July 26, 2020 | Scripture, Sermon, & Prayers

We’ve been meeting out in my garden for the last few weeks, as we’ve unpacked parables that have had a seed theme. Two weeks ago, we talked about cultivating our soil, making sure we were ready for the Word of God. This soil cultivation is done by doing our own work, working the soil so that we are receptive for whatever seed God scatters among us, so that when it lands it can take root and weather all storms and droughts. Last week, we discussed what it feels like to be in the weeds. It’s feeling pretty weedy these days, and it’s hard not to ask God why evil and hardship are allowed to continue. A small explanation is offered in the parable of the wheat and weeds, it is that our roots are in the same soil as the roots connected to these difficult times. We are so important to God that God does not want to risk any of us being lost by pulling the weeds prematurely, our little rooty-tendrils wrapped around and intertangled with the roots that are holding in place the very things that we pray deliverance from. Instead, we are tended to in place, we are cared for by God who wants our success as we navigate hard things. So, this week, we have a handful of parables illustrating the Kingdom of Heaven, starting with… are you ready for it…

A mustard seed.

I know, shocking. Seeds.

But before we move onto some of the other wisdom offered by today’s readings, let’s not gloss over the mustard seed, even if it’s tempting because, well, we’ve probably all heard sermons on the mustard seed a billion times. This two-verse chunk from today’s Gospel reading has a lot to deconstruct within it. The word choices and the little details make it extra interesting when you sit to chew on it a bit. Especially if it’s deli mustard on whole wheat with turkey and melted cheese… Mmmm…

 First, let’s look at the mustard seed itself. Tiny. If you only had one single mustard seed, it would be easy to lose it. In this parable, Jesus tells us that someone has just one, and this person sows it in his field. The field is his, and by the use of the word “sow” we can guess this person probably has crops. This field is not likely a field that is unused, however, it is a little bizarre, isn’t it, that they sow only one seed? When I’m planting my garden, even if I’m not using the whole packet, I usually plant a few seeds. And I definitely don’t call it sowing. Not for my haphazard little plot. So, there’s already some dissonant language within this simple parable that tells us there’s something different here. Something that is slightly off.

Mustard, a favorite for about half of my household, was also used as a condiment in the ancient world. It also may have been used medicinally. But to put a single mustard seed in a field is weird, even knowing it would be used. Why not a whole field of mustard?

Then it grows up pretty huge. So big that birds nest in it. When we look back at our earlier weeks of seed stories, this seems like a bizarre placement for mustard. The other seed sown in the field would then be in less than ideal growing conditions once the mustard grew to it’s full height, taking most of the nutrients, it’s roots spreading and making it so the other crops have less room to grow, the massive height of it shading the other crops.

The kingdom of heaven is like…

…

…

like someone put a seed in a field that no one expected to be there, and no one noticed until it was so huge that it practically had its own ecosystem.

The next verse jumps to another analogy. A woman puts yeast into flour, leavening it. Okay, so this isn’t weird in our day of being able to buy self-rising flour, it seems like maybe even this woman is the inventor of self-rising flour, but let’s look at in context. Bread needed to be unleavened for the sabbath. This was an important piece of the spiritual ritual of the Jewish folks listening to Jesus give this message. Three measures isn’t just like, three cups of flour. It’s like, flour for 100 people. It’s a lot. In some translations, including the RSV, which is the one we have in our pews at Grace Community, instead of a woman putting yeast into flour and intentionally mixing it as the NRSV reads, it says, a woman took and hid leaven in three measures of flour. Hid. There’s something a little more subversive, a little…off-putting… about that wording. So she stashes some leaven in all the flour stores, and it spreads, until the next thing you know, it’s in everything.

A man finds a treasure, and buries it in a field. Then sells everything just to but the field with the buried treasure? Why? Why not just go home and sit and gawk at the treasure with all of his other stuff as well? There’s something bizarre going on here.

All of these scenarios are shocking. They require some form of patience, of some waiting time. Time for the seed to grow, for the flour to leaven, for escrow to close on the field. Anyone who has bought a house knows that’s the most uncertain, unsettling, long time of their entire existence. Not sure what the ancient version of escrow was, but certainly there is not an immediate opportunity for the man to enjoy the treasure he has found and buried. If you’ve been following along with what we’ve been doing for children’s time for the last few weeks, you’ve seen that we planted a seed and then checked on it every week. To watch all the videos right now in a row, it would seem pretty fast from initial sowing to the first shoots of the plant popping up, but trust me, in kid time (or impatient adult time) it felt like ages. Last week, showing the empty, boring, plain cup of dirt in the children’s time video felt anti-climactic. Like, womp womp, nothing’s happening. But this week, there was a sprout! There’s a wait, there’s anticipation, and there’s an element of surprise to God’s kingdom. I had no clue my nasturtium seeds would come up kind of purply gray. I was ready for bright green.

God’s creation, here on earth and beyond, defies what we think we know about it, and surprises us. What may start as our initial understanding of God’s love for us starts small and then is overwhelming in its abundance.

I was fully prepared to focus on the Matthew reading and just go from there this week, but yesterday while hiking, thunder crackling above, the greenness of the trees, ferns and moss dimmed by a sudden overcast, something (the holy spirit?) told me to re-look at the Romans reading. I had shoved the print out of today’s readings into my pack before we took off, so while walking, I revisited Romans. It hadn’t been an easy hike for me, my energy was off. Funky. Low. I could feel a headache coming on. Every single step was filled with “Ugh. I don’t wanna.” I can usually keep myself going by humming Taize songs or trying to remember the words to hymns (Yesterday it was “Everlasting Arms,” and somehow I could only remember “leeaaaaning, leaaaaning”). But even this, which I try to pass off as a pretty basic form of prayer and connecting to the divine, was not really working. It’s hard to be prayerful when you just have “dun dun duh duh duh, dun dun duh duh duh leaning on the everlasting arms” on loop without any of the substance. So that first line in today’s Roman reading grabbed me pretty immediately: “Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

I mean, it was practically like the Spirit heard my struggling through the hymn and sighed deeply and was like “Oh for cryin’ out loud, just read the Bible, Kim!”

And so there it was. The piece I had been looking for to bring more clarity to each of the seed stories over the last three weeks. They’ve taught us about how to be prepared, how to thrive under crummy conditions, and how to wait and be surprised, but what is it that’s so compelling that keeps us here, firmly planted among the weeds? Why do we want to make sure our hearts are ready for the Word? What could possibly be so amazing that we are willing to accept that a farmer willingly put a behemoth of a mustard bush in his field?

Romans 8:35 lists hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and sword as those things that might attempt to separate us from the love of Christ. Those sound a lot like the weeds, the rocky ground, the spiritual droughts, we might face, especially in these difficult times we are living in. However, the equivalent of the mustard tree-bush-birdhouse becomes apparent in the words that should shock us to our very core. If they don’t read them again, hear them again, take the “heard it before” blasé out of the equation: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, no height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

I mean, that’s everything. Nor COVID, nor politics on Facebook, nor a divided nation, nor protests, nor tear gas, nor murder hornets—remember them?,—nor whatever August 2020 has in store, will be able to separate us from divine, unending, redemptive, reconciling, surprising love. That’s what’s planted in our fields, that’s the leaven that’s making its way through our flour, invisibly, quietly. That’s what we can expect at the end of all of this uneasy suspense. It’s the surprise we should have seen coming, but how can we ever expect such things when life has been so hard? And so we tend our soil. We pray and maintain connected to God, even when the weeds are thick around us—even if our prayer is feeble and the words aren’t right, as long as it’s the best one we’ve got. We remain ever-ready for what God has to offer us.

Love.

Love that is all-encompassing, bigger than we could ever imagine, and that will find us and stick to us no matter where we are or what the headlines are saying today. That’s the good news we receive this week. May you be covered by the astonishing, inseparable, and sometimes baffling love of God in Christ Jesus. Amen.