[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast.
So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: Good morning. For those of you who might be new, my name is Jason Coker. I'm one of the co lead pastors here and this is our sort of teaching time for adults and kids. The kids go to their class and do their lessons there. And here we typically work through different teaching series and today is no different. We're going to be finishing up our series on the parables of Jesus. We've done this the last two summers in a row, so this summer we're sort of finishing out that sort of long term series. Today we're going to be looking at a very familiar parable and I'm going to do my best to just acknowledge the familiarity because this is one of those parables that can be a bit problematic. So bear with me as we get into it.
But before we jump into that parable, some of you might be wondering what's different about me today? And I want to just share with you what's different about me is I reached a milestone, an important personal milestone today. Today was the first time in about three months that my right eyebrow was long enough to be trim.
Now, if you don't know why that's funny, you should come to church more often.
But today it was actually like looking like an insect on my face. And I, I had to trim it. And I was very, very careful this time to put the eyebrow guard on my razor before swiping it across my face.
All right, today we're going to take a look at Matthew, chapter 13, verses 1 through 9. Let's just jump right in. I want to share the passage with you and then I'll jump into what I'm noticing in this passage today. And I want to invite you to bring what you're noticing as well. Matthew, chapter 13, verses 1 through 9 says this. That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea and such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there while the whole crowd sat, excuse me, stood on the beach.
And then 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. And other seeds fell on the 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 the thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth good grain, some a hundredfold, some 60, some 30.
Let anyone with ears listen.
Now, if you've been sitting in church for any amount of time, you've probably heard this parable over and over again. But Jesus disciples were baffled by this. So they were like, what are you talking about? So a little bit later, this isn't up on the screen, but I want to share with you Jesus's explanation, his interpretation of his own parable. Skipping ahead to verse 18, it says this. 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.
And as for what was sown on the 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. When trouble or persecution arise on account of the Word, that person immediately falls away.
And as for what was sown among the thorns, this is the one who hears the Word. But the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke out 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, another 60, and in another, 30.
Would you just say a prayer with me?
God, we thank you for today.
Thank you for this opportunity for us to come together as a community, to lift our voices, to pray our prayers, to sing of the hopes and possibilities that we cling to, to attend to these words and to stories like this, ancient stories that have proven to be a trustworthy way for people to examine their hearts, to be stretched, and to come into contact with a sense of your presence.
We ask that you'd make that true for us today, that we would stretch and grow and have a sense of hope in what is possible.
We pray all this in Jesus name.
Amen.
Okay, so today is Social Justice Sunday. It's the first time we've ever done this. The inspiration for this was Labor Day.
And so the intention was for me to start my message today with a Bit of story about Labor Day and how Labor Day was started and why Labor Day is incredibly important in the history of social justice. And all that was accomplished because of the institution of unions, people who came together and advocated for themselves, and how that's just incredibly important, and how those rights and those progresses that came through unions, like, you know, five day work week, you know, paid vacation, and all the other things that we take for granted today.
I was supposed to share a bit about that and how that is an important expression of social justice.
And then we suffered another school shooting.
And for the longest time, we marked every single school shooting at this church. The following Sunday, we would set up candles for every person who was shot and killed in a school shooting or any public shooting. And we would invite the congregation to come up and light those candles as a kind of prayer for those people and for those families. It felt like it was not only insane that our country was enduring this kind of mass public violence, but insane that congregations every Sunday might just ignore it or offer their prayers and nothing more. And so for a long time, we really leaned into some kind of embodied expression of compassion for those circumstances until a couple folks in the congregation were like, I can't come to church those days because I was in school where there was a mass shooting.
We've reached that saturation point in our culture where we all, probably, by one or two or three degrees of separation, now know somebody who was in a mass shooting.
And so we really had to rethink, like, how we mark those sorts of days.
And honestly, I still don't really know how we should be handling that, because it seems like such a massive problem.
But on Social Justice Sunday, it seemed incredibly hypocritical to not acknowledge that we have a gun violence problem in the United States.
And so I think what I want to share with you today at the beginning of this message is that 10 years ago, 10 years ago last July, Janelle and I were vacationing in Palm Springs in July.
Rates are cheap.
And we were laying around a swimming pool at, you know, some, like, resort.
And we had been visiting this church at that point for about four months.
And there's a long story there, I won't get into that. But, you know, Janelle and I were thinking about getting back involved in church at that point. We had not been in church of any kind for about five years.
We ended up at this church for a bunch of reasons. And there were about, you know, 30 or 40 people in the pews, and it was really struggling in a lot of ways.
And we were just getting to know the denomination that this church was connected to, the Disciples of Christ. I didn't know anything about the Disciples of Christ at the time. I'm a recovering evangelical.
So we were vacationing and talking about this denomination and whether or not it was a good fit. And I was following the feed, the news feed for the national gathering of this denomination that just happened to be occurring that July in 2015 in, I think, Indianapolis. And as we were talking, this bulletin came across the little news feed that I was following that said that the Disciples of Christ as a denomination, passed Resolution 1521, which was a resolution on gun violence.
And I won't read the whole resolution to you, but I said to Janelle, oh, my gosh, this denomination just passed some kind of resolution on gun violence. So I clicked the link and I looked it up and I read through it, and. And as I read through it, we both just cried in the hotel room because it said things like this.
A Christian denomination in the United States put out a resolution that said things like this. Whereas the United States is suffering from an epidemic of gun violence, with nearly 100,000 people shot and 32,000 dying each year, including more than 17,500 children and 2500 dying.
Therefore, be it resolved that the General assembly of the Christian Church Disciples of Christ in the United States and Canada, meeting on July 18 through the 22nd, 2015, urge the many expressions of the Christian Church Disciples of Christ, that's us.
Urge the many expressions of the Christian Church Disciples of Christ, to prayerfully examine our collective and individual relationships to a pervasive culture of gun violence and commit to reconciling the cultural divides that perpetuate it through mutual respect and forgiveness.
And the resolution went on to list some very practical, pragmatic things that a congregation could do to contribute to a society that might be less enmeshed and entangled and in love with guns.
And coming from an evangelical denomination, this just broke both of us, because we longed for a church. We longed for a community. We longed for a Christian tribe that would be willing to acknowledge that we lived in a world full of social injustices and that maybe we can and should try to do something about it.
And that was maybe the moment that we were like, we got to do this. We got to be a part of this church. We got to be a part of this denomination.
And now I really regret it. But kidding, kidding. It was getting really sincere there for a moment. You guys.
What's hard about this is that was 10 years ago.
And gun violence increased every year thereafter in the United States, peaking in about 2021. 2021, there were nearly 50,000 shootings in the United States, up from the 32,000 that was quoted back there in 2015.
And then it dropped off pretty significantly in 22 and 23.
That peak in violence was probably related to the pandemic.
But here's what's hard about that. Among many other things, is that the constant roller coaster of public shootings, school shootings, and gun violence that we all are riding on every single day as we open our news feeds produces in us a real compassion fatigue.
It's hard to care after a while.
It's hard to summon the energy to tell yourself that you should be moved and motivated to do something when the something that you do doesn't seem to take root. And then it happens again and again and again.
There's a technical term for compassion fatigue. It's secondary traumatic stress or sometimes vicarious trauma.
It's emotional and physical exhaustion prolonged by exposure to the suffering of others, leading to reduced empathy and a diminished capacity to care.
If there was a T shirt for the era that I think we live in, that T shirt would say, I don't care.
It's hard not to see, like, a diminished capacity for empathy all around us.
Now back to the parable of the sower. The trouble with the parable of the Sower is that if you're like me or like Janelle, you were raised in a church that taught you that the parable of the sower was a parable about evangelism.
And Janelle and I had a whole back and forth about this yesterday, talking it through, because she was raised in a Southern Baptist church. I was raised in a Calvary Chapel. And both of these are churches that are highly, like, forceful about their evangelism.
And so the parable of the sower is a great way, like, to read it to people and say, see, this is your job. Your job is to take seeds of evangelism to people wherever you go.
Like, it's your responsibility to do that. Like, everywhere you go, at work or at school or in your neighborhood or in your family, around the Thanksgiving dinner table. If people don't believe the right things and they're going to hell, then it's your job to bring them the seeds of the good news so that they can be rescued from eternal damnation. And as Janelle pointed out to me yesterday, there are a couple of very serious problems with this. The first is the idea that it's somehow your job in this church to go out and like, bring people in to convince them that like, of all the other varieties of Christianity, about 10,000, FYI, that's a real number.
Not my exaggeration, right.
Of all the varieties of Christianity, we just happen to be the right one.
It's a little bit like saying, of all the varieties of beer out there, Stone Delicious IPA is really the only real beer.
Nobody says, of all the beers out there, Modelo is the right beer. The only real beer.
Oh, look at that.
This is how churches split.
And that I think sort of captures the kind of ugliness of what those churches emphasize. Because if all we're doing here every week is becoming loyal to a particular brand of Christianity, then aren't we just engaged in consumer capitalism, not Christianity?
And so the trouble with reading the parable of the Sower this way is a kind of manifesto on evangelism, is that we make it your job, your responsibility to be, you know, the multi level marketers of our brands.
Nobody wants to sell Amway. Nobody wants to sell the Oceanside Sanctuary. Nobody wants to sell fundamentalist Christianity. Nobody wants to sell progressive Christianity. Nobody wants to sell.
Right. Like, sales is hard. It requires you to, like, convince other people that they need your product, even if, you know, maybe they don't need it because you have a quota to fill. That's tough. That's tough work.
Nobody wants to have to do that work for their church.
Closely related to that is a kind of attitude of smug superiority.
If what I have to sell is the best version of Christianity, then I must be better than you.
Don't you want to be better like me?
Don't you want to occupy sort of the top tier of Christianity, the ultra elite Christianity, the kind that comes in a silver can specially lined to keep the beer fresh? I don't know what the deal is with the beer today.
It's not in my notes.
And then this leads us very quickly, very easily into just a convenient way to judge those who don't like what we're selling.
Well, they're the rocky soil.
They're the ones whose hearts are hardened. They're the ones who are susceptible to the evil one coming and stealing away their hope.
The problem is with them, not with me.
But what if Jesus isn't giving us a parable that is a kind of manifesto on how to be a better multi level marketer for your faith?
It occurs to me that this is a parable about planting crops that grow.
And unlike us living in the 21st century in the United States the wealthiest nation that has ever existed. People living in the ancient near east would have literally depended on the crops that they grew.
There were no superstores, no Walmarts, no Ralph's, no Stater Brothers, where you could go and get your food refrigerated and packaged and sanitized, sometimes chopped up conveniently. So all you have to do is throw it in the air fryer and it's ready to go. That wasn't their existence. Their existence was if they wanted to eat six months from now, they had to till the soil. They had to have access to land, which is a privilege to begin with. They had to get good quality seed and sow it and then, you know, tend to it, right? Like water it, make sure that it had everything it needed, make sure that it was guarded, you know, from. From pests and from birds that would come along and eat it. And if all of those things happened, they were very likely to starve them and their closest loved ones.
And so Jesus is tapping into something that they would know very intimately, a process that they would understand totally.
For them, the issue wasn't sales, it wasn't marketing. For them, the issue was hunger, it was subsistence. It was flourishing in their lives.
And Jesus borrows from this imagery. He says, hey, listen, the kingdom of God is a lot like this.
You need to plant some crops, right? So you go out, you reach into that bag, it's time for you to plant, and you throw the seed. And some of that seed, you know, it falls on good soil and it takes root and it grows and produces crops. And that's. That's amazing.
But some of that seed, as you throw it, you know, it falls on a path that's been worn and walked upon and hardened, and seeds have a tough time taking root there. And another seed, it might fall on good soil, but, you know, birds are going to come along, they're going to eat it, and other seeds, they're going to take root and they're going to grow. But because that's not great soil, it's a little shallow, you know, you can't expect a lot of crops to come from that.
What Jesus is giving them is not a recipe for success. He's giving them an explanation for failure.
Do you hear that?
Jesus is not giving them a recipe for success.
He's not saying, hey, if you want to really grow great crops, you got to throw it on good soil. No, no. He knows that if you are trying to grow food, you're going to throw as much seed as you can anywhere that you can, in the hopes that something will grow so that you can eat and feed your family.
The great question is not so much how do we do this in the most successful way so that we can scale it up and make a profit. The question is, why does some of the seed that I throw not growing?
This is not a parable about smugness and superiority. This is a parable about humility and persistence.
Hey, listen, I know sometimes you go out and you bring something good, a seed that you want to toss. And I know sometimes it doesn't grow, sometimes it doesn't take root. Sometimes it does take root and it produces a dud. And other times it takes root and produces good stuff. I know that that's how life.
You know that that's how life works.
The great surprise of this parable is that is also how the power of God works.
That I think is something that we're not prepared to accept.
The power of God works just like this.
The power of God is like a seed thrown onto the soil.
Sometimes it takes root, sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes it takes root and somebody chokes it out. Sometimes it's eaten by pests, sometimes the enemy wins.
This is not the faith that tends to grow churches. FYI, we don't want a faith that has seeds of possibility.
We want a faith that gives us magic bullets.
This, actually, I think, is why a lot of people come to faith.
Because they have been told that God exists as a being somewhere in the cosmos and that that God is all powerful, can do all things, and will do whatever it is that is good and right and true. You can count on it.
And so we think that if God exists as a being and is all powerful somewhere in the cosmos, then if we are aligned with God, then we now have a magic bullet.
If I'm with God, then I can fix all my problems.
If I'm with that God who exists somewhere in the sky, then when I am ailing or sick or frustrated or dysfunctional or toxic or maybe just a jerk, and I say the right kind of prayer in the right kind of way, with the right kind of intention and the right kind of doctrine and the right kind of theology, then it's fixed.
And I can shoot those bullets of power at any problem that is vexing me, and it will be solved.
Paul Tillich was a German theologian in the middle part of the 20th century, and he said very provocatively that no such God exists.
That the God that we imagine, the magical being that exists somewhere in the cosmos, you know, the sky, Daddy, who is all powerful and who will take care of you does not exist. Paul Tillich famously said that God is not a being at all, that God is the God of gods, the God above, the God that we imagine. God is the ground of being.
God is that which enables being to exist, that which holds it together in a mystery that we cannot fathom or understand. But by some miracle, we're able to sense it, to experience it, to feel it, to recognize it. Sort of like the winds.
Jesus explained it this way. He said, nobody knows where God comes from or where God is going.
But you can feel the spirit moving like a wind.
You can feel what direction it's going in.
You can't control it, you can't point to it, you can't name it, you can't own it.
But somehow we can discern it.
Hey, listen, I hate preachers who quote Albert Einstein, but I'm just going to do it.
Albert Einstein came very close, I think, to articulating this in a very powerful way when he said this. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that behind all the discernible concatenations there remains something subtle, intangible, inexplicable veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion.
The parable of the Sower is Jesus's way of explaining that.
The parable of the Sower is Jesus's way of saying to his disciples, who he has charged with going out into the world, bringing the good news of the kingdom, bringing goodness and righteousness and peace and joy to the community. He says to them, here's why that sometimes fails.
Not here's a recipe for success.
Not here's a way for you to know how to judge the people who don't hear you, who don't receive it, who don't buy into your product. Instead, here's why that sometimes doesn't work.
I think a handy way of knowing what kind of Christian or what kind of church or what kind of Christianity you're dealing with is to notice whether or not people use a rejection of the good news, a rejection of the gospel of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness. If they use that rejection as an occasion to judge or if they notice it as an occasion to express care and compassion.
Why is it that when Jesus says, hey, sometimes the seed falls on rocky soil, and sometimes the seed will. Will take root, but you know, it's in shallow soil, so it doesn't last, and sometimes the birds come along and eat it why is it that some people take that as an occasion to judge folks who don't listen?
We could just as easily say, oh, my gosh, why is their soil hardened?
What trauma did they experience that has made their hearts hardened to the possibility of goodness and righteousness and peace?
What's the rocky soil in their life?
How can I help?
How can we come together to create the conditions so that the ground of being has been tilled and softened and ready for seeds of possibility to be planted?
This is very much what we're about here, planting seeds of possibility.
If you get emails from Larry Warner, who leads our Justice Works team, then you know that our Justice Works team is constantly, incessantly planting seeds of possibility. This week they went and they met with city council members in the city of Oceanside to implore them to support tenant protection ordinances here in Oceanside so that people could actually afford to live here if they work here.
They were just throwing seed.
And I can tell you, having heard the report, that some of that seed fell on rocky soil and some of it fell on good soil.
This is just how social justice works.
This is how it works in the food pantry where Victoria, every single week, and her team are working to provide food to people who are food insecure. Sometimes our appeals for help there fall on good soil. Sometimes it falls on bad soil. This is what our queer committee does all throughout the year. In November, when they host an event here that is based on remembering trans people who were murdered in the United States, a list that is way too long. Every single year, they are throwing seeds of possibility into this congregation.
Can we be the kind of congregation that sees trans people as real people, that sees trans men and women as people who deserve to be loved and included and accepted and, I don't know, not murdered because of their gender?
Some of that seed falls on good soil, some of it doesn't.
Our invitation to you today and every week is to persevere in sowing good seed, is to throw the good seed that you have wherever it might fall and to trust that something good can come of it.
I know this seems like a weak power, like, who wants to serve a God who doesn't give us magic bullets, but gives us seeds of possibility instead? We all feel like it's such a weak expression of goodness when we're just throwing and casting and hoping something comes to be, but when the crops come in, it's a miracle.
We're dazzled by it.
And so we persevere.
Today, Janelle and I want to share with you A video from one of our partners. One of our social justice partners is Pico, California and the San Diego Organizing Project this fall. They have asked member congregations like ours to get involved in a campaign that they're calling Rooted and Rising.
And I want to share a video with you in just a moment. It's only three minutes long, and then we'll be done.
And in this video, what they're doing is they're inviting congregations like ours to participate in hosting small group sessions in our homes where we invite our neighbors, where we invite our friends or our co workers.
And we're not trying to sell them something. Instead, we're just asking them to share.
What is it about your community that you think needs to change?
How can our communities be stronger, kinder, more just oriented communities?
And then what we'll do is we'll take that input that we get in these groups and we will bring it back to SDOP and back to Pico, and they will design policy campaigns to bring about the kinds of changes that we see are needed in our communities. So it's sort of like a big sort of listening campaign.
This is another good example of what it's like to throw seeds of possibility. I want to share that video with you now, and then we'll wrap it up today.
[00:33:56] Speaker B: A single candle doesn't change a room, but gather 10 and you begin to see faces again.
Gather a hundred and the shadows start to retreat.
This is what it means to meet in person.
Not just to talk, but to bring light, to carry what each of us has.
Grief, vision, story, faith. And combine it into something we could never hold alone.
Across California, something is breaking from rising costs. Rent, food, childcare to crowded classrooms. Too many families are choosing between survival and dignity, between scarcity and sacred connection.
Politics feels distant, but faith, faith brings us near.
And when people of faith gather, we don't just reflect, we organize.
This is rooted and rising. House gatherings for a just California.
A sacred campaign. Across kitchens and pews and parks, thousands of Californians gathering to listen deeply, to name what's wrong and to imagine what's next.
These houses meetings are more than conversations.
They're the beginning of a movement, one that will rise from living rooms to pulpits, from neighborhoods to the halls of power.
In spring of 2026, we'll bring 2,000 people to the steps of the Capitol in Sacramento, not just to be heard, but to be felt, to deliver a moral agenda shaped by every voice that gathers tonight.
Pico, California, is the state's largest multi faith, Multiracial Organizing Network.
529 congregations, 22 counties, over a half a million people strong.
We build moral power, people power and narrative power.
We believe faith is not neutral.
It's a compass for action.
And love, when organized is a force the world cannot ignore.
Tonight, we begin by listening. Because listening is leadership. Struggle becomes solidarity. Presence becomes power. And together, we build something worthy of our fame.
Welcome to Rooted and Rising house gatherings for a just California.
You belong here.
Let's begin.
[00:36:51] Speaker A: One of the ways that you can get involved here in social justice work at the Oceanside Sanctuary. The band is going to play one last song for us to worship together. And then as you leave, on your way to getting pancakes. Because we have way too many pancakes for you not to eat some, right? On your way to getting pancakes, you'll notice that there are tables for all of our social justice teams. Our food pantry, our justice works team, which is spearheading this campaign, our queer committee and our anti racism team. All of these teams need your help. They need your participation. They need you to have the perseverance to continue to sow seeds of hope and possibility.
What we're asking you to do today is to pick one or two of those teams that you really align with. Do you really care about helping the queer community to find safe and inclusive spaces here in North San Diego county, starting with the Oceanside Sanctuary? The queer committee needs your help. They need people to help do that. And every one of those teams could use your help as well. So that's our invitation to you.
Amen.
Wow, really?
I know I've been talking for a long time.
Danielle. Can we worship one last time together? All right, let's do it.
[00:38:19] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
To learn more about our community or to support the work we do, Visit
[email protected] We hope to see you again soon.
