The following is a sermon preached by Leigh Edwards, a parishioner of St. Joseph's, at Oriental United Methodist Church, on 14 June 2009. The text is Mark 4:26-34. We pray for Leigh as she serves her internship at Oriental UMC.
I lived last year in a neighborhood known by people outside of the community, and even by some inside, for its drugs, gangs, poverty, and violence. In fact, the house that we resided in used to be a boarding house – which was a veiled way of talking about a transitory location for those looking for some kind of comfort in drugs, sex, or just a roof over their heads. There is a lot next to our house that is long, skinny and weed covered – the neighborhood association is not sure what to do with it – and it is exactly the kind of lot that you would tell your kids to stay away from and that would necessarily bring down adjacent property value. People used it as a thoroughfare from further back in the neighborhood to the bus stop, and often probably for other sorts of business. Once in a while TROSA would come by and clean the lot, though its general state was weed and trash covered. A friend of ours from the neighborhood buried a dead cat that was found on our sidewalk there. In the process he discovered, or was reminded, that even feet down in the dirt it was filled with broken glass, cigarette butts, old tires, bottles, candy wrappers, and even the occasional appliance. The lot had seen the passing of years, and had a lot of stories to tell from the neighborhood. The lot was a mess.
One of my roommates, probably the most contrarian of them all, decided to build a garden, and to build one right there on that lot that we did not own. He spent a week filtering the dirt through the wires of an abandoned shopping cart, just to make it safe to grow seeds in. The plot was maybe 3 feet by 2 feet and framed by discarded white boards. Old bottles were used to help support the raised bed. Thanks to the labor of our housemate, near the end of spring our house was able to enjoy salad greens that were grown in the polluted dirty lot next to our house. It was an unlikely little ray of hope in the midst of abused and trashed land.
I see what my roommate did with that tiny garden plot as embodying the aspects of the kingdom that Jesus describes in the two parables of our gospel lesson today. In the first parable a farmer scattered seed on the ground. The parable says “he does not know how” the seed grows. However, what I suspect the parable is saying is what the farmer actually does know: that he can do only so much in the growth of the seed. It is the work of the earth, sun and rain to produce and bear the fruit of good wheat. The second parable of the mustard seed is meant to be read right in line with the first. In it a tiny seed, contrary to our notions of relative input and output, produces one of the most lush and helpful plants in the garden. The wheat is not so different for, like the mustard shrub and most other plants, it comes from a relatively small beginning. The mustard seed is the same as the wheat because, like the wheat, it grows not on its own but because of reasons not completely understood even by the most learned farmer: the richness of the earth, the heat of the sun, the work of the animals, and the biological inner workings of the seed. There are three aspects of the Kingdom of Heaven illustrated by these parables: faith, hope, and patience. The last one, patience, is probably the hardest one for us to get, as it rests upon hope and faith. It is also one of the most vital and one of the most reflective of who God is. At the end I will return to why I see a tiny garden in the middle of an abandoned lot may be such a patience filled endeavor towards the kingdom of God.
The farmer in the first parable does a completely unremarkable thing. He sows some seeds. It is a normal task for a large, though decreasing, part of the population. It is something that we take for granted as consumers of agricultural products. The farmer plants the seeds, knowing he is not responsible for yielding the whole product and with the knowledge that there are things that he simply cannot control. This is faith. Faith is to know that ultimately someone or something else is in control of the outcome, or in theological language, is omnipotent. We have a part to play – to plant the seeds. The farmer should plant the seeds well, deeply, with sufficient room to grow and in soil that has been properly rotated, lain fallow for a year perhaps, and is respectful of the many systems around it that sustain it. Still, ultimately, no matter what the farmer does the seeds will grow or not grow. There is something bigger.
Faith is a large burden off of our shoulders. Faith in God means that we believe that God’s plans have already been accomplished through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are not in charge of saving the world. Faith means that, guided well in how to plant our seeds, take care of the land we are given, and graciously care for our plots we are not burdened with the tasks of causing the inner workings of the seed to grow. If we live well, work well and play well we do our parts.
However, as the saying goes, even Satan believes in God. So what makes us so different as Christians? I would suggest that the mustard seed provides us with a pretty great response to that – hope. Hope seems to be a dangerous word these days, especially with so many people losing jobs. What, really do we have to hope in? When we daily see women who feel they cannot purchase milk for home, one quarter of this county in poverty, women and men scouring want ads for work, and violence ravaging many nations across the globe, we have to ask: is hope naïve?
It depends on what kind of hope you are talking about. One type of hope will tell us, given an apparently “bad” situation, that those particular bad things will magically get better. This type of hope tends to offer shallow words of comfort to victims of suffering, to downplay hardship, and to insist that there is some solution in grasp if only we can see it. I like to call this type of hope “optimism.” God is not optimistic, God is sure. God has a different type of hope, a theological hope. This is the hope of sitting with people who are broken hearted even if we cannot do a single thing for them. This is the hope that gives when asked, not knowing what really may come of it. This is the hope that befriends those in poverty if only because Jesus told us that is where he would find them. This hope is the planting of a mustard seed. It is a hope of certainty, a hope that when we act faithfully a shrub will emerge. Not any shrub, either, but a beautiful, lush, sheltering shrub that we, (remember the wheat?), may not know how it will grow. Hope is to not only know that you do not have control over the outcome but to delight in it! The outcome belongs to the most gracious, loving and just being that exists: God. This is good news!
Sadly, however, these words – hope and faith – easily become trite words cross-stitched on pillows and thrown around to shallowly try to assuage pain, justify inflicting undue harm, or suppose that being a Christian is only embodied in donating money to the far off hungry while ignoring how our way of life contributes to this poverty. This is what makes the latter portion of the first parable so important. Faith and hope are, in Jesus’ parables, different foundations of patience. Faith and hope tell us why we must be patient and humbles us into remembering that our plans are not God’s plans. Human success is not God’s success and our rewards are not God’s rewards. Patience is ultimately about trusting God to take charge of what God does best.
In the first parable the farmer waits as stalk, head and grain are produced out of the tiny seed that was planted. This is so important. The wheat, and by association the mustard seed, continues to bloom in different ways. The plant is not harvested immediately, nor is it expected to be harvested immediately. The stalk looks little like that the final grain will be! More so, ultimately, the stalk will be discarded, though it was a necessary part of the plant’s growth. What, in the end may seem extra or unneeded was actually fundamental to the product. What is more important to remember is that God is the harvester. We may not know exactly what the final product will look like or when it will arrive, but we know it will be good. Like the farmer, we are asked to wait in patience before the harvest, tilling and caring for the crops.
A young couple a few years ago felt a call to go do mission work in the Middle East in a place that saw regular armed conflict. The couple was traveling in a convoy when they saw the truck behind them blow up. Searching for their friends they came into a village called Rutba that was inhabited by native people. The doctors nursed and cared for the injured people, free of charge. Full of gratitude the young man asked what they could pay the doctor. “Nothing,” the doctor replied, “just tell people about Rutba.” Overwhelmed, the couple returned to the United States and opened a house of hospitality in a racially divided town in North Carolina, encountering the messiness of reconciliation there. The house, now called Rutba house, houses many without homes, facilitates friendship across racial boundaries, offers two free community meals a week to whomever wishes to come, and helped begin a network of these sorts of places all across the country. The doctor in Rutba planted a mustard seed. He was not trying to create peace between the two sides in the war, and he did not kid himself to think that this action did not meant that more of his friends would not be killed later. More of his friends were probably killed by American soldiers. The doctor never saw, and never expected to see, any reward or fruit of his labor. He never saw the Rutba House. What’s more, the Rutba House may not even be the full fruit.
So hope and faith do not necessarily mean searching for quantifiable results, striving for product or improving standard of living - though these things may be important at some point be a part of what we do. Rather, being faithful may just mean getting to know the people around us who are different from us, using the small seeds we have and rejoicing in what God makes of them. Like the five loaves and two fish, or the mustard seed, what comes of what seems like impossibly small resources used in faith can be miraculous. We tend to speak today of ideas of efficiency, size, the best for the most amount of people. In other words, we presume to predict the future based on what we think we may have observed before. This is what science has taught us. We try to do the best, and “best” is defined by our own ideas of what is good at some finite time in the future.
So it may be difficult to justify spending time with people, being with others without a particular task at hand. We have an inclination to only do things that see immediate results. We want to give five dollars to the girl in the grocery line instead of befriending her to wonder why she is struggling financially. We form committees with those “less fortunate” in order to empower and help them, or send the homeless off to shelters. Rarely do we simply sit with and befriend our neighbors simply because they are our neighbors – it goes against every inclination of efficiency and success that our world runs out. But the church, in the words of Mother Theresa, is not called to be successful, but to be faithful. Success will come at some point as a result of being faithful, but it is not that for which we ought to strive. To choose to be with others instead of doing for them plants mustard seeds that are solely based on strong hope and sure faith. They allow us to witness in the most important way: to live so that, were there not a God, our lives would not make sense at all.
This can be overwhelming still – some people forever question whether or not they are being faithful enough without having some sort of graspable result. But we’re not saving the world, and we don’t have to do it all. We should not want to do it all. God calls us to plant just one mustard seed with the confident hope of the coming kingdom – regularly inviting one man to dinner who lives and eats routinely by himself, befriending a man you often see on the street and later finding he has come to live with you and your wife, or planting a minuscule garden in a seemingly barren and wasted plot of dirt.
This is why I see my roommate’s garden as a pretty good in-breaking of the kingdom. The garden was not planted to feed the entire community, or give teenagers something to do in the afternoon – both very good things – but instead did something beautiful, time consuming and good. He transformed a small part of a dirty lot, in some sense against the rules of the neighborhood association, but with the hope that it would be used for good. He had faith that it would grow something, hope that it would come into something good and is still sitting with the patience of what will come of that tiny garden plot, in a week, a year or ten years. One of our Latino brothers uses the phrase “Paciencia Ardiente,” or “ardent patience. This is an eager patience that realizes our integral and loving part in the kingdom, but a kingdom that is ultimately brought about not through our work but through the infinite love, patience, healing and justice of a relational God. This means planting your garden now and loving the garden, the earth, and the people who surround it instead of holding your own expectations. God is not optimistic, God is sure, and God’s wisdom is not human wisdom.
You may be used to hearing faith and hope used with the word love. Love is supreme, but often misunderstood. God loves us with a love that does not expect specific outcomes, but enjoys imagining fruit of goodness. It endures things that do not make sense, and lives with hope even when hope seems completely undeserved. That is why I leave love out, not because it is unimportant but because if you embody faith the size of a mustard seed, patience that humbly endures while still hoping a hope that refuses to shut off the possibility of good, you may be pretty darn close to love. You may be pretty close to the kingdom of God.
