*Mark 4: 26-34*
Have you ever heard the ancient biblical Greek word lachanon? Well neither had I until this week. It often gets translated as shrub, like we heard in our parable, the mustard seed becomes a great shrub, but really the word translates better to vegetable or herb. And I love this for two reasons. One, it shows how funny Jesus is in Mark, the kingdom of God is a mustard seed, small when sown, but grows up and becomes the greatest vegetable of them all, not a great oak or cedar tree, but a vegetable. Hilarious, I mean how grand can a vegetable be…well unless you’re a zucchini grower, then you know what Jesus is talking about!
But I also love this translation because it is more relatable than a shrub. Like many in this area, I work with vegetables around this time of the year. Vegetable gardening is a big part of my child and adult life, and it was my father who taught me most of everything I know about gardening. Growing up I always saw him in the garden, weeding, hilling, gathering fresh vegetables. I remember one year at the end of the growing season, he was cleaning up the rows of tomatoes in the Fall and there were rotten tomatoes all over the ground. While he was cleaning it up my sister and I were driving around our yard in the car, we were in grade 7 and 8 and practicing our skills behind the wheel, and as we went around in circles my dad began to whip rotten tomatoes at the car. We laughed and tried to outmaneuver the incoming shots, even stopping for just enough time to pick our own tomatoes up and fire them back at him out the car window. Good times in the garden.
As I became an adult, my dad began to teach me how to grow a garden, and naturally, the process always began with seeds. We’d make our rows and then sprinkle the seeds in them and cover them up with dirt and maybe a little water. Then he told me what the most important thing that a gardener must never do in a garden, and even though it’s been years, he still reminds me of this every year. The worst thing someone can do to their garden…is to over-garden it! Every year he reminds me to not go into the garden every day touching plants or moving soil, just let it be. Go grab the weeds when they get big, but let everything have a chance to really grow on its own. The more you try to control it, the more harm you can do to it.
And I think this is one thing that Jesus is trying to teach us as a church with these seed parables. When it comes to growth, we can’t control it. With growing the kingdom of God, we all want to have our hands in it as much as possible, but we forget that growing the kingdom is not our job. We are sowers, the vegetable farmers, planting one zucchini seed at a time. We plant seeds of outreach and safe community spaces, we plant them hoping people will experience God’s love in the world when they participate in them, hoping that maybe they’ll want to join us in this ministry of service and forgiveness, but planters don’t grow the seed, we don’t grow people in faith, only God can do both of those things.
This sower in our first parable goes out to the garden and just tosses seeds, just throws them all over the place, and never returns to them, yet, they still grow. The Sower wasn’t needed for their flourishing, she slept day and night while the plant grew its stalk, head and grain. The seeds sprouted and grew and she didn’t even know how they did it. The earth, creation, produced of itself, life germinated and grew by the grace of God.
And this truth, that the growing of our personal faith and the faith of others who we encounter is in the hands of God, can be a relief. We can spend too much time and thought on outcomes, measuring the growth of all our ministry against what it produces, how many people show up on Sunday, how much money we have in the bank, but this parable reminds us that the success from our work is not dependent on us, nor determined by us, it is dependent on and determined by God. We can’t control or predict the growth of the kingdom of God or understand what success means in this growth, we may at times wonder what growing this kingdom even is or if it’s even possible for God to do, things can look bleak sometimes. But God’s love in this world works in mysterious ways, regardless of our insights or faith, it’s going to grow in some shape or form…
…as long as we continue to scatter our tiny seeds. When we clean up storage or sanctuary, celebrate our youth and support them, when we have a potluck or fundraiser, put pride flags on our doors, look to expand our music ministry, send out weekly emails, offer coffee hour, in all these things and more we are scattering seeds, tossing them in the soil of our community so that God can grow them into something great. We plant and maybe water, and then God grows. That is the faith we are called to. So let us keep scattering these seeds every chance we get.
The following Spring after the tomato fight with my father, we were surprised to see a couple of tomato plants shooting up in random spots around the garden. It was surprising because usually tomato seed won’t survive the winter, but I guess we had thrown them in so many places that some settled deep enough. So it just goes to show you, that if you toss some seeds out there, surprising and wonderful things come from them because there is a loving God taking care of them. May these parables inspire us in both our own lives and in the life of the church to plant many seeds, and may it comfort us in knowing that God will use our resources and effort to produce the greatest of all vegetables. Amen.
-Cynthia Reynolds
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