Proper 6B, June 13, 2021

O Startling God, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Today we are celebrating a harvest in the Church in the baptism of Baker Chapman Ryan, and we are celebrating Deacon Sunday! Baker is right here with his family and friends. Our own deacon, Bob Greiner, is guest preaching at Trinity Church in Melrose this morning, but he’ll join us for a Chapel Camp gathering on Zoom at 12:30 to talk about the blessing of diaconal ministry. We welcome back Isaac Everett, who is serving as our deacon, although he is a priest. Priests and bishops are always deacons first.

We are celebrating the spread of the Realm of God, which is, as Jesus says, as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and wake up day after day, while the seed would sprout and grow without the sower knowing how. Then one day the grain is ready to be harvested. This is such a day, a harvesting of growth from seeds that were planted. This is a day to celebrate the growth that happened while we slept (or didn’t sleep while parenting young children)! None of us, not even the smartest scientist in the world, knows exactly how it happens. This is a day to celebrate the mystery of life and love that comes to fruition in the Realm of God.

For our celebration we have one of my favorite readings from the Gospel of Mark. I just love the baffling Zen-koan nature of Jesus’ teachings in the earliest Gospel, and I love Mark’s aside: “With many such parables he spoke the word to them…but he explained everything in private to his students” (aka his disciples). Left unwritten, however, is the private explanation of the riddles, which is sad because they’re hilariously funny, although the jokes haven’t translated well. According to Mark, Jesus was a very funny man. Humor was an essential tool in his medicine bag. The problem is that, two-thousand years later and more than five-thousand miles over, nobody gets the joke. I know that because no-one guffawed with laughter when Isaac read the part about the mustard seed.

Part of the problem is that many of us have been trained not to laugh in church. It’s too bad, because a lot of what happens in church is really very funny. This parable of the mustard seed is a great case study of a funny story turned into a sentimental and sweet, church-school lesson about how tiny people, tiny deeds, and tiny faith can grow into something great. It’s not that that lesson isn’t true; it’s just not all there is to the story. 

I’ve never been much of a gardener, and so the idea that throwing seed on the ground (the word here is more like tossing than planting) and then having it all ready to harvest because of the work of the earth, after I did nothing but sleep and rise every day, sounded pretty good to me for a long time. The word in Greek about how the seeds grow is automatay – automatically. And since I’ve never tried to plant and harvest a crop, the idea of attracting all the birds of the air to a field where food was growing never struck me as particularly problematic until much later.  I know, however, that some of you are marvelous gardeners, so perhaps that’s why you don’t laugh when you hear this lesson. It’s really not that funny if you are a careful, hardworking grower of food.

So it’s not that those church-school lessons were all wrong; they were just much too tame and careful and utterly devoid of mischief (because really, what parent wants their children learning mischief at church?). I can’t ever let mention of a mustard seed go by without quoting the Roman historian Pliny the Elder. He wrote about mustard in his first-century encyclopedia, Natural History: “Mustard…with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health.” In fact, according to Pliny there was hardly an ailment that mustard could not cure. Pliny continues in his entry about mustard, “It grows entirely wild…[and] when it has been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it.” [1]  And here’s the other thing about mustard. The Mishnah, an ancient middle-eastern almanac for faithful Israelites, points out that it was unlawful to plant mustard in a garden, and it was dangerous to let it grow in a field. 

Perhaps this is a clue that Jesus’ hearers don’t have fields to work in and maybe that they resented folks who did. Perhaps this is a clue that Jesus is teaching something subversive here. Jesus is saying that the Realm of God is like a seed that grows into shrubbery – a big, scrubby bush, which takes over where it is not wanted, that quickly gets out of control and attracts undesirables who will make a big mess. You know the birds of the air make big messes right? Jesus is saying that the Realm of God has blatant disregard for order or common sense, or for the expectations of law-abiding people. (Listen well, Episcopalians.) But it’s not any old weed that he used for an example of the Realm of God; it’s this amazing source of healing power, this mustard! It’s like kudzu. That menacing weed kudzu also has powerful medicinal qualities. The Realm of God, the rule of love, is scandalous, wild, and incredibly healing. It will take over and turn your world upside down. (Or maybe it will turn your world back right-side up.) 

It’s like that sappy old Burt Bacharach song from 1973. The chorus goes, “The world is a circle without a beginning and nobody knows where it really ends. Everything depends on where you are in the circle that’s spinning around, half of the time you are upside down.” Bob Greiner will be so happy that I sang a show tune in my sermon! In the Gospels, parables that are meant to overturn, deconstruct, and transform using humor in the most subversive ways. These ways can be frightening if we are satisfied with the way things are in the world; but if we desire something more than the status quo of scarcity and fear and limited justice we’re regularly offered, then maybe this promise about the realm of God, the rule of love, offers hope. This hope isn’t just meant to cheer us up; it is meant to move us to action. [2]

What are we meant to do in response to this teaching of hope? Well, I can think of at least three things. The first is laugh. You know, loosen up a little, when Jesus tells his funny stories about the chaotic and amazing ways that the love of God works. In the 16th century Martin Luther wrote, “If you truly understood a single gram of wheat you would die of wonder.” I think that maybe if we truly understood a single mustard seed we would die of laughter! The joke is on you Baker Chapman Ryan; the joke is on you, deacons, and the joke is on the rest of us, and laughter, like mustard, is very good medicine. The realm of God is a complete and glorious mess and it’s all around us.

The second thing to do follows the acknowledgement of the glorious mess of God, and that is renew a practice of humility. Strip away whatever pretense has accumulated in our hearts lately. Remind ourselves that we don’t have the foggiest idea how life and growth really happen. Even if you are a medical doctor or PhD biologist or chemist or physicist, there’s still a lot of mystery. “Remember that God is God, and we are not God,” as the late Bishop Barbara Harris liked to say. Economic power is not God. Military might is not God. And never forget, the Church is not God. We can’t control our own life or the lives around us, really. If anyone doubted that before, the last fifteen months have made it clearer. We can choose to co-operate with God’s grace or not. We can be loving and generous in the midst of the mess, or not; that is our choice. I urge us to be loving and generous more and more.

The third thing that we are meant to do in response to this teaching is harvest what we did not plant or water; we are meant to go right away when the grain is ripe, when the time is right, and gather some of the abundance of God’s grace. We do have work to do. We are also meant to notice, to take stock of those places where God’s realm is infiltrating, where hope is growing like a weed, where God’s love is sneaking in or spreading out. We are meant to gather and celebrate the fruit of the harvest.

There’s a famous reflection written for Archbishop Oscar Romero, which is often referred to as a prayer. It was in our bulletins for the celebration of my institution as your rector many years ago. It’s good to remember whether one is newly or oldly baptized in the Church. It goes: [3]

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view. The kin-dom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the kin-dom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything. This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities. [I would add that we harvest what we did not grow.] We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for [God]’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

So here’s your homework, Emmanuel Church: laugh, practice humility, and harvest what we have not planted or watered. Gather some of the abundance of God’s grace, right away!

[1] John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 73.
[2] Thanks to Davie Lose at www.workingpreacher.org for this lovely insight in his blog post “Mission Possible,” for June 10, 2012.
[3] Composed by Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw in November 1979 for a celebration of departed priests. It is often mistakenly attributed to Romero (and I have made this mistake before.)