Sermon: “Planting Seeds”

How often have you heard the parable of the mustard seed?  Mustard-seed faith.  When my daughter heard I was preaching on it today, she said, “Again!  You’re always talking about the mustard seed!”  And it’s true.  I admit it.  I love this parable.  But the thing about our faith is that, with God’s help, a very little bit of human effort goes a long way.  A very little seed of faith can sprout into a healthy shrubbery of hope, and even a thick and tall and sprawling, fruitful vine of love. 

I know many of us are planting seeds this time of year.  But can you remember the sense of wonder you felt the first time, as a kid, a teacher had you plant a bean seed in a paper cup?  Remember the suspense?  That’s what this parable captures, I think – the mystery of God’s power.  When my 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Richardson, had us plant those seeds, I seriously doubted anything would come of it – I mean, I was 9.  But then, on the 3rd or 4th day, this little green sprout started to poke up from the dirt!  We adults get so jaded – we’re tempted to take everyday miracles like that for granted.  People who come from dry places, like my California husband and kids, and our Iraqi refugees – they are amazed by this lush Connecticut spring.  It’s like you can watch your grass grow.

Jesus was from a dry place too – the Middle East.  He knew what it was to be grateful for a few patches of plant life in a hot, arid world.  Close to the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus spent a lot of time, it’s green and fertile – but we remember he and his followers also spent a lot of time in the wilderness.  The rocks and hills and sandy desert were good places to hide when they got into trouble back in town, but hard places to find food.  Re-read just the first few chapters of Mark’s Gospel if you need a reminder of how massive the Jesus movement quickly grew to be, and how controversial it was, as Jesus and his disciples upset Jewish religious leaders and Roman officials wherever they went. 

And by Mark’s time 40 years later, things were worse.  As Christianity got more popular, things got worse for everyday Christians.  Mark was written right after Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple around the year 70, and the Jews were blaming Jesus followers for the trouble they’d caused.  They saw Christianity as a new and dangerous cult, something that undermined the conventional wisdom of decent society – a weed in the garden of Judaism that needed to be rooted out. 

We New England Congregationalists have to be careful that we’re not too hard on all those good Pharisees and Sadducees who were attacking Jesus – because, like them, we love and honor our history.  We respect our nation’s traditions, and we worship in fairly conventional ways.  We have educated and authorized clergy, like the rabbis of Judea – most of us don’t listen to street-corner preachers or get baptized in wilderness watering holes.  We don’t sit with lepers and the homeless poor at big outdoor revivals, praying to be healed or saved.  We come to worship in our little white meetinghouse, under a tall steeple.  We can take justifiable pride in our Pilgrim ancestors, who set out to be a city upon a hill, in the tradition of the great prophets of the Hebrew Bible, which (it’s easy to forget) were the only scriptures that Jesus and his people knew.  The Old Testament lesson for today (Ezekiel 17:22-24) will sound familiar:

“22Thus says the Lord God: I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out. I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain. 23On the mountain height of Israel I will plant it, in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind. 24All the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord. …”

In founding this great country of ours, our Separatist ancestors – refugees from political and religious oppression back in England – established us as the light to the nations proclaimed by the prophet Isaiah.  So it’s easy to see ourselves standing proud and tall as an example to others, bearing fruit for God’s reign of love on this earth.  I think especially on this Flag Day, we can be proud of all that members of this very church did to establish our great nation.  I shared that sense of pride yesterday, at Andy Slater’s Eagle Court, as we pledged allegiance to the flag together.  It’s natural to feel pride in our success – either as a nation, or as a church, or as individuals.  And today I hope we feel a sense of pride in the welcome we’ve been able to give our new refugee family from Iraq.  I hope our Sunday School teachers, too, feel a sense of accomplishment in completing another good Church School year.  But there’s an awful lot that makes up a Christian life that can go unnoticed, or under-appreciated, even by those who themselves do the work. 

Do you know what I mean?  No one gives out awards for coming in to church on a Monday to clean the church toilets, or a merit badge for wiping down a table with a sponge or putting an offering envelope in the plate.  But that’s everyday Christianity in action.  Anyone can appreciate the 100-foot-tall cedar and the eagle soaring high above it – but we Christians are also called to plant, to cultivate, and to appreciate the humble mustard seed that rarely grows as tall as 5 or 10 feet, and yet it gives shelter to the smallest songbirds of the garden.  The random acts of kindness ordinary Christians do every day are seeds planted for the Reign of God’s Love.  Our kids know this too, right?  Even toddlers in our nursery learn to share.  In all our Church School classes, our kids are taught to welcome the stranger.  Our Senior Highs go on mission trips.  Our Junior Highs walked in the Relay for Life – and what was their gift of mini-M&Ms to us but thousands of tiny mustard seeds?  They yielded heavy rolls of quarters in return!  That’s what this mustard-seed parable of Jesus is about.  The ordinary goodness of faithful Christians blossoms and grows and spreads around the world like weeds.

So when we think of mustard, we have to think “dandelions,” not cornstalks.  It’s a weed.  Mustard did not begin to be cultivated as a food crop until many years after Jesus, in India.  And yet mustard is a good weed – it was always used as a spice, for food or medicine, and stalks were used to thatch roofs – because it grew everywhere.  Even today, you can see raggedy patches of mustard growing tall along the highways of Israel.  And as a ground cover, mustard helps return nutrients to the soil, deter insects, and shelter good little birds that eat garden bugs.  California wineries have learned to plant it between the rows in their vineyards, as you can see from the photos my husband printed out for us there in Brooks Hall.  So it’s abundant, and useful, but it’s still a weed. 

At the time of Mark’s Gospel, mustard was spreading west through the Roman Empire – just like Christianity.  And just like Christianity, it was seen as a dangerous, non-native invader.  Have you heard that saying, “A weed is just a flower that’s the victim of prejudice”?  Isn’t that true when religious majorities refuse to tolerate religious minorities?  That intolerance drove the Pilgrims out of England.  That intolerance led to the Holocaust.  It’s at the heart of violence in the Middle East today.  The tyrants of this world have always tried mow down ordinary people of faith in the name of national harmony – to root us out, trample us under foot, kill us with poisons, pave us over.  And yet, that’s not God’s peace you get in a totalitarian state with a unified public religion of conventional morality.  Real and holy peace comes from the simple daily practice of love and justice.  This is the central truth proclaimed by all three of the major religions of the Middle East – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Our Creator made all humanity as brothers and sisters in the Divine image, and commanded us to care for one another, and for our world. 

So keep planting seeds of faith, hope, and love, people of God.  Let us continue to heed our call as active disciples – nourishing the earth with the simplicity of our lives, leaving behind fertile soil where God’s word will reseed itself for the next generation.  We’ll never know where some of those tiny seeds will land.  We can pray they will bloom like mustard flowers for God’s glory – as our faith spreads like weeds to heal the earth, to welcome stranger who flies to us for shelter, and to push up through the cracks of tyranny and Empire. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

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Psalm 92:1-5, 12-15

¹It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High;
²to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night,
³to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre.
⁴For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work;
at the works of your hands I sing for joy.
⁵How great are your works, O Lord! Your thoughts are very deep!

¹²The righteous flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.

¹³They are planted in the house of the Lord;
they flourish in the courts of our God.

¹⁴In old age they still produce fruit; they are always green and full of sap,

¹⁵showing that the Lord is upright; he is my rock,
and there is no unrighteousness in him.

Ezekiel 17:22-24

²²Thus says the Lord God: I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out. I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain. ²³On the mountain height of Israel I will plant it, in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind. ²⁴All the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord. I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the Lord have spoken; I will accomplish it.

 

Mark 4:26-34

²⁶He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, ²⁷and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. ²⁸The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. ²⁹But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” ³⁰He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? ³¹It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; ³²yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” ³³With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; ³⁴he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.