The Sermon After the Sermon

June 18, 2009

I preach as often as I clean out the junk drawer in our kitchen which is to say about two or three times a year. One of those rare preaching gigs seems to traditionally fall on the Sunday after summer break begins which means attendance is somewhere between scant and minimal. I like it that way. There’s a cozy family feel in the sanctuary and few enough eyeballs in the house that I can make eye contact with the entire congregation during the course of the sermon, which I tend to think of as a spiritual chat rather than a sermon. It eases the internal expectations I have of preaching by re-framing it in that terminology. Whatever works.

The Gospel reading for the day was Mark 4:26-32 that includes two brief parables.

Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.’

The Parable of the Mustard Seed

He also said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet 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.’

I tend to be a visual learner…and teacher and so when I read “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground…” I reached into my right pocket and hurled a heaping handful of seeds at the right side of the congregation, and when I came to “It is like a mustard seed, which when sown upon the ground…” I reached into my left pocket and flung a fistful of mustard seeds over the left side of the congregation. I took no small delight in watching these dear people I love ducking for their lives but at the same time I had a greater purpose than my own personal amusement. I wanted to tangibly communicate that the kingdom of God is no less a present reality in their lives here and now than as the seeds that crunched under their shoes and that fell from their hair with every shake of their heads. The kingdom of God slipped into the realm of this world and humanity when the Son of God came to us. It is present reality and a future event, it is now and it’s not yet. Yet another head-scratching mystery of God.

After exploring the parable of the mustard seed that turns up in all the Gospels, we looked together at this parable of the growing seeds that appears only here in Mark. A farmer plants seeds in a field and then the farmer leaves the field and returns home. Day and night he goes through his regular routine and all the while the seeds in the field are growing. The farmer has no idea how the seeds grow but the thing he does know is that he can’t make them grow and become a harvest. All he can do is scatter the seeds and then it’s up to the seed, the earth, the sun, and the rain to do their part. And they do. The seed grows and becomes a stalk that grows a head that blossoms into full grain. Only when the harvest has arrived does the farmer return to the field with sickle in hand to gather the full harvest.

The farmer couldn’t force the seed to grow anymore than the zealots in Jesus’ day could usher in the kingdom of God through a revolution or the Pharisees could make the kingdom arrive through strict adherence to the law. The kingdom of God will come in it’s own time and it’s own way. Like the earth produces of itself “automatically” so too does the kingdom of God. We scatter the seeds of the kingdom…seeds of love, grace, mercy, compassion and peace, and then it’s up to God’s Spirit to take those seeds to produce the harvest that God desires and sees fit.

What this parable teaches me is that all God asks is that I be faithful to do my part in tossing the seeds, and then let go and trust that God will be faithful to bring forth a harvest. There’s nothing I can do to make people or the world change. I can’t force people to be committed to equality. I can’t bring forth a harvest of understanding, love and acceptance. I can’t make anyone accept gays and lesbians. I have no control over the injustice others do or the lies that others speak. All I can do is scatter the seeds I’ve been given as faithfully as I know how. I’m not called to bring forth the harvest. I’m called to go out into the field and with these hands and this heart and this voice and this life sow seeds of kindness, truth, mercy, forgiveness and love and then I’m called to do the hardest thing of all. God calls me to walk away from the field; to stop striving and laboring under my own power to make the seeds grow into the harvest I think they should be and blossom at the time I think they should bloom but to entrust the fields to God’s care. It will be God’s Spirit who will watch over the seeds you and I have scattered and from them God and only God will bring forth a harvest, greater than any harvest we could have anticipated or hoped for.

Now, here’s the beautiful thing. It happened after church.

As soon as the benediction was given and the congregation began to leave the sanctuary for the table of cookies in the fellowship hall the children came running to the front of the church to scoop up the seeds that were on the floor. As they gathered them up in their hands they were so excited and happy, telling me how they were going to take them home and plant them. They had no idea what the seeds were or what they would grow in to. Not one of the children even bothered to ask me what kind of flower seeds they were. They didn’t ask because they didn’t care if they were posies or petunias. They just wanted to take them home, scatter them, and see what would happen.  The activity of seed scattering excited them more than anything else. It was only the few adults who remained behind picking up seeds for themselves that continued to ask, “But what kind of seeds are they? No really, I need to know. I need to know what kind of seeds they are to know when and where to plant them.”

That was the real teaching of the morning for me. Not the sermon I preached but in what I saw after church in the joyful excitement of the children. I long to be that free of expectation so I can take delight in scattering the seeds and stand in wonder at what God brings forth at the harvest.

Just last evening, a day late and a dollar short for the sermon, I read this wonderful quotation by Henry David Thoreau that seems more than fitting for the mystery that lies at the heart of Jesus’ parable.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

I’m with Thoreau on this one. I’m prepared for the wonders that will spring forth from the seeds of the kingdom of the God.

Posted in Storytelling