Sermon for Sunday, June 16, 2024

June 16, 2024

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott


Mark 4:26-34


Most of us are so familiar with the imagery of seeds that we may lose the sense of strangeness that the original parable held, or we may get one seed parable confused with another. I spent part of the week thinking about faith like a mustard seed before I went back to the text and realized that Jesus is comparing God’s kingdom first to the growth of a seed and then to a specific seed, the mustard seed.

Let’s remind ourselves of what Jesus talks about when he talks about the kingdom of God. We might hear this and think that Jesus is talking about Heaven. It’s obvious, right? Various empires rule the earth and God’s kingdom is elsewhere. Why would God hang out here, with floods and fires and fire ants, when God has a better place, a place where we’ll all meet up when we die?

If we look at the word kingdom in the original languages, we get a sense that Jesus talks about something else. A better translation for the word “kingdom” would be reign. Let’s put that word in our Gospel text for today and explore.

Many of us have spent our lives thinking about seeds as a metaphor: a metaphor for faith, a metaphor for potential, a metaphor for growth. So the idea of God’s reign as seed wouldn’t be strange. Jesus presents an appealing picture in some ways. We don’t have to do anything. Unlike other texts, the reign of God is underway, hidden but ready to burst forth. The idea of God in charge, even if we can’t see or understand, is a comforting one when we live in times that baffle us. If we’re tired from trying to make the world a better place, it’s refreshing to hear this message that lets us trust that God’s reign is sprouting, all evidence to the contrary.

The people who first heard Jesus’ message might be a bit more puzzled. Think about the imagery that Ezekial uses, which seems to say that the reign of God will be like the mighty cedars of Lebanon, not a sprouting seed, and certainly not a mustard seed.

Scholar Amy-Jill Levine reminds us that the mustard plant might be a metaphor for the bounteous life we have under the reign of God—she says that mustard would be used as a curative in the ancient world, and it would be available to anyone who needed it. Here we see a different side to the idea that God is at work in the world, that much like the birds who find shelter in the trees that grow out of tiny seeds, we too have resources on earth, resources given to us by a generous creator who has made a vast and diverse creation to give us everything we need.

A resource that we don’t often talk about, a resource that God has given us, is our own hopes and dreams and desires. I was down at Southern seminary this past week for an onground intensive, and one of our presenters talked about God planting dreams in us. It’s another aspect of the garden metaphor that I found powerful this week, and I wanted to share it with us all, as I know that we’re in a period of discernment at Faith Lutheran. In some ways, it mirrors what is happening with the seminary, and with many of our religious institutions.

In my small group this week, I met a pastor who serves at the church in Pomaria, SC where the plan for the seminary was created. The pastor talked about how absurd that plan must have sounded when a bunch of country folks came up with the idea of creating a seminary down the road, but that’s exactly what they did. They had dreams and yearnings and the courage to follow those dreams, even if they didn’t have all of the resources assembled.

Even if we don’t have the courage to follow our own dreams, Jesus assures us that the reign of God is underway and that it’s not too late. Today’s Gospel seems to tell us that we need to leave the seeds alone and get out of the way. Amy-Jill Levine points out that germinating seeds die if exposed to light and air too early. Seeds need time in the dark soil of uncertainty before they can sprout.

The poet in me wants to remind us of what has composed that soil. We might think that it’s too late for our dreams to take root. We might feel the weight of previous dreams that have crumbled to ashes. But farmers and gardeners know that soil is not only something that you buy at the Home Depot. If you have time, you can create good soil by composting. My grandmother had the blackest soil I’ve ever seen, a strip of earth along the building in the back yard, and she built that soil by digging all her kitchen scraps into the ground and letting nature run its course. She didn’t think about the proportion of leaves to vegetable scraps to ash that some recipes online will give you. She didn’t need fancy equipment. Just a strip of ground and the remainders of daily living, and she had soil that was better than anything you could buy.

As I finished my week away, I stopped by the house of a friend for lunch. She showed me her beautiful garden that she’s creating from the backyard that used to be a heap of brambles and broken bricks. As we walked by a weedy patch, she said, “Didn’t I just pull these weeds a minute ago?” I laughed and said, “You’re going to have a long summer.”

All the way home I thought about Jesus and his metaphors. If he was creating a parable for today’s audience, he might say, “The reign of God is like that patch of weeds.” And we would say, “Surely not. Surely the reign of God is more like this beautiful garden I saw in an Instagram post or a magazine article.” We might expect Jesus to tell us how to be the fertilizer in the God’s garden, and instead he’d tell us about the reign of God as a weedy patch that sprouts up regardless of what we are doing.

All we need to do is notice. Or not. The reign of God is right here, right now, Jesus proclaims, about to sprout like a weedy patch of ground. Even if something happens, if the weedy patch of God’s reign gets yanked out by the roots, God’s reign sprouts again, the most persistent of weeds, growing into shrubby growth that will sustain all of creation.