great migration of black southerners from the rural South to the urban North during the early 1900s. Earlier we sang the hymn "We are Often Tossed and Driven," by Charles Tindley, the first great pioneer of gospel music. The title itself suggests the life of a migrant people pushed and pulled from South to North amid hazardous conditions. The hymn's lyrics explicitly address the seemingly inexplicable, cruel fate of a people in search of "that blessed promised land." For these migrant people, poverty stands central to the hardships faced. The lyrics read, "We are often destitute of the things that life demands, want of food and want of shelter, thirsty hills and barren lands." Despite the bad times described in this verse, the refrain that follows captures the quintessential hope of gospel music and the gospel message. "By and by, when the morning comes, when the saints of God are gathered home, We'll tell the story how we've overcome: for we'll understand it better by and by."

Hope in the midst of conditions of despair can also be seen in the music of Thomas Dorsey who some call the father of gospel music. Following on the heels of Tindley, Dorsey composed many of his most popular songs during the Great Depression. In explaining the aim of his compositions during this period, Dorsey said:

I wrote to give them something to lift them out of that Depression. They could sing at church but the singing had no life, no spirit...We intended gospel to strike a happy medium for the down-trodden. This music lifted people out of the muck and mire of poverty and loneliness, of being broke, and gave them some kind of hope anyway. Make it anything but good news, it ceases to be gospel.

Dorsey even found a source of hope when composing "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" after the deaths of his wife and newborn child. Like many gospel songs, in this one Jesus personifies one's ultimate hopes and longings for comfort. "Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand, I am tired, I am weak, I am worn. Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light; Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

Reading the lyrics of gospel music, I get a sense of what it is that makes some patches of soil better than others. The key lies not within the individual but within the social and cultural and theological environment of that individual. Relevant music and worship, poetry and prayer enable us to contend with the cruel absurdities of life. They help us deal with our own suffering and the suffering of others. Without the relevant resources, how are we to deal with death, with poverty, with despair? Without the relevant resources, how are we to survive persecution, how are we to fend off the temptations of society? In their essence, relevant resources are counter-cultural. They don't go along with societal definitions of success that rely on greed and foster callous disregard. Gospel music often exemplifies counter-culturalism at its best. In one of Tindley's songs, he writes:

Our boasted land and nation, Are plunging in disgrace; With pictures of starvation Almost in every place; While loads of needed money, Remains in hoarded piles; But God will rule this country, After a while.

The key to such relevant messages, of course, is the relevant message of Jesus, the gospel message. In proclaiming the good news, Jesus gave us the ultimate of hopes: God's empire. In helping to make this hope tangible, Jesus spoke in parables. He recognized that while we can't hope for all the land to yield a harvest at once, we can still place our hopes in the good soil of the here and now. The good soil will provide the bountiful harvest. It will give us what we need in order to struggle and survive. The task that remains for us is to prepare for the harvest: to till the soil, to remove the rocks, to prevent the weeds and thorns. The more we prepare, the richer the soil, and the greater the harvest. This is our real and tangible hope, and we have the resources to do it.

Scripture Reading Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23