The Parable of the Sower: Choked by Thorns
This post has been especially difficult to write because my own heart is so often distracted and deluded. I grew up in the evangelical church, and despite what my pastors and teachers said, it was clear to me that what mostly distinguished us from the rest of the world was personal piety. Moreover, that piety was largely expressed in what we didn’t do. As a child growing into adulthood, I didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t gamble, didn’t dance, didn’t have extramarital sex. I went to church weekly, read my Bible assiduously, and prayed occasionally, usually when my own needs or desires were being thwarted. Despite knowing that Jesus required his followers to love everyone, I struggled to love anyone outside my own immediate family. My life has not been marked by generosity or productivity. Apart from my children, who have already all surpassed me, I have little to show for the many years I’ve identified as a follower of Jesus. Instead, my life has been marked by distraction and delusion.
I rarely feel anxious or worried. In part, this is because I don’t often or easily attend to my own feelings, so I usually have feelings that I either don’t notice at all or barely notice. I think this is fairly common for men in American culture, but my case may be extreme. As a young child I was naturally empathetic, so much so that the pain and misery of other children affected me much more than it did my classmates (or so it seemed to me at the time). I hurt whenever anyone else hurt. This kept me out of fights because I did not want to hurt anyone else, not even those who quite plainly wanted to hurt me. I tried with limited success to suppress my feelings. Then came Star Trek.
I became a fan right away, and I idolized Mr.Spock. His self-command became my goal. I developed a thick skin and cultivated sarcasm and arrogance to shield myself from my own feelings. I became so good at it that years later when I began to see value in feelings, I found it very difficult to feel anything much.
I could write a good deal more, but my immediate point is to show that the worries of the age need not produce feelings of anxiety or concern. In my case, they produced an inner drive toward ease and comfort. I did not want to do hard things. In college I took easy, fun classes. That these classes were almost all in mathematics was just a quirk of my own brain. I found math easy and fun. I also liked to read, so I took literature classes. I avoided philosophy and science because I knew they would challenge my faith. I gave very little thought to what living out the gospel of Christ might entail. Eventually, aimless and adrift, I joined the Air Force hoping to find something I liked doing, but after six years, I was still just as purposeless.
Marriage and family gave me a sense of purpose but brought along its own distractions. Paul puts it like this:
I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided.
1 Corinthians 7:32-34a
Marriage was an unqualified good for me. I loved and still love my wife. I love my children and grandchildren. I do not in any way regret marrying. Yet I still have to acknowledge that I married before learning to follow Jesus wholeheartedly. I kept expecting some kind of oracle from God, a direct message saying, “This is what you must do.” I wanted an angel to visit me like the one who visited Gideon or at least a prophet to thunder, “Thus saith the Lord” in unmistakably authoritative tones. And yet….
I know myself. I would not have accepted the word of a prophet if it didn’t feel right to me. Marriage was a wonderful gift, and it brought me closer to another human being than I had ever been in my life, but it also gave me a justification for doing the best I knew instead of earnestly seeking God’s will. I didn’t realize it at the time, but God’s will isn’t at all hard to find or understand1. His will is that we love and serve him by loving and serving everyone who comes within our purview.
Jesus warned his disciples that some people hearing the word about the kingdom of God would accept it and grow but not produce any fruit. He said that their productivity would be choked out by worries of the age and the deceitfulness of wealth. Ideally, he wants those who accept the good news of God’s kingdom to become activists for it, to focus their efforts on becoming faithful citizens of that kingdom and bringing in others as well. But he recognized that some people are not fully committed to his agenda. They become distracted by the worries that are always present in life and deluded by wealth and its pursuit. Although they grow until the harvest, they contribute nothing or very little to making the kingdom of God a reality.
Distraction has always been present, but even more so now when many of us carry with us a device that clamors for our attention, with apps designed to capture and hold us. Our attention has become monetized, and billion-dollar companies exert all their expertise to claim it and resell it. No wonder we find it hard to meet our neighbors or go for a walk.
Moreover, we live in a culture that admires and glorifies the acquisition of personal wealth far beyond what is needed to satisfy ordinary human desires. To opt out of the pursuit of more and more and more is regarded as eccentric. As a result we now live in a world where “[i]n 2025, the world’s 12 richest men owned more wealth than half of humanity.”2 That number has likely already fallen.
Yet we know from scientific studies3 that wealth warps the brains of those who have it. In general, wealth makes people less empathetic, less generous, and more inclined to attribute their success to superior intelligence. They are inclined to believe they deserve their wealth and as corollary that poor people deserve their poverty. Wealth gives those who possess it the illusion of control. Jesus told a parable4 about a rich fool who, buoyed by his own success, decided to hoard his wealth for himself. But God called him a fool for thinking that he could do as he pleased and enjoy his prosperity for years to come. For none of us is guaranteed tomorrow. The rich certainly live longer, but even they succumb eventually to death, and have to give an account to God for how they have used their wealth.
Above all, wealth gives its possessors the illusion of righteousness. Few people like being in the wrong. If you have enough wealth and power, few people will risk your displeasure by pointing out your failings. You become insulated from the ordinary criticisms that help most people form their character. Unless you make deliberate choices to have advisors who will tell you the truth instead of telling you what you want to hear, you risk being completely deluded about everything.
- Discovering that God did not have a plan for my life was wonderfully freeing. Instead of trying to determine what secret agenda God had for my life, I started trying to live as a lover. ↩︎
- Similar statements appear in articles about rising inequality all the time. This one comes from Oxfam, the global organization that fights inequality and poverty. ↩︎
- See for example this interview with Paul Piff, Phd., who discusses some of his own research into how wealth alters people’s behavior. ↩︎
- Luke 12:16-21. ↩︎