Planting Seeds

Beginning last weekend and continuing through to the end of November, the lectionary will have us reading from Mark’s Gospel. (There is one slight digression: four weeks in late July and August we will jump over to the sixth chapter of John, where Jesus explores the metaphor of what it means to call him “the Bread of Life.”) For now, though, as we pick up on this journey with Mark, it may be helpful for preachers and congregants alike to recall where we are in his third gospel, the shortest and the earliest one written.

Mark does not begin with a birth narrative. Instead, the opening scene is in the Judean wilderness, where we are introduced to John the Baptist and his diet of locusts with wild honey. We meet Jesus when he comes out to the Jordan to be baptized by John. Immediately afterward, Jesus is driven by the Spirit further into the wilderness to be tested. When he returns, he calls the first disciples, performs an exorcism in the synagogue, and then heals a leper. All that in chapter one!  

Then he returns home to Capernaum and immediately there is controversy with the religious authorities, followed by more healing, more callings, and more conflict. By the end of chapter three Jesus has re-defined family in a way that is dramatically counter-cultural, not only to the norms of the culture of his day but of ours as well. Those who would speak for Jesus about “family values” (or say their congregation is "just like a family") need to pay close attention to what he does and does not say in those verses. In the Kingdom of God, according to Jesus, “family” is not one mom and one dad and 2.2 children living in the suburbs. “Who is my sister and brother and mother and father?” Jesus asks. The answer is simple and concise: “the one who does God’s will.” 

Christian family values are not founded on allegiance to tribe or family lineage or ideology. The new community that Jesus calls together is bound together by the waters of Baptism. For the new family that is created by those who put Jesus at the center of their lives, “water is thicker than blood.” Baptized  with Christ and in Christ, we become sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers to one another. 

In chapter four of Mark, Jesus begins to teach his disciples about this Kingdom of God. Through the healings and exorcisms we’ve already seen signs of that Kingdom. But now Jesus turns to stories—parables of the Kingdom. That is important. He doesn’t offer a catechism or a creed or dogma that defines who is in and who is out of this new family he is forming. He doesn’t say you must read the Bible this way or that way, or how the church will be organized as an institution. Rather, he tells parables that challenge anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear to imagine the world in new ways. He tells stories that give us “hints and guesses,” and which are always in need of being interpreted anew in each generation.

I suspect that most of us can go weeks and even months without using the word “eschatological” in our vocabularies. But it's a word Christians should know. Eschatology is simply talk about the end times. Whether or not we use the vocabulary it’s important to know that most of us probably do think eschatologically when we think about the Kingdom of God: i.e. we focus on the end result. We focus on the end of the world as we know it. What will the Kingdom look like? Will the streets be paved with gold? Will the lion and the lamb lie down together, and a little child lead them? What will it look like when every tear is wiped away, and they study war no more, and they do not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain? What will it look like when Christ is all in all and the world is restored to unity and every knee bends and proclaims Jesus as “king of kings and lord of lords?” The mystery of faith is that Christ has died/Christ is risen/Christ will come again. Eschatology is about that last part—about the end (and the fulfillment) of human history.

Yet we live “in the meantime.” We live with wars and rumors of wars. We live with violence in the land of the Holy One and in Jerusalem, the city of "shalom/salaam." We live in a nation where the divide between rich and poor just keeps growing. We live within a context where not only are the systems of racial injustice still intact but overt acts of racial violence and hatred and bigotry are on the rise. We seem to have reached a new place in the fight against COVID, at least in the United States. But globally we cannot un-see the images coming out of India and other parts of this fragile earth, our island home. We live with these deep divisions. We have become used to polarization of a society that isn’t comfortable with “maybe” or “I don’t know.” And so it feels like a long way from “peace on earth and good will toward all.” In fact we live at a time when the future even of this good earth is in peril. 

So how do we live in such a world as followers of Jesus: with hope and with patience and with perseverance? That question is always before us: what does it mean to be an Easter people who carry with us a vision of the Kingdom and yet not live in denial about all the hurt and pain and suffering of the world? What does it mean to live faithfully between “Christ is risen!” and “Christ will come again?”

This, I think, is the context in which we need to see and hear these two parables about seeds in the reading appointed for this coming Sunday, from Mark 4:26-34. It’s relatively easy to paint a picture of the Kingdom of God when it comes to fruition - when it comes to an eschatological reality. But how do we develop the kinds of eyes that can see the seeds of that reality already in our midst today? Where is the Kingdom already present?

I’ve been wearing glasses since second grade for near-sightedness. I can still remember the feeling on the first day of wearing those glasses that there was a whole world out there I hadn’t been able to see before. Right around the time I turned forty (now eighteen years ago!) my optometrist told me that I needed progressive lenses; trifocals. I had been wondering why the font in the newspaper had gotten so tiny, and my arms were getting shorter, but I was still shocked at this news and in denial for about a year. I finally agreed, however, that this was a necessary change. I was now not only near-sighted but also far-sighted. The joys of aging! 

I think that the parables of Jesus are above all else about helping us to see the world from another angle, through another set of lenses. Most of us hear “Kingdom of God” just as the people of Jesus’ day did. We tend to look for the big things, for the things you can’t miss like a mighty sequoia or redwood in our midst. (The Biblical equivalent is the cedar of Lebanon—but that’s all it means—something big and unmistakable and grand.) Yet if our glasses are just for seeing big things far away, it’s very easy to miss the mustard seeds that are already in our midst—right up close. And I think that Jesus is trying to get his disciples—then and now—to look at the world close up.

The parable of the mustard seed is not only hope for the future, but about patience and endurance for the present. The theologian’s word is to speak of the Kingdom as present “proleptically” which is an even better word to use than eschatological if you want to impress people. But in the end its meaning is quite simple: for there to be peace on earth it has to begin with me and with you. For us to deal with the original sin of racism in this nation, it has to begin with people (especially white people) who are willing to help dismantle racism. 

When I served as rector in Holden from 1998-2013, every second Wednesday of every month that parish served a meal at a place called the Mustard Seed in Worcester. Interesting name, eh? To do that work, somebody had to go and buy those super large cans of baked beans and a whole bunch of frozen hot dogs and somebody else cut those hot dogs up and opened those cans of beans and stirred the pot and put them in the oven. And another bunch of somebodies would stop by and drop off desserts, and somebody else would come by to pick up the cooked beans and franks and drives them into Worcester where somebody else had dropped off the salads and then they would plop it on the plates of a whole bunch of somebodies with real names and real lives and their own stories so that they can put food into an empty belly. And then the pots would go back to St. Francis and somebody would scour them out and put them away. I got to witness this happen again and again. Occasionally I'd find a way to go in with them but as the rector, I had a Wednesday night service and a lot of the time I was there I had little kids. It was our ministry but it existed before I arrived and as far as I know it still continues; it was not reliant on the clergy.

And here is the thing: on Thursday night another congregation did the same thing in their own way, and on Friday night another congregation did. Little tiny seeds—barely visible—especially if you don’t know where to look. Because the Worcester newspaper was, for the most part, not all that interested in covering what happens at a place like the Mustard Seed.

You don’t feed the world by waving a magic wand. You do it one plate of beans and franks at a time. And maybe along the way someone begins to ask a question about the roots of hunger. That's when they will no longer call you a saint, but perhaps a communist: when someone wonders what it would take to deal with underlying causes of poverty and to begin to make that arduous journey from charity toward economic justice. 

In the moments when such questions are asked, and changes are worked for, the Kingdom of God is very near indeed. Indeed, wherever seeds are being planted and nurtured, the Kingdom of God is truly in our midst. It’s already present—here and now—even if the harvest remains in the future. It's present proleptically, and that truly is good news. It sustains us in doing the work God has given us to do today. It means that we must not allow ourselves the "luxury" of becoming paralyzed by the enormous scope of the challenges that face us, but that like that guy walking along the beach and throwing the starfish back in the ocean we do what we can. We do not lose heart. We entrust the future to God, trusting in the shade of the mustard bush where the birds of the air come to find peace and refreshment. The work we are given to do is to keep hope alive, and to not lose heart. Our job is to keep on planting seeds. 

I imagine it was hard for the first hearers of Mark’s Gospel to be patient and hopeful: a tiny, fragile community standing against entrenched imperial power. Yet they persevered. We are the beneficiaries of their perseverance.  I know that it is hard for us, increasingly aware that the mainline churches are sidelined from the power structures of our society. Yet maybe that isn’t all bad news. Maybe it is as a tiny, fragile community that we are better able to bear witness to the love of God we have known in Jesus Christ. Maybe our work is to keep on tending to the Kingdom in mustard-seed like ways here and now, so that our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren enjoy the fruits of our labor.