Sermons for the Month
Power-Packed Seeds and Gardeners
DATE: June 18th, 2006
SERVICE: Second Sunday After Pentecost
TEXT: Mark 4:26-34“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
There have been some nearly perfect June days this past week, which makes me hopeful for our VBS week that begins tomorrow. This is the time of year when new life is bursting out all around us. On Tuesday I drove to Columbus early in the morning for a workshop at the Seminary. It was such a beautiful day with the blue sky above me and the fields in various stages of cultivation beside me. (Being from Nebraska originally, I always notice the progression of the crops.) The median was blanketed with yellow, white and purple flowers, and everywhere I looked another shade of green was presented to me. What a day! The words of today's Gospel lesson came to mind as a sped past a field of wheat just beginning to flourish. "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seek would sprout and grow, one does not know how." All that new life is exploding around us, and we human beings do play a role in making it happen, but it's a limited one. Let's track the progress of my zinnias. Remember, I showed you those tiny seeds during a sermon earlier this spring? Well, I dug a little trench, and then carefully sowed the seeds - alternating between three different packages for the sake of variety. I gently covered them with dirt and mulch, added water and waited. What happened next was not in my hands. The tiny seedlings poked their heads through the earth; it's a funny thing, though. There are bare spots, where the seeds did not germinate. And, in other areas it's as if they are competing to grow. Why that happened, I can't explain. My next job will be to thin them, and water them, but beyond that their growth and their flowering is not in my hands. Who knows if I'll have 6-feet-tall plants and abundant blooms again this year? Well, Jesus is saying that the Kingdom of God is like those zinnias. Just as the earth produces in a process that we do not fully understand, so also God grows the Kingdom in a way that is mysterious to us. Remember that phrase from the Gospel, "the earth produces of itself"? The sense of that is that the seed grows because of an inner force which the gardener or the farmer did not give it. That plant has a life-force that was put there by God. It's the same with God's Kingdom; we have a part to play, but it is God who causes the Kingdom to flourish. And, God works in unlikely ways to create that growth, which is why Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to the smallest of seeds. Who would think that such a tiny, inconsequential seed could grow into a substantial shrub? Likewise, who would think that a group of uneducated people, those who had been identified as sinners and outcasts, and of all things - women - would keep the Good News of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus alive and growing? How could such inconsequential people make the Christian faith flourish in a substantial way? The answer is obvious - like the seed they had a life-force that was put there by God and that brought about the harvest of faith in unexplainable ways. It's interesting to me that we can look back at them and nod our heads in agreement with this idea; but somehow it's a bit more difficult to apply the principle to ourselves. Maybe that's because we know too much and are overwhelmed by what we know. The workshop that I went to on Tuesday was called, "Loving Our Neighbors as Ourselves: Christian Discipleship in the Global Community." The opening presentation was on U.S. foreign policy, and there were sessions about the war in Iraq, free trade and global development to address poverty. It was one of those situations in which the magnitude of the issues sets your head spinning. I felt that the best presentation of the day was on the genocide in Darfur - which is in the Sudan in Africa. It's a situation about which I knew little. Now I know more, but I do not know what to do about it. The fact that 400,000 people have died since March of 2003 at the hands of a violent militia - who are attempting to wipe out a particular ethnic group - is astounding. Add to that the fact that 1.9 million are displaced within the country, another 210,000 have fled to neighboring Chad for refuge and 2.4 million are in dire need of food and it's absolutely overwhelming. The government of Darfur supports the militia, probably financially, but certainly by looking the other way and by limiting outside troop support and humanitarian aid. This is the type of atrocity so many have proclaimed would never happen again following the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, or the massacre at Srebrenica - to name just a few. (1) So, what does all that have to do with us, and the Gospel lesson which compares the Kingdom of God to a seed? Well, it so happens that the Kingdom of God does not just exist in Akron, Ohio or even in the United States. And, it's also true that although places like Darfur are far away and seem to have nothing to do with us, the people there are our sisters and brothers in the human family. When we allow their plight to become part of our consciousness - even though it's uncomfortable and do not dismiss them, when we pray for them and donate money on their behalf and write our congressional representatives saying that we are concerned, we are planting the seed of the Kingdom. Who knows what the growth of that seed will be? It may be difficult for us to see how it flourishes, and to trust that God can use us. Yet, we play a part in the Kingdom of God growing into world-changing dimension. I think we struggle with this - at least I do - because it's difficult for us see beyond what merely is. Yet, we understand how this happens in secular realm; people dream and unprecedented things happen. Some of the sermon material I was reading for today mentioned that the competition that Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, should be concerned about is not other computer giants. Instead, it's the kids working in a garage that come up with something new - something beyond what is - and then knock him off his perch. After all, that what he did 25 years ago to IBM. (2) Can we apply that kind of visioning to bringing the Kingdom of God more fully among us? Oh, I can do that with my zinnias; it's easy for me to believe that those little green sprouts will grow into tall, strong plants with bright flowers. But, to see us, the people of Faith Lutheran Church, really making a difference in the world, that's more difficult. It's challenging because we so easily forget that the one who puts power in a tiny seed also puts power in the church and in us. So, whether the seed is being planted on behalf of people in Fairlawn, or West Akron, or far away Darfur, the important thing is that we cast a vision for how it might grow. W we risk to do the planting, all the time trusting in the power of God within us, and then we step back and let in grow by the grace of God, we know not how. There will be a harvest, the parable promises; when it comes we will wipe the dirt off our hands and give the glory to the master gardener. (1) "Never Again, Again? The Situation in Darfur and the Faith Community's Response", presentation by Tara L. Van Ho, June 13, 2006, Trinity Lutheran Seminary.
(2) SermonWriter for Proper 6B (June 18), pg. 8, www.sermonwriter.comAMEN