Later on today approximately 150 million people will be doing exactly the same thing: watching the Super Bowl. By my calculations—which you really should not trust—that means just over 2% of the world’s population will be curious enough about who will be crowned the best team in professional American football that they will sit for several hours in front of a television set in order to be among the first to know. I will be one of those people.

People are curious. We like to know things, especially things about other people. We like to know all sorts of things, even if they really don’t amount to anything at all. And today, with the use of modern electronic forms of communication, you and I can know crucial facts about other people whom we will never personally meet. We can know what they had for breakfast, or even what they are thinking about having for breakfast. We can know when they get a traffic ticket, or how they feel about global warming, or how they feel after a night of too much carousing on the town. Occasionally, we might even learn something interesting or useful about them. Like the fact that they have decided to drop by for a visit and they will be at the front door in less than two minutes. One of the most recent electronic marvels through which we can share mostly useless information is called “Twitter.” Through Twitter, a single individual can “tweet” hundreds of thousands of other people with small bits of information. It’s a great tool, and it capitalizes on the insatiable human desire for information. We are nearing the end of our series of messages this winter about knowing God. Since you are sitting here this morning, I assume that you would like to know God, or at least you are with someone who would like to know God and you love them enough to come to church with them. In any event, we have been looking at some of the basic and most important ways that you and I can have an ongoing relationship with God as we get to know him and also to know what difference this might make in our lives. At the outset of the year we learned that the Lord’s Supper—which we celebrate again today—is one way we learn crucial information about God. We also have baptism, worship, prayer, and scripture: all tools and methods and gifts from God so that we can learn useful and important information about ourselves, about how this world is designed to operate, and about the God who made it so. In last week’s look at scripture I proposed that the Bible is the original Facebook in whose pages we can learn about God. This week I want to look at the Bible in a different way. I would also propose to you that the Bible is also like Twitter: in its pages God is constantly sending us messages. For a few moments this morning, then, let’s wrap our minds around this one question: When God twitters, do you listen?

Much of what the Christian faith is all about is the conviction that God has been and still is saying something to us. There is truth to be known and this truth is crucial to our success as individual people and as a whole human society. God is not absent, God is not silent, God is not confusing, God is not hurtful. God is present with us, speaking clearly, for our good. The brief Deuteronomy passage occurs just after Moses has come down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments. The wandering Hebrews have gladly received this message from the God who a while back had rescued them from Egypt. They are happy to have someone like Moses who will listen to God and then teach them what God says. Of course, the story of the Old Testament is about how the people so often forget what God has says, or worse yet, how they ignore it. But still there is a deep conviction that God has spoken and what God has said should be given their full attention and allegiance. Over the centuries, this conviction led the people to write down the most important events and the most important information. The writings would come to be called “sacred,” because the reading and hearing and especially the doing of what the writing said were the key to successful living.

And so, in the context of a people and a culture in which knowledge about God and God’s ways was so deeply respected, even revered, a new teacher entered the scene of history. Whereas Moses had taught the people the commandments and statutes and ordinances of God, this new teacher often spoke as if he were God himself. This new teacher often used his actions to teach just as much as his words. And often he spoke in parables, stories that used one level of conversation to speak about a much deeper level of truth. This new teacher, however, was also just like Moses and all the other great teachers and leaders in the history of the people. This new teacher also understood that God had been and still was speaking to the people. Of course, the teacher is Jesus, and the parable we’ve read from Mark is one of his most famous. It is sometimes called the Parable of the Sower, or also the Parable of the Seed. It is a parable that speaks about this fundamental part of the Judeo-Christian faith: that God is a God who speaks, and in the speaking and hearing and doing of God’s word, something very special happens.

Jesus’ parable is very simple and drawn from something common in the lives of the people whom he taught. Ancient Palestinian farming consisted of the farmer throwing seed all over an available patch of ground and then working with what came up. The ground was of an inconsistent quality, though, some rocky, some shallow, some exposed to birds, some hardened by the traffic of human and animal feet. The quality of the ground upon which an individual seed fell determined the quality of the plant that grew from it.

The earliest Christians understood Jesus to be talking about something other than farming. They knew he was talking about the Word of God. The Word of God—God’s message that he has been speaking all along—is the seed. The seed is potent, powerful, able to produce a crop of righteousness, right living. Back in the days of Deuteronomy, the people had learned that hearing and applying God’s word was what enabled them to live long and well in the land God was giving them. The Word, though, demands good soil in which to grow. There’s the rub. If the Word falls on hard ground and doesn’t get absorbed into the soil, the birds eat it. If the Word falls on rocky ground, there is nothing for the roots to grab hold of, and it begins to grow but then quickly fails. If the Word falls among weeds, it will not be able to withstand the competition for sun and water as a young plant and it will find itself choked out. But if the Word falls into good soil—a place where it is nurtured, fed, protected—then it will produce much.

Here are the questions that you and I should ask ourselves every day. How do I sometimes refuse to let God’s word penetrate into my soul so that it can grow there? How can I learn to accept and nurture the message that God wants to speak to me? What new seeds are God wanting to plant in me, and what old plants have perhaps reached the end of their lives and need to be removed so that others can grow? What word is God speaking to me to which I have refused to listen? In short, what makes for good dirt, and how can I become better dirt?

In the world of Twitter, an individual tweet must be very short and therefore, to be useful, must be very much to the point. Jesus’ parable was the same. It was about the conviction that God wants to be known and God can be known, especially in his word. It was about the conviction that God will be known by those who want to know him. It was about the conviction that all the blessings of the Kingdom of God will grow into their full potential in those who welcome and nurture and follow the message God is speaking. To Jesus’ way of thinking, being good dirt was all about listening in order to learn and then listening in order to obey. “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”

Amen.