This sermon was delivered at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church on Sunday, June 17. Audio will be available in the following week at stmatthewsmn.org. You can read the lessons here.
When I was in second grade, our family moved from a tiny student apartment to a little house in Nashville, Tennessee. The house had a small raised vegetable patch and a perfect place to cultivate compost, and so that year, my mother decided to plant a vegetable garden.
When spring came, we planned and sowed careful rows of seeds—beans and carrots, tomatoes and leafy greens; all kinds of wonderful vegetables for us to feast on come fall.
We carefully watered and tended our garden, and soon shoots began to appear.
But, we noticed—some of the shoots weren’t in careful rows, and didn’t look like beans, or tomatoes, or leafy greens—they weren’t weeds, though—that much was clear, and as they grew we realized, much to all of our surprise—that they were pumpkins.
And, these pumpkin plants were on a mission.
They snaked all over the garden; up the wall of the garage, over the raised brick beds, across the back sidewalk—By late fall, they were growing huge orange orbs hidden underneath wide, leafy branches, and those branches kept on growing, eventually even reaching their spirally tendrils across the yard and towards the house.
None of us could figure out where they came from, until, one fine day—it dawned on my mother:
the family had made jackolanterns at Halloween the previous year, and the hollowed out pumpkin pulp had gone into the compost. The compost, spread all over the garden, had actually been filled with well-nourished seeds.
Whenever I think of the parable of the mustard seed, this is the story that I remember.
Jesus often talks about the kingdom of God, or the work of faith, like caring for a plant: pruning a vine, or sowing a seed, or harvesting grain. And sometimes he refers to the careful work of a caretaker, but sometimes he talks about the Kingdom of God like a kind of plant that needs no tending—the kind of plant that is unstoppable, inexplicable, uncontrolled by even the best human efforts. The parable of the mustard seed is one such story.
But–what is a parable?
We toss this word around all the time—so much so, that we may assume that we—or others—know what it means. But we are not living in first century Palestine, and so the meaning of the word may not be immediately clear to us.
A parable is a story—a metaphorical story—that can be taken at face value, but can be explored beyond just face value.
My favorite way of understanding what a parable is comes from Godly Play.
In the Godly Play circle, parables are presented in golden boxes. Before the story begins, the box is closed—there are no identifying features and no way of knowing what is inside. It’s supposed to be this way—a parable needs to be opened with intent.
The storyteller explains to the circle that the story is precious, like gold. The box is shaped like a present, and it is a gift– a gift given long ago, that we already have received. The box has a lid, because parables are complicated—they are sometimes closed to us, and we cannot understand what they say, no matter how much we try.
A parable is less of a thing and more of a practice—not a lesson to memorize with a clear answer, but a story that does work on us so that we might grow closer to God.
Jesus speaks to us in parables about God, because God is known not like one thing, a person, or an idea—but like a story, that you can keep coming back to and see new things.
So: Today we have two parables to play with, the more well known ‘parable of the mustard seed’, and a less well known story—a parable of a hidden seed.
What pieces of God are we being invited to know through these stories?
There are many sides to these parables, but what I see when I approach them this time, is the way in which the Kingdom of God is presented as something at work without our intervention—perhaps even in spite of us.
The hidden seed germinates and grows into a full harvest without our knowledge, and the mustard seed is abundant without tending:
Mustard, in the ancient world, was famous for that—it sprouted almost immediately, and ran wild. It was a medicinal plant, highly useful, but very easy to cultivate—any joe could grow it, and any joe could pull off a few leaves to use for healing.
When I hear these stories, I hear a promise that the Kingdom of God is alive and well, even when we have not willed it to be so—even in spite of our propensity for generating evil.
This does not mean that we’re off the hook, or that we ought to be obstinate against the commandment to love—certainly Mustard is most useful when actually cultivated, and grain most useful when it is actually harvested—but in these stories, lie a promise that the Kingdom of God cannot be stopped by our failings.
And the news is ripe, these days, with all of our failings.
Here at St. Matt’s, we’ve been asked to think about where we might see parables in our own modern context.
This week I invite you into this practice of parable—to notice the stories that God is telling us, and to play with them.
And I want to leave you with an example of my own—I hope, to offer you a sense of hope, strength, and perhaps even comic relief, as we all try to learn how to live into the Way of Jesus in these demanding times.
The Kingdom of God is like… a raccoon that decided to climb a skyscraper.
And, though this raccoon represents a rather undesirable member of the urban wildlife community, it’s staggering climb of twenty stories attracted the love and attention of the entire world, brought the internet to a standstill, and all of humanity– for a moment–became inspired by it’s strange and unbelievable tenacity.
What story is God telling you?
The featured photo is not the actual MPR raccoon, because those photos belong to someone. 🙂 This is a public domain photo from wikimedia.
