Growing

Pentecost 3B, 6/14/15
Mark 4:26-34

God, bless the reading, the hearing, the singing, and the preaching of the word today. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

This is a great time of year for growing things.

At least, that’s what I hear.

My experience this year has been a little bit different.

Sometimes, even in the growing season, the plants don’t cooperate.

My husband and I have a patch of our lawn that we’re trying to reseed this summer. There was basically a big dip in the front yard, I think because there had been animals living under there and the dens collapsed over the winter.

So, we filled in the hole with several bags of dirt – or soil, or whatever the correct gardening term is.

My husband even bought the bags that advertised that they were good for growing grass.

And then we poured on a bunch of grass seed.

And we watered it every day, unless it rained.

And we waited.

And nothing happened.

So we reseeded the whole thing, and continued to water it, hoping that some grass would start growing to fill in the huge brown patch that we had created in our front yard, which by the way, had done absolutely nothing to improve our curb appeal.

Some of the seeds eventually started to grow, and we’re pretty sure that some of the grass that was buried under a few inches of dirt just kept pushing through until it started peeking out the top.

Today, about half of that patch of our lawn has grass growing in it.

And about half of it doesn’t.

There’s no real rhyme or reason to it, we just have to take it for what it is, enjoy the grass that is growing, and have faith that the empty spots will fill in over time.

The kingdom of God is like that.

We scatter seed, we hope for the best, and sometimes things just don’t work out the way that we expect.

Now, in our front yard, as one of our friends reminded us, we could have just covered up the dirt patch with sod.

I don’t think there’s such an easy fix for the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God involves people – imperfect, unpredictable, wonderful and frustrating human beings – so it takes a lot more work than just planting grass in our front yard.

But what the two things have in common – the kingdom of God and my front yard – is that they are both about growing things. 

In the kingdom of God, you can plant some seeds. You can sow your ideas among a group of people, you can encourage new growth, you can water and fertilize and aerate the soil, metaphorically speaking.

Communities of faith are fertile grounds for growth.

That’s why the kingdom of God is like planting and harvest, according to today’s parable.

The kingdom of God is like when we plant some seeds among our friends and family, and miraculously, some of those seeds start to grow, and even though we can’t fully comprehend the miracle of new life, we rejoice that the growth happens, and we depend on the fruits of our garden during the harvest season.

There’s something mysterious and complex about the kingdom of God, something so unusual about it that it can’t be described directly.

Jesus can only describe God’s kingdom to the disciples in parables.

Now, the passage from Mark says that Jesus explained everything to them in private, and they claimed to understand everything that he said, but I don’t think that’s really how it happened.

The kingdom of God is incomprehensible.

That’s why Jesus kept using parables, trying to get them to understand a little bit at a time, so that hopefully, eventually, the pieces would fall together in their minds and they’d have some idea of what he was talking about.

If you pay close attention to the disciples throughout the Gospel stories, it’s pretty clear that they don’t really understand everything that Jesus tried to teach them.

But that’s OK.

When Jesus taught in parables, the point wasn’t to comprehensively explain everything, to prepare the disciples for some final exam that they would have to pass before entering the pearly gates.

The point of the parables is to satisfy some of their curiosity while encouraging more conversation and exploration.

The disciples didn’t need to know it all – and neither do we. From the parables of Jesus, we can learn in bits and pieces about the mysterious, amazing, incomprehensible kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God is something that Jesus spent a lot of time describing, in parables, to his disciples. It was the primary topic of Jesus’ teachings.

During his ministry, Jesus talked about the kingdom of God more than he talked about anything else.

         Wanna know what was second? Money.

Jesus didn’t actually spend a lot of time talking about how to live a moral life, or how to worship, or how to be a good disciple.

He talked mostly about how to be a good citizen in the kingdom of God – and how to recognize that kingdom when it showed up around you.

That’s one of the things we can learn from today’s parables.

The kingdom of God is already around us.

The ground is fertile and ready for growth, it just needs some seeds and water and tender loving care.

There is going to be growth in the kingdom whether we participate in it or not.

Here’s an interesting thing about that patch of dirt in our front yard.

The weeds love it.

The conditions are perfect for them – fresh soil, regular water, plenty of sunlight. Even when the grass seed doesn’t take, the weeds have no problem growing in that spot of our lawn.

If we let them keep growing, the weeds would take over, and not leave any water or nutrients for the grass to grow.

The soil is going to produce plants one way or another.

The kingdom of God is like a newly tilled garden, where the soil is rich and the sunshine and water create the perfect growing conditions.

Jesus invites us in to that garden, to plant the seeds that we want to have growing there, to produce the crops that we will want to harvest down the road once they are ripe.

Sometimes we plant grass and get weeds.

Sometimes, like in the second parable today, we plant a tiny seed and get a huge bush!

Although, the mustard plant would have been considered a weed, you know. Really, a weed is just a plant that is growing somewhere it’s not supposed to be. Roses would be weeds in the middle of a cornfield.

But the kingdom of God is like that.

Sometimes we prepare a garden hoping for a particular crop to grow, and something else happens altogether.

Sometimes we plant one kind of seed and something unexpected grows up instead. Maybe there were already some seeds taking root in the soil before we got there, and we didn’t know that other plants were already starting to grow.

Maybe the packet of seeds you bought at the store was mislabeled.

Gardening can be an art for people who are really good at it.

But gardening can also be a mystery.

Things happen that are unexpected, plants grow faster or slower than we want them to, or they don’t take root at all.

         Tiny seeds grow into massive plants that take over all available space.

You plant grass seed and nothing happens, except that dandelions and clovers start to sprout… which actually means that a lot is happening, there’s plenty of new growth, it’s just really not what I was hoping for when I dumped all that dirt and grass seed out on our front lawn. 

The kingdom of God is like when it’s supposed to be the growing season where you live. You plant a bunch of seed, and some of it grows, but other patches are left bare.

We are not in charge of the growth of the kingdom of God.

We are not in charge of the plants in our gardens or the grass in our front lawns – all we can do is plant the seeds, and plant more when the first ones fail, and water and weed and hope for the best.

Isn’t that what ministry is all about?

When the time for harvest comes, along with the gardener in today’s parable, we can reap whatever has grown, and rejoice in the miracle of growth and new life from tiny seeds, in unlikely places.

But more importantly, at this time of the year – when it is the time for growing, not for reaping – we can recognize that the kingdom of God is present in our community just like God is working in the garden.

God is with us in our sleeping and waking, planting and weeding, working and resting… and the kingdom of God is here.                
Thanks be to God. Amen.