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| This is from my first garden, in my window at Union Theological Seminary. The seeds that were planted there have grown much faster than I dreamed. |
Trust God. Plant
Seeds.
Fred Craddock is a famous preacher
and teacher, whose stories are well-known to preachers for their depth of
understanding. And he tells this one story about coming in to do a funeral for
an old parishioner.[1] After the
funeral, he stayed around talking with folks, until most of the peripheral
people had gone, and it was just family there, including the oldest daughter
Kathryn. Fred says Kathryn was a wild-child. She wouldn’t sit still, she
wouldn’t listen, never paid any attention, was always pushing, shoving, and
breaking things. When he left that old church, he would have said that of all
the people that had been there, if there was one who never heard a word he
said, it was Kathryn.
And
now Kathryn was there sitting with him after the funeral, and she’d long since
grown up. Now with a little bit of gray in her hair, she was an executive at a
telephone company. And Fred leaned over and he said, I’m sorry, it’s such a
tough time.”
And
Kathryn said, “It is tough. When Mother called and said Dad had died of a heart
attack, I was just scrambling for something. Then I remembered a sermon you had
preached on the meaning of the Lord’s Supper”
Fred
said, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” but she proceeded to quote back to him a
piece of this sermon he had given, must have been twenty or thirty years
before. When you plant a seed in someone, you never know when it might sprout.
“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.
This
is our story for today, it’s called the parable of the growing seed. And like
any good parable, it’s a tough nut to crack. They call this parable a kingdom
parable, because it describes what the kingdom of God is like. But this kind of
parable doesn’t describe it with adjectives. The kingdom is described through
story, perhaps because stories hold a lot more within them than what adjectives
could describe. But the meaning of a parable isn’t always clear at first sight.
It pulls you in, forces you to ask the questions, to search for the answers.
What does it mean that the kingdom of God is like if someone scattered seed on
the ground, and it grew, but they knew not how?
Rev.
Craddock tells another story, of a summer camp he went to one week.[2]
And there was this director there, and he was so committed to everything being
the most meaningful thing that had ever been. The campfires were so meaningful.
The trees were meaningful. Even the squirrels and the pinecones were
meaningful. And from the beginning of the week he had been telling the kids
that Thursday, they were going to have a special breakfast. It was going to be
a meaningful breakfast, almost like a communion service. It was going to be so
meaningful, it would be like being “in church having communion with Jesus by
the side of the Sea of Galilee.”[3]
On
Thursday morning they all shuffled in, unsure of what to do with the gravitas
of this breakfast that they were about to have. One boy even dressed up. Where
they’d been noisy and raucous all week, this breakfast was quiet. You could
hear forks scraping against the plates as they pushed their food around. What
do you do with meaningful eggs? And eventually someone got up, and then another
one, and they all rushed out. The director was crushed. Rev. Craddock tells
this story, and then he said, “You know what I think? If he had trusted what
was prayed and sung and said, like a seed that carries its own future in its
bosom, if he had just put it out there and left it alone, I daresay that as
they loaded the blankets and things into the bus on Saturday, the meanest kid
in the group would have said, “You know, this has been more church than church
to me.”
“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.
In the summer
of 1994, Janet was the choir director at First Presbyterian Church in
Cartersville, GA and she was waiting on the last choir member to arrive at
church so they could leave to go to Montreat for the Worship and Music
Conference.[4] The last
choir member was Susan, who at the time was a part of the ministry of
hospitality. She arrived half an hour late because she’d been taking a homeless
person to the shelter in Rome. As they got on the bus, Susan said, “You know,
we sure need a homeless shelter in Cartersville.” Janet didn’t think anything
of it at the time, they were running late for a long drive, and she had a lot
to worry about, but the seed had been planted.
Well,
they got to Montreat, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, which
is in my humble opinion one of the most gorgeous places on God’s green earth,
and the worship was wonderful, and in the midst of that week Janet heard God’s
call. “You need to open a shelter for the homeless in Cartersville.”
When
she came home she shared it with her husband and a few friends, to see if it
was something that could happen or if it was just crazy. They were supportive,
and one of those friends invited her to go with him and see the county
commissioner. And the seed began to sprout.
The
county gave them a little run-down house that the church and community helped
fix up. They formed a board. Eventually they found a new home and a whole new
building was built there, and now it shelters more than 30 people who need
rest, help, and hope. Susan didn’t know that she had planted a seed in Janet’s
heart. She didn’t know how it grew from an idea into a hope and into a
ministry. But as they walked into that new building everyone could see that the
harvest had come.
“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.
So
what do we do with this kingdom of God whose keys have been given to us even
though we only know it in parables and stories? We’ve been given the task of proclaiming that the kingdom of
God is at hand, but we feel like we don’t know what we’re doing. Like if
someone gave me a hammer and some nails, and said, “Go build me a city” I think
this may be a part of what the disciples were going through at this point in
the story. They had tasted glory, they had seen miracles, healings, heard words
that spoke to their soul. But they’d also been with Jesus as he was rejected by
his family, chased out of the cities, and hunted by the authorities. They
realized that this kingdom-building was not as much of a cakewalk as they had
imagined. It would be neither quick nor painless. But here Jesus tells them not
to worry. God is doing all the heavy lifting. The seeds that they plant will
grow even if they don’t understand how. It is a matter of “finding the right
soil and trusting that the seed will grow.”[5]
So what do we do with this kingdom,
of which we’ve seen just a glimpse, had just a taste, heard just a whisper. We
sow seeds. We scatter the word all around us, on the path, on rocky soil, among
the thorns, and in places where it will take root. A healing touch. A word of
comfort. Refusing to give up on a flawed friend. An unexpected card. A prayer.
Sharing an idea. We plant the seeds of love, hope, and promise. And then,
though we don’t know how, God takes the seeds which we have planted and raises
them up.
This is the good news. We have been
charged with the salvation of our world. We’ve been sent out to shine the light
of Christ even in the darkest places. We’ve been charged with the
transformation of this community of people into the body of Christ. And when it seems like it’s too much to
bear, more than we can handle, we’re given this. Jesus came down to save us. We
were created in God’s image, that God’s light be our light and shine through us
on the way. The Holy Spirit transforms us into a Pentecost people, filling us
with the words to say, the actions to take, the places to go. We plant the
seeds, and trust that God will raise them up, and the harvest will come. For as
Paul told the Romans, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”
“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.
[1] Craddock,
Fred. Craddock Stories, St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001, p. 30.
[2] Craddock,
Fred. Craddock Stories, St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001, p. 31.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Smith, Ted.
“Planting Seeds” Sermon on Mark 6:24-34. First Presbyterian Church,
Cartersville, GA, June 14th,
2009.
[5] Myers, Ched.
Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus: Orbis
Books: Maryknoll, NY, 2008.
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