Kingdom seed by kingdom seed (sermon from Sunday, June 17, 2018)

Reading: Mark 6:24-34

(When Jesus does stuff -- like healing the sick, feeding the hungry, forgiving the sinners, and reaching out to include the outcast and forgotten, it is pretty clear what the kingdom of God is, and that it is there if we want it.  But when he talks about it -- especially about how it comes to life, and how we come to live in it, we have to start scratching our heads, and challenging some of our learned notions of how it comes to be, and how we come to live within it.)   

 

I hate it when Japhia gets sick.  I hate it when she gets so sick she has to go the ER to have them help her with the nausea and the vomiting. 

I hate not being able to fix it, and that it will never get better. 

Sometimes I get angry and start blaming.  Sometimes she gets angry and feels depressed. 

It’s hard to feel such powerlessness, which is why the Serenity Prayer seems to be one of the most helpful prayers for us ever to learn, and to learn how to live:

God,

grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change,

the courage to change what I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

Thy will, not mine, be done.

Because powerlessness in the face of certain realities, is one of the realities of life.  And all of us suffer it. 

What is there perhaps in your life that you wish were different, but you know will not be, no matter how much you wish it?  What is there in the world you would change if you could, and you know you can’t?  What is there inside yourself or in someone you love, that you wish wasn’t, but is, and always will be? 

Sometimes we just wish the kingdom of God would come – that final solution, the answer to incompleteness and brokenness.  And whether that means all of us just going to heaven, or heaven coming to be on Earth doesn’t really matter.  Because when hurting comes and powerlessness overwhelms, either way would be better than this.  Just let it come, dear Jesus.  Let the kingdom come.

“So,” Jesus says, “it’s the kingdom you want – the kingdom of God?  Let me tell you then…

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.”

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.”

That’s it?  Seeds sown on the ground, and then waiting for them – trusting in them, to grow and bear fruit?

And a mustard seed?  One of the smallest seeds of all?

I already feel like that, and maybe you do too at times in your life.  Small and just thrown out there into the field of the world, vulnerable to whatever may come.  Cast down and quickly buried and lost in the cares and sorrow of the day.  What kind of help, what kind of kingdom is this? 

Okay … there is something to be said for the mustard seed.  Often mustard is just an invasive weed, something any good farmer spends a lot of time pulling out of his field.  But cultivated as a crop, it actually has value.  Crush the seed, and the oil can be used to flavour special dishes, and it has medicinal power.  The seed and oil are bitter, but they help clear both the senses and the bowels.  Applied to the body, it is a remedy against insect bites, fungus, phlegm, and toothache.  Who knew, that such a little, lowly, often unwanted thing would be of such good?

Kings are likened to cedars – like the great, towering cedars of Lebanon.  And kingdoms, if they are likened to plants at all, are likened to a grove of oaks like the Oaks of Mamre where Abram, our father, is sitting when God came to tell him of the vast and endless people that will come of him. 

And when the kingdom comes?  Surely that has something to do with cities and fortresses strong enough to withstand any threat, with temples grand enough to house God forever, and with weapons powerful enough to eradicate evil.  Isn’t that how we imagine heaven?  And imagine the Second Coming of Jesus to bring the kingdom to be?

And yet … Jesus says, this little plant – a shrub at best, just a few feet high at most, reaching spindly-weak branches out into the world and into the wind, is exactly what gives the safety and support that God’s restless and troubled creatures need. 

This, Jesus says, is what saves the world.  This is what makes life good.  This is the kingdom of heaven on Earth.

The seed of our heart, small as it is, crushed, its oil flowing out with power to heal.

This plant of our faith, our hope and our love, powerless as it may seem to be to make a difference, sown into the field of someone’s pain or of the world’s sorrow, and growing to offer exactly the kind of care, safety, and support that others are in need of.

So when Japhia is really sick, we go the ER together and we ask them to help her with the nausea and vomiting.  And when we come home, day by day and week by week, we keep working at and living into the kingdom of God in the same way that you do – with mustard seed by crushed mustard seed of time and care, and mustard plant by out-reaching mustard plant of humble attention and support. 

Not a final solution.  Not an end once for all to the incompleteness and brokenness of life. 

But the kingdom of God that heals the brokenness of the moment, and offers exactly the gift of peace and support that we and other restless and troubled creatures are in need of.