There is No Bad Soil: The Parable of the Sower and the Hidden Wisdom of Soil ~ July 12, 2026

Sermon for Emmanuel Church, Dublin, NH | The Very Reverend Gideon L. K. Pollach | P10A

Many of us went for a walk in the woods this week, down at the Miner’s house on Silver Lake. As we walked, to those with eyes to see, we could see soil being made: Moss and leaves, mushrooms slowly turning duff into earth. A trillion decomposers doing their silent work, right at our feet.

I have been thinking about soil all week.

For years now, I have been working to turn the edge of my driveway from grass into garden. Grass is a monoculture: it crowds everything out and gives nothing back. A Garden is a community - mutual, vibrant, and diverse. So, season by season, I have been planting, moving the ground from lawn to living earth.

Every Good Friday, I mark the progress of spring with an act of faith. After the noon service, and before the evening one, I go out and sow cosmos and zinnias in that garden - the Good Friday Garden. My mother always taught me that anything sown on Good Friday is bound to rise.

Usually, the flowers come up extravagantly: tall, careless, colors colliding, no plan to any of it. That's the point. The sowing is prodigal. The rising reliable.

This spring I sowed that day as usual. Sarah and I sowed extra in every bare spot around the yard also, a riot of color for the unplanned earth. The season turned. We came north to Dublin months later. And, before we left, I went to check the progress.

In the bare spots where Sarah and I had scattered extra seed, Cosmo fronds were already coming up - Zinnias blossoming.

But, the Good Friday garden, the one I've been building for years, had been overgrown while I wasn't watching. Not by weeds. By echinacea, day lilies, Rudbeckia, and Leucanthemum or Shasta daisies. Everything else I'd sown in other years, growing faster than the cosmos.

Unplanned, but welcome abundance.

The cosmos and zinnias aren't gone. They're just growing where I can't see them, crowded, leaning into whatever light comes through, waiting. I'll find out when I get home how they did.

I am living this summer, in the interval between sowing and knowing. In fact, the whole of life is that interval. And this parable is about that life.

We have a long tradition of misreading this parable.

We hear it and begin the audit. Which soil are we? Are we the rocky ground, quick to receive, quick to fall away? Are we the thorns, well-intentioned, crowded out by worry and the lure of wealth? Are we, please, fingers crossed, in the good soil? When we will find out?

The interpretive layer in the second half of this passage invites exactly this kind of productivity audit. It maps each soil type onto a failure mode. We turn a parable about a sower into a diagnosis about ourselves.

Consider who the tradition says wrote this Gospel: the disciple Matthew.

Matthew, we are told,  was a tax collector. His entire vocation was assessment: categorize, calculate, determine what is productive and what is waste. Matthew took Jesus' story about a prodigal sower and turned it into a productivity audit. That is what tax collectors do.

But the sower is not a tax collector. The sower is a sower, not an auditor.

Read again what Jesus actually describes: A sower went out to sow. He threw seed everywhere: on the path, on rocky ground, among the thorns, on good soil. No survey. No assessment. No ground prep.

That kind of generosity is reckless,  by any agricultural standard.

Those of us who garden already know this. A wary gardener doesn't plant without auditing the garden beds and then deciding whether and what to sow. A gardener sows with care. Attending to what will do best and where. Maybe with reference to notes from last year.

And here is another thing that Matthew's audit mis-states: the thorns in this parable aren't evil. They're just faster. They are unplanned, unwelcome abundance, and they grow in every garden, including ours.

The competition isn't between good and bad. It's between slow growth and everything else. Including beautiful things and prickly things. Including things we chose, and things that claim us.

This may be a more uncomfortable interpretation than the standard reading. But, it is also more true. And if the productivity audit is the wrong approach to interpreting this parable, we might ask: what then is the soil?

So here, then, is another truth that good gardeners know: the ground is not inert. It never was.

Consider: A teaspoon of healthy soil holds approximately one trillion organisms. The metabolic signature of that community has a name: geosmin, produced by Actinomycetes bacteria working in the dark. You may know the smell of this activity, it is the smell of soil after rain- which has its own name- petrichor. Our noses are attuned to it. In fact, we evolved a sensitivity to geosmin because that smell signals life, and life has always meant growth, health, and promise.

In 1885, a German biologist named Albert Frank coined a new word mycorrhiza, from the Greek words mykes, meaning fungus, and rhiza, meaning root. Fungus-root.

Frank observed that mycelia thread through soil like a wet nurse, drawing nutrients from deep in the soil, feeding the trees and plants from below. Drawing nutrients from rocks and other organisms that plants cannot harvest.

This relationship had no name yet. Frank was struck by what he found: not parasitism, not competition, but what he called "intimate, reciprocal dependence." Merlin Sheldrake, in the book Entangled Life, describes how Frank's critics dismissed his findings as "a sentimental illusion."

They thought that if one partner appeared to benefit, the other must be paying a price. That's the way of the natural world - competition, scarcity. Mutual benefit must be impossible. Generosity had no place in the logic of soil.

Frank proved them wrong.

Pine seedlings grown from the same seed grew larger and healthier in diverse living forest conditions than seedlings grown in sterile laboratory conditions. The difference wasn't the seed. It was what was already in the ground.

The Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki built on this research and developed an entire method of reforestation on this principle of intimate, reciprocal dependence. He proved that native plant species, planted together, densely, in living soil grew faster than those planted separately.

The wisdom was this: trust the mychorizal community already present to thread the plants into mutual relationship. The forest that emerges in this deep intimacy is more resilient than anything planted alone.

The Hebrew word for the ground from which we are drawn is adamah. Soil. Not dust. Not dirt. Not inert material. Arable Living earth.  The ground who feeds things and yields them.

When Genesis says God formed adam from the adamah, it describes a soil creature drawn from a soil community already exchanging, already threading root to root in the dark, already alive and made aware of it.

Human beings, according to Genesis, are not animated dirt. We are conscious soil.

Matthew's productivity audit assumes we are lone seedlings in sterile ground, succeeding or failing on our own terms. But, that was never  what the text said. That was never the condition in this ground.

If we are animated soil, then the mycelia were already there before we were formed. Knitting together a community. A Community that preceded the individual Adam, or soil creature. The deep truth: we were never meant to grow alone. We are born from community, for community.

There is no bad soil. There are only conditions we haven't learned to read yet influencing growth in ways we do not yet understand. But, Jesus understood this before science had words for it.

The author JRR Tolkien read Frank's controversial research. Sheldrake documents it in Entangled Life. Mycorrhizal fungi found their way into The Lord of the Rings- even if we missed it.

Maybe you remember this: When the elf Galadriel gave gifts to the Fellowship before they left on their quest from Lorien, she gave Sam, Sam the gardener, Sam who loved growing things, a small grey box. Inside, she said, was earth from her own orchard, soft and fine as dust. At its center, a single silver-shelled seed. She warned that It would not keep him on his road or defend him against any peril. But if he found his home barren and laid waste, this earth would make his garden bloom.

That earth worked because it carried what Sam couldn't see. The fungal soil community of Lórien, packed into a grey box, waiting to thread itself through wounded ground.

In Tolkien's telling, cut from the films, the hobbits return home to find the Shire devastated: trees felled, land stripped, the countryside they loved made unrecognizable by industrial malice. Sam scattered Galadriel's earth at the root of every sapling he planted in every place where a beloved tree had been destroyed. The gift was never for keeping. Every grain to a wounded place and the garden grew- as if by magic. But, in fact, by mychoriza.

Paul puts it this way in Romans 8: the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us. Working in us, the Spirit does not dwell, if we improve or perfect ourselves. She dwells. Already.

Already working. The community that is the presence of God is already there before we know to look for it. Working silently within us, redeeming and renewing us from within.

The answer to the productivity anxiety produced by the soil audit here is not to try harder to be better soil. We are already rooted in something we did not create and cannot see. The sower's reckless generosity is God's character. Frank called it mutual generosity. Frank's critics called mutual generosity a sentimental illusion. They were wrong about soil. They were wrong about Gospel abundance also.

Which brings us back to my Good Friday garden.

I don't yet know whether the cosmos came up.

I know this: I sowed them on Good Friday because I believe something about God's generosity that I cannot explain. I know something about death and resurrection that I cannot argue my way through. But, I enact that manner of life by sowing generously, on Good Friday, and every day that I can.

I know that when my Good Friday garden was overgrown, Sarah and I sowed again, not from loss of faith, but because that is what prodigal sowers do. Trust.

We don't need to wait for ideal conditions. We don't need to be the right soil. We don’t need to improve who we are for the Holy Spirit to work in us.

We are called to be sowers. We  are called to scatter the seed on the soil and trust what we cannot yet see.

The bare spots were already flowering.

The Good Friday garden is growing where I can't see it yet, alive in ways I won't know until I come home.

The word is already in the ground.

That is not a metaphor for faith. That is faith, a faith that trusts God and trusts the soil. So, sow.  Amen.