"Again Jesus was teaching beside the sea and such a great crowd came to gather  around him that he had to get into a boat and move outside the shore a ways.  The crowd was on the land beside the sea.. And Jesus told them many in  parables. 'Listen,' he said. 'A sower went out to sow and as he sowed some seed fell on the path and the birds came quickly and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground where it had no depth of soil and because it had no depth of soil it grew up very quickly. But when the sun came out it scorched it because it had no depth of soil. Still other seed fell on thorny ground and when it grew up the thorns choked it out and it bore no fruit. Some seed fell on good soil, growing up, increasing and yielding thirty-fold, sixty-fold, one hundred-fold. If you have the ears to hear, listen.' "

In this story that we have just heard, there are four kinds of soil. We are going to talk about hardened hearts or hearts that are as hard as a rock, and sometimes that does describe us. Our hearts can be turned and hardened against our neighbor. Our hearts can be turned and hardened against God. Is there any hope for such people, for hard hearted people?

In this parable, one of the kinds of soil is the rocky ground kind of heart. Jesus is probably talking here about the disciples. Some of the scholars who study this story in Mark say that the four kinds of soil are four different groups of hearers in the Gospel. The rocky ground people are the disciples. When Jesus explains the parable a few verses later, he’ll say, "These are the ones who when they hear the Word of God, they immediately receive it with joy, but they have no root in themselves. When trials and tribulations come on account of the Word, immediately they fall away."

Now that line, "immediately they fall away," occurs again later on in the Gospel when Jesus is with the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemene. And he says to them (he’s quoting an Old Testament passage), "When the sheep is struck (that’s referring to himself), the sheep will immediately fall away." The same term used in Mark about the disciples. Or we can go back to Mark, chapter three. Simon gets a new name from Jesus. He calls him Peter, or "Rocky." Now in Matthew’s Gospel when Peter is called "the rock," we take that as being his foundation of faith. But in Mark’s Gospel it may well be that his name "Rocky" is a symbol of these hardhearted kind of people. Rocky.

Let me tell you then three boat stories in Mark’s Gospel. When Mark wants to portray the disciples, he almost always does it in these brackets of threes. First, in chapter four, the boat story. Jesus has been teaching that day with the disciples. When the day is over he gets in the boat with them, they push out from the shore out into the sea, and a great storm comes up. But Jesus is sleeping, not paying any attention to the storm and the disciples are getting very fearful. Finally they wake him up. They say, "Teacher, don’t you care that we’re perishing here?"

Jesus gets up and says to the wind, "Stop!" To the waves, "Be still." And they are. Then he turns to the disciples and says, "Why are you afraid? Don’t you have any faith?"

Mark says that the disciples were stunned by Jesus, they didn’t understand what was happening. "Who is this," they say, "that even wind and waves obey him?" Why do they ask who he is? They have been with him from the very beginning. Are they getting nothing?

The second boat story: Mark, chapter six. This time Jesus has just fed 5,000 people. He tells the disciples, "You get in the boat and go out. I’m going up into the hills to pray." So Jesus is up in the hills praying, the disciples are on the boat crossing to the other side. Some hours later, Jesus looks out and sees them a long ways away. They are having a terrible time rowing against the wind. So—and you remember this story too—he walks out on the water in their general direction, although not necessarily going to them. They see him and they are terrified.

They cry out, "It’s a ghost!"

So he goes to them and says, "Why are you afraid? It’s me. Don’t be afraid."

Then we read, as Mark puts it, the disciples were astounded and they didn’t understand because their hearts were hardened. There you have it said explicitly about the disciples: that their hearts were hardened.

There is one other boat story and that’s in Mark, chapter eight. This is after the feeding of the 4,000 and that’s an important element because the bread is going to figure in the story. Jesus and the disciples get into the boat. The disciples are concerned that they only have one loaf of bread. Jesus says to them, "Why are you talking about bread? Are your hearts hardened? Do you not understand? Do you have eyes that do not see and ears that don’t hear? When I fed the 5,000, how many loaves were left over, how many basketfuls left over?"

One of the disciples answered, and I think very meekly, "Twelve."

"And when we fed the 4,000, how many baskets did you collect?"

"Seven."

"Don’t you understand?" Jesus says. "Don’t you get it yet?" Their hearts, indeed, seemed to be hardened.

We move later in the Gospel, chapter fourteen, to the Garden of Gethsemane. Most of you remember that story as well. Jesus wants to pray and he wants the disciples to stay awake with him in prayer. They fall asleep. He comes, wakes them and tries it again. They fall asleep. And as usual in Mark, they fall asleep three times. They can’t stay awake while he prays. That’s the last we hear of the disciples in the Gospel of Mark. They are sleeping in Gethsemane.

We then hear a little bit more about one of the disciples. His name if Peter. Peter followed Jesus for the trial. He stood outside with the bystanders. A little maid came along and said, "Aren’t you with the Galilean? You’re a Nazarene, too, I think."

Peter said, "I don’t know what you are talking about."

The maid said to the others, "I’m sure it’s him. I’m sure he’s with them."

And again he said, "No, no. I don’t know what you are talking about."

Finally, the bystanders said, "Yes. We’ve seen you with him, haven’t we?"

This time Peter curses, "I don’t know the man!" Then Peter heard the cock crow for the second time and he remembered what Jesus said: "This night, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times." And Peter wept. So we have the disciples sleeping. That’s the last word we hear about them. And Peter? The last word we hear about him in this whole Gospel is that he is weeping.

We come then to the last chapter of the Gospel. It’s the Easter chapter. The women go to the tomb and they meet the angel. The angel said, "You’re seeking Jesus of Nazareth. He’s not here. He has risen." Then as a message for the disciples, "Go tell the disciples and Peter (Aha! Jesus is not done with these folks) that he is going before you into Galilee and there he will meet you as he promised." It’s as if Jesus is saying, or God is saying here in this passage: "I am the sower and I’m going to keep on sowing. I see you, disciples. I see your hardened hearts and I’m going to keep on sowing. I see that you’ve turned away, but I’m the sower and I’m going to keep on sowing. I see that your hearts are sometimes like rock, but I’m the sower and I’m going to keep on sowing. I’m going to sow until that seed cracks those hearts of yours and your hearts break forth with good fruit and good production."

Then Jesus turns to other disciples. Mark here paints a picture of the disciples and I really think he paints a picture of disciples in every age. Our hearts, our hearts. We are also the people who have heard the Word of God, have heard it maybe all of our lives, but so often when trials and tribulations come we turn away, immediately we fall away. We may sometimes feel that people mock us for our faith and we turn away. We may experience great grief in life. Almost all of us do at some point. That grief can shock us, shock us to the point where we wonder if what we believe in is worth anything at all. Or our own agendas may block us from focusing clearly and centrally on Jesus, so our hearts are hardened.

Is there any hope for hardhearted people? Jesus says that yes, there is. "I’m going to meet you in Galilee." I think Galilee for us is just those places where we hear the story of Jesus. "I see that you’ve turned away," Jesus says, "but I’m the sower and I’m going to keep on sowing. I see that your hearts are hard as rock sometimes, but I’m the sower and I’m going to keep on sowing. I see that your hearts are hard, but I’m the sower and I’m going to keep on sowing and I’m going to sow and I’m going to sow until by the power of the Spirit the seed breaks your encrusted hearts and produces thirty-fold, sixty-fold, one hundred-fold. If you have ears to hear, listen." Amen.

Lydia Talbot: You are a masterful story teller, Dick!

Richard Jensen: Thank you.

Talbot: Biblical literature. You said to me, "You must get people to stop explaining Bible stories and start telling them."

Jensen: I read once read that Garrison Keillor was asked, "Why do you think sermons are boring (because he once said that he thinks they are boring)?" And Keillor said, "They are boring because the pastor has this wonderful story, then he takes the story, sticks it in a corner and gives you a lecture instead." So what I have learned in the last ten years is the power of these stories on their own. I say to pastors all the time that the stories are more important, especially the Biblical stories, than your comments or your insights into the stories. Tell the stories. And they have great power.

Talbot: That allows us to see ourselves in the stories.

Jensen: That’s right.

Talbot: The metaphor of Jesus as the sower. What does all this reveal to us, as you have conveyed from the Gospel of Mark, about the cost of discipleship?

Jensen: I think, first of all, it means that we need to recognize that we are often not very good disciples. We all have these hardhearted moments. But that is not going to "capsize the boat," our boat. Jesus will continue to come after us.

Talbot: What keeps him going, Dick?

Jensen: Jesus?

Talbot: Yes.

Jensen: Well, that’s his mission from God, to somehow convince us that he loves even us.

Talbot: "I will keep going," he says, "I will keep sowing." I am reminded of an image, in one of the paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, of the sower. Of course, the metaphor is seeing religion through nature and, in his case, generating things anew, a new way of painting for Van Gogh. But the image of the sower and we as sowers of seed.

Jensen: That, of course, is a story about discipleship. Once we’ve been penetrated and we start to bear fruit, that fruit is going to mean that we are also going to be sowers of that seed to others. And that we do, hopefully, with some of the same kind of patience Jesus has. It’s so easy to get impatient with people. Sinners are really rascals, you know! You can give up on them, but you can’t. You keep throwing the seed.

Talbot: There is also from Leviticus, of which I am reminded, the image of when we are told while harvesting the field not to go near the edge, to save that for the poor. The instruction in these wonderful stories speaks for itself.

Jensen: Very much so.

Talbot: Now take us back to your days on Lutheran Vespers. You know all about the art of broadcasting on radio and the connection between electronic media and Biblical authenticity.

Jensen: That’s very important and I wrote a book about ten years ago called, Thinking in Story, and this is exactly the premise. We have lived, since the time of the printing press, in a very literate world. Prior to the printing press, we lived in an oral world. The ear was the way that you heard and understood things. Now, first with radio and even telephone, which you have to include, it starts to come back, and with television you have both eyes and ears. But in that old oral world there were storytellers and that’s a lesson from that old world that we can apply in this new electronic world of communication. Ears have come back and ears really don’t go a good job of digesting really highly literate sermons. I’m sorry I have to say that to people.

A long time ago I made up a rule, the first rule of a boring sermon. If you hear a sermon that you think is boring, check and see how long the sentences are. Sentences that look perfectly fine on a piece of paper are way too long for ears. Ears need orality. So that’s why I want to get back to orality and I want to get back to these stories.

Talbot: Dick, your passion is the three Gospels. Say a word about that.

Jensen: I’ve put those into books—Preaching Matthew’s Gospel, Preaching Mark’s Gospel, Preaching Luke’s Gospel—where I’ve tried to help pastors see how these stories are connected to other stories. That’s what this sermon did. It connected stories in Mark. That’s how the Gospels work. We have spent so much of our life dissecting these Gospels down to one story or even one word. You need to learn to see how the stories in the texts given to us Sunday by Sunday connect with the wider world of Mark and the wider world with all of Scripture.

Talbot: And the wider world in which we live! You are going to Malaysia next year. Say a word about that.

Jensen: I have this great opportunity to go to Malaysia, Singapore and then Russia later in the year to teach people in other cultures. I want to talk to them about story telling and see how that goes.

Talbot: A master story teller, Dr. Richard Jensen! Thank you so much.