Church of the Holy Spirit, Vashon June 13, 2021 Mark 4:26-34
Rev. Jeffrey Gill
Jesus, as we know, often spoke in parables – little stories or word pictures – and his parables invariably spoke to everyday realities, common things in everyday experience, but used them to point to an alternative reality that he called the kingdom of God, or the reign of God. Today’s gospel is a good example of that.
“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…”
Many of us grew up in the heyday of labor-saving devices and commercialized agriculture that took us away from this most basic of realities. It was just so much more convenient to buy corn already prepared and packaged in a nice little can you could just open up and heat in a pan, than it was to go through all the hard work of planting, weeding, watering, and waiting for it to come to harvest, then cutting it down, shucking it, cutting it off the cob and cooking it. Or buying bread already baked that meant you no longer had to grow the grain, harvest it, grind it into flour and bake it yourself.
Now there’s much to be said, of course, for the efficiencies in dividing up the labor where some plant, others harvest, others do the grinding, and still others do the baking, etc., where we each enter the means of production at different points along the way. But somewhere along that spectrum we seem to have reached the absurd situation whereby generations of children grow up believing that food comes from the grocery store in boxes and cans – and barely understand, if at all, where food actually comes from. I hope that’s less true here on Vashon than in most communities.
The first parish I served as rector was in a semi-rural community a half-hour north of Boston. We developed a wonderful relationship with an urban parish not far away, and part of that involved a shared community garden where kids who grew up in the city could actually come and get their hands in the dirt, planting, weeding, watering, waiting and watching as their labor bore fruit in the wonderful produce that sprang from the earth, and eventually ended up on their tables. It was a revelation to many of them! Eating food that they had actually played a role in growing! No cans, no boxes!
It’s also the case that due to the miracles of modern communication and transportation, we can have just about anything that grows anywhere on our tables any time. We’ve grown accustomed to eating fruits and vegetables out of season, since if they’re not growing here, they probably are somewhere in South America or another part of the world. Shipping companies are happy to help us with that! No matter the cost to the environment of transporting food around the globe.
So many of our labor-saving devices and our expertise in logistics have acculturated us to a separation between our bodies and the earth from which we all come. Too often we see them as separate realities. We fail to appreciate that our lives are one with and depend upon the health of the earth with its complex and endlessly fascinating (and fragile!) systems of productivity and regeneration. We see it in the failure of so many to take climate change seriously and imagine that it doesn’t really have much to do with us and will all just kind of sort itself out on its own.
As a people we have lost our sense of connection between those little seeds and our lives.
Wendell Berry in his book of poems titled The Mad Farmer said that “Sowing the seed, my hand is one with the earth. Wanting the seed to grow, my mind is one with the light. Hoeing the crop, my hands are one with the rain. Having cared for the plants, my mind is one with the air. Hungry and trusting, my mind is one with the earth. Eating the fruit, my body is one with the earth.” 1
There’s an interesting piece of evolutionary biology related to seeds that just might help us understand what Jesus’ intention is in this little parable. There was a time in our primordial past when plants were propagated primarily through spores. But things really changed dramatically when flowers came into being. Loren Eisley describes this in an essay called How Flowers Changed the World.
“… the true flowering plants… grew a seed in the heart of a flower, a seed whose development was initiated by a fertilizing pollen grain independent of outside moisture. But the seed, unlike the developing spore, is already a fully equipped embryonic plant packed in a little enclosed box stuffed full of nutritious food. Moreover, by featherdown attachments, as in dandelion or milkweed seed, it can be wafted upward on gusts and ride the wind for miles; or with hooks it can cling to a bear’s or a rabbit’s hide; or like some of the berries, it can be covered with a juicy, attractive fruit to lure birds, pass undigested through their intestinal tracts and be voided miles away.
“The ramifications of this biological invention were endless. Plants traveled as they had never traveled before. They got into strange environments heretofore never entered by the old spore plants or still pine-cone-seed plants. The well-fed, carefully cherished little embryos raised their heads everywhere. Many of the older plants with more primitive reproductive mechanisms began to fade away under this unequal contest. They contracted their range into secluded environments. Some, like the giant redwoods, lingered on as relics; many vanished entirely.” 2
Seeds make it possible for plants to replicate themselves far and wide by being transported through the air, or on the backs of animals, or in their intestines, spreading the gift of life to places far and away, and making the earth the fertile and regenerative place that it is.
Jesus spoke of seeds – like the tiny mustard seed, for example – as signs of God’s reign. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
God’s reign begins small, within the heart of each and every one of us, and spreads and grows as the way of love becomes the way of life, in our homes and families, our communities, through our participation in their life, and finally in our world.
We are often tempted to believe that things are going backward rather than forward, and that things are worse than they have ever been. And yes, we can all point to ways in which our world, and yes even up close in our own communities and homes, things are not as we would like, and certainly do not reflect the values of the reign of God. Inequality on a global scale, racial and economic injustices persist, and there is so much more work to be done for us to even begin to approximate the world Jesus wanted us to live into.
But, if we look at the big picture, we can actually see that we live in better times than perhaps any other era in human history. Steven Pinker’s 2011 book, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, assembles data from many different fields to show that violence has dramatically declined from the beginning of human history until now, and especially over the past 150 years. One of the tipping points he describes in his heavily researched volume is the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, which began a gradual process of humanizing the lives of slaves, which for many people was a turning point leading just over a decade later to the abolition of slavery in this country. As we all too painfully know, that did not solve the problem of racial injustice and human cruelty. Juneteenth will be celebrated this week as a day marking the end of slavery, and yet as the continuing violence against black bodies reveals in our own time, the seeds of the kingdom take time to germinate and grow. People still cry with Nina Simone in the words of her moving song, “I wish I knew how it feels to be free.” We can hope and pray that our George Floyd moment this past year may prove to have been another tipping point.
It is clear that in some ways we are still at the beginning of this new era of human compassion that is still taking root, and that still bids us all to be engaged in the spread of a deeper, more just, and holier sense of our equality before God.
I share this to encourage us all to continue to plant seeds, yes, sometimes just tiny mustard seeds, that bear fruit for the reign of God, by living lives that move us
forward to that goal, by sharing the love of God in our own lives, and being a part of the movement for justice, love, and a new birth of human community.
And, I dare say, that it begins not only with our care for the human community, but for all of life, for our planet and the whole of creation. In fact, it begins with sowing seeds, putting our hands in the dirt, both literally and figuratively, reclaiming our essential oneness with all of creation. Doing so just might help us to finally get it right.
1 Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmers Poems, No. IX (2011) 2 Loren Eisley, How Flowers Changed the World (1996).