The Parable of the Sower: Hearts Like Dirt

I recently spoke with a young man from Chicago, who was living in Chattanooga, TN. He told me that prior to living in Chattanooga, he was allergic to dirt. Now, he spends most of life outside climbing, mountain biking, and camping; and is happier than ever.

The spiritual life is a bit like dirt. Counterintuitively, the dirtier we get, the healthier we may actually be.

The Parable of the Sower compares the heart to different kinds of soil, and the in this parable, the dirtier the dirt, the better the receptiveness the heart has to the Word of God. The soils are described as "by the wayside" (the hard-packed section along the road), "stony", "thorny", and "good soil". Good soil is well tilled, soft, and rich. After a day in the garden one comes back with deep rich soil under the fingernails and all over the clothing. The other soil types typically represent elements that separate the seed from the actual dirt.

This represents how we try to protect ourselves from a variety of elements related to the Word of God itself. The Way-side heart is unconcerned and ambivalent to either the voice of God or the concerns of humanity. Stony, hard hearts have become reactionary and hardened to the struggles and hard truths of life. The Thorny hearts are those whose greeds and personal desires have inoculated them against caring for the deeper values of life. In some bizarre inversion, we who are made from the dirt of the ground, or as others have recently described it, "star stuff", try to avoid contact with soil. We similarly attempt to protect ourselves from other people, hard truths, or the suffering in our world. In doing so, we separate ourselves from a healthy spiritual life. Just like an overly clean child may be a setup for a weak immune system, an overly defensive heart may be a set up for spiritual sickness.

Have a soft heart, be willing to get dirty in this life, and allow for the fact that you just may be wrong about life and are in need of correction from God's Word. These simple principles are evidences of a person ready to receive the Word, and grow in fruitfulness.

“Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. And these are the ones by the wayside where the word is sown. When they hear, Satan comes immediately and takes away the word that was sown in their hearts. These likewise are the ones sown on stony ground who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with gladness; and they have no root in themselves, and so endure only for a time. Afterward, when tribulation or persecution arises for the word’s sake, immediately they stumble. Now these are the ones sown among thorns; they are the ones who hear the word, and the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things entering in choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful. But these are the ones sown on good ground, those who hear the word, accept it, and bear fruit: some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some a hundred.”

Pastor Phil Wyman looks back at 2015 at The Gathering

2015 joins the previous couple years as part of our crazy years of transition. We have taken an epic wilderness journey into becoming a gathering of house (and pub) churches. This year (perhaps) has been even more of a wandering than any previous year of our existence. Then again, having mapped territory no one before us had ever mapped in our work in the city of Salem, maybe it was just another crazy year, but we keep following the Shepherd who leads us on.

2015 started off with a surprise. At the end of January, I (Pastor Phil) ended up with a sudden attack of back pains, which could have been measured on the Richter Scale. By February, this turned into an extended hospital stay and the discovery that the pains had nothing to do with pulled muscles or slipped discs. Rather, a strep infection was found in my blood stream, and pockets of that infection had settled inside my spinal column, and scarier yet, inside my heart. I was effectively down and out from late January until May, and although I was home for much of that time, I was connected to antibiotic drip systems six hours a day, which looked like a medical version of the “Holy Hand-Grenade of Antioch.” And, fortunately, like the Holy Hand-Grenade of Antioch it worked and wiped out the infection.

The church, and our local friends were wonderful during this time. They brought me food, lots of probiotics, and reminders of love. Boxes of nerds arrived from our geek friends, balloons from bartenders, and meals that made a hospital visit seem less of a drudgery. One of our home-groups even held a service in the hospital room one Saturday morning. I did not feel as badly, as my critical condition, and so I became a bit squirrely, and wandered the hallways playing my guitar and singing to people. This turned out to be enough of a hit, that some of the night crew cheered when I returned for a second visit, and then apologized for being excited to see me back in the hospital again.

Somewhere in this time, our now weekly home and pub groups gathered together for a grand meeting of eating and sharing and I was hooked to my Holy Hand Grenade, and they made it all happen, while I sat like a happy papa and looked on.

The Holy Hand Grenade worked just in the nick of time, and while the church had been meeting and doing its weekly activities without me, there had also been a UK Festival Outreach, which had been in the planning for 6 months. Two days before I was to fly to the UK, and meet Dennis there, I received the doctor’s clearance. So, off I flew to Wales with oral antibiotics in hand. There we built an art project at BurningNest; we worked the doors and debates at a philosophy festival; and we ministered to the 23,000 hippies, hipsters and all around seekers at Stonehenge during the Summer Solstice.

Of course, as October rolled around, we were back on the streets of Salem during our one million visitor month with live music every weekend, and hundreds of friends from around the country joining us for ministry. We bought pizza for some of the homeless youth and elders who like to hang around our stage, we interpreted dreams, we shared the love of our Lord Jesus with locals and visitors alike, and we simply created a presence of acceptance and love during a weird and wild holiday season in our unique city.

Between the time in the hospital and the frenetic pace of Festival outreach from Summer through Fall, this year has seemed like a blur, and does even now as I look back in the rearview mirror.

The hospital stay and prolonged downtime was perhaps a forced sabbatical of sorts. I was able to complete a book I had been working on for a few years, and Burning Religion is now self-published and online at Amazon.com.

Despite all this, we bought ice cream for the kids at the park on the Point in Salem during the summer, and we joined the World’s Largest Eye Contact Experiment in October.

Please keep us in your prayers. Getting back into a regular pattern of spiritual life as a body of people has not been easy, but we continue our ride into Bethlehem and appreciate every person who remembers our labors.

If you would like to help support the mission of the The Gathering, which has moved from a local expression of innovative mission, to something beyond the boundaries of our own country, you can do so at our website --> salemgathering.org. May your Christmas, your Solstiee, your Hannukah, and your New Year be blessed.

10 Years of Service in Salem, MA

As of June this year we began celebrating our 10th year living and ministering in Salem, Massachusetts. It has been a wild adventure at times, and we are thankful to the people who have blessed us during this season. The following is a press release which has been sent out, and we would love to have you join us as we do celebration 2.0 on Sunday, July 26th. (We will be doing a celebration in honor of some various aspect of our community life once a month for a number of months.)


The Gathering: Celebrating 10 Years of Service in Salem

On July 26th at 10am The Gathering will be celebrating 10 years of service in the community of Salem. The celebration will occur at the church's 10am Sunday service at The Vault - 217 Essex Street in Salem.

The Gathering began in the summer of 1999 with two families from Southern California. From the first year this new church had established itself as an organization dedicated to serving the city of Salem.

In their first October, they provided free live music on the streets of Salem, began to give away free hot cocoa, and offered free spiritual counsel to visitors and locals alike.

From this simple beginning the outreach of The Gathering has grown to include 40 to 50 hours of live music at The Fountain stage on Essex Street each October, organizing and sponsoring the Annual Salem Halloween Children's Day on the Common, serving up to 10,000 cups of free hot cocoa each October, offering free dream interpretation and spiritual counsel to thousands each year, painting children's faces during the city's 4th of July celebration, serving the crowds during the Christmas Tree Burning each January, supplying sound for community events, and collecting and distributing warm clothing to those in need each winter.

The story of this service has appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, the Dallas Morning News, on syndicated radio programs, and across the nation and in the Caribbean in local newspapers.

Pastor Phil Wyman has estimated that The Gathering has contributed $750,000 to the city of Salem and its visitors in the last 10 years in donations, and volunteer labor. "I have been a pastor for 24 years, and I am constantly amazed by the dedication of our church members and the constant hospitality we have extended through them and through our extended Gathering family far and near in service to our community." says Pastor Phil.

The celebration will relive the stories of this service to the community. For more information, you can call The Gathering at 978-744-8444, or e-mail at pastorphil@salemgathering.com.

Sunday, May 31st at The Gathering

This morning it is a nice day. Our doors to the street are open wide, and a few people wandered in while Carl Nystedt led the worship. Carl is good, and people like to stop and listen to him. So if we can open the doors (which face to the walking mall) everyone likes to visit in downtown Salem.

Jeff is preaching now, and started by saying that "eschatology" is a $5 theological word that you don't need to spend $30,000 at seminary to learn.

I teaching through the first part of the 5th chapter of James, Jeff tells about living at Larche, and learning to cultivate life and spirituality by cleaning toilets, and putting away his Merton.

Attendance at service this morning is smaller than typical. Are you a member of a small church? How does it effect you when the numbers are smaller on a Sunday morning? Does it effect you?

Now Jeff is on the subject of gossiping - now he's meddlin'! James meddles. I guess we need to meddle like he does as well. So Jeff is calling us to repentance on the subject of grumbling and gossiping. "Nothing about us without us," is a quote he brought up as a good rule of talking about others - say nothing about them with out them present.

Okay, now Jeff is talking about gopher wood, and wondering how gophers make wood. Hmmmm, what happened to that $30,000 seminary education.

Hey there, it's Jeff now. Phil started finishing up James by pointing us back to the openness and power that is evidenced in Acts 2:41-47 and encouraged in passages like I Corinthians 14. Phil noted that for all his tough talk and assumed heavy handedness, in passages like I Cor. 14 Paul encourages the church to a radical mutuality in which more than one prophet speaks, praises and tongues are encouraged and interpreted and the church shares all good things with one another.

In closing (a phrase that preachers use at their peril, btw), Phil reminded us that James has commissioned us to do what he was attempting to do. Namely, to turn one another from sin and death and so save one another. Hmmm...saving one another...it sounds like Martin Luther had more than one reason to hate this book that he both wanted to strip from the canon and effectively commended in his writing and preaching on a number of occasions.

Paul Drake anchored the service by leading our celebration of Eucharist. In a reading of Mark that I have never thought up myself, Paul reminded us that the first Eucharist was kept among a community that was broken and disintegrating as the disciples worried that they would be the one to betray their Lord. Paul mentioned that his reading of the text was influenced by the relationality that was emphasized in the two former sermons that were preached this day. Maybe we have multiple prophets speaking during our services after all. I wish more of these prophets were women. We've got enough white male middle-class prophets around here.