Planting Seeds [Proper 6B - Mark 4:26-34]

 The Rt. Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Mark 4:26-34

 

Planting seeds

All Saints’, Hoosick

 

In 2020, during the height of the early pandemic, I decided to plant a garden.  Not very original, I know, but my wife has a gluten allergy and so bread-baking was pretty much off the table, and I am too cheap to buy a Peloton bike.  And so, I tended to a garden.

 

My first year was fairly successful.  I grew more spinach than we could possibly eat; the basil was fresh and delicious; my oldest son devoured the cherry tomatoes.  It was not a large garden; it did not solely sustain us through the ravages of the first year of the pandemic (I still had to buy and sanitize groceries), but I found the routine of my garden rewarding and the fruits of my labors fulfilling. 

 

And then year two arrived.  I planted that second garden as life was reemerging.  The vaccine was available.  Masks were the norm; groceries no longer required Lysol.  Things were returning to some kind of normalcy.  And while the world around us was again changing, my new-found love of gardening remained.

 

I had learned quite a few things during my first planting season and so, naturally, I expected a greater harvest in year two.  Loaded up with soil and amendment; I plotted out the garden.  I put all my learnings and experiences to task but found that past success is no guarantee of future results. 

 

I again planted my spinach and my tomatoes.  They had done so well the previous year, and had been popular with the family, so I had to run them back.  My hopes were high. 

 

The first Spring morning of green is so exciting.  Little sprouts pushing through the ground.  After weeks of watering brown dirt, color is a significant milestone.  On that breakthrough day, I invite the entire family to gaze upon the tiny green leaves.  And I make them pretend to be as excited as I am.

 

During the first year, those little spinach leaves just kept getting bigger.  During year two, they kept disappearing.  Each morning was a new disappointment.  And then one sad day my tomato seedling was felled, cut down in its tender youth.  It turns out I spent most of that second season trying desperately to save my plants from a gang of cursed roly-polies.  I worked hard but gained little that year.

 

Despite the adversity of that second season, I was hooked and I planted again.  The roly-polies, for reasons I do not understand, did not return.  They were a one-year pestilence.  After the terrible year two shock, year three brought a new, and more welcome, surprise: an unexpected pumpkin.  It grew, I suppose, from the old compost.  I did not intentionally plant it, it just happened.  As the Gospel says, “the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”  And it was a lovely pumpkin, one much celebrated in my home.  First a mantle decoration and, when Thanksgiving rolled around, a pie.

 

There is a mystery to gardening, an unpredictability.  There are sometimes pests and sometimes hail.  Sometimes the rains are generous and the sunshine perfect.  Some seeds are full of life; some never even open.  The gardener can only do their best. 

 

Or, I guess, not do anything.  That is what we find in the Gospel parable today.  The farmer, if that is what he, in fact, is, does nothing but sleep and wake through most of this story.  He scatters the seed on the ground and then goes to bed.  The seeds grow and he seems baffled by the entire affair.  He is the passive audience of a natural world that does not require his assistance and exists beyond his capacity to comprehend.

 

It is a curious story – and does not resemble my experience of gardening at all.  I carefully planted each seed at its appropriate depth and spacing.  I watered and thinned.  I staked the plants that needed support.  I covered them when chunks of ice or unseasonable Rocky Mountain snow fell from the sky.  The guy in the story tossed some seeds and slept it off. 

 

Jesus understands the importance of a well-told story.  He knows how to hold his listener’s attention.  For one he doesn’t talk too long – the entire first parable of our Gospel passage is just four verses long.  Also he never tells long tales about his own garden.  That helps.  And he always works in an outrageous detail or two – something that would sound silly or absurd to his first century crowds.

 

I’ve never been a first century subsistence farmer, but I imagine most of them worked much harder than the man in Jesus’ story.  Farming in the ancient world was about survival – especially for the peasants in Jesus’ audience.  Farming is difficult still today – even with the considerable assistance of expensive equipment and 2000 years of scientific research.  I grew up around farmers.  Never did one just scatter some seeds and take the summer off.

 

And Jesus, growing up when and where he did, was very aware of the struggle to produce enough food to feed a village and support a family in the first century. 

 

But this is not simply a wacky story about farming.  This is a glimpse into the nature of the Kingdom of God.  Somehow this story about a clueless, seed-scattering farmer is a story about what God is doing in the world.

 

I am often asked, as your new Bishop, about church growth.  This diocese is packed with people who really, really love their churches.  They love coming together for good Episcopal worship; they treasure the memories of baptisms and weddings and confirmations; they are proud of the tradition of outreach and service; they care deeply about the people with whom they share the pews – people who have cried with them and laughed with them and prayed with them.  And they are nervous because the nave is not as full as it once was and the checking account is lighter too.  And so they ask me how to grow the church.

 

And I have ideas.  I have tried some things at my churches that seemed to work.  But also, as with gardening, church growth is mysterious and unpredictable.  Sometimes we do all the right things and end up with a garden of nothing but roly-polies.  Sometimes we are graced with an unexpected pumpkin.  Sometimes, like the man in the parable, we toss out some seeds, on a whim, and are surprised to discover a field full of wheat.

 

Growth in the Kingdom of God has always been a challenge because growth cannot be cajoled or manipulated.  We cannot force people to love God or follow Jesus.  We cannot make people come to church – even when we work really hard at it.  And that is difficult to accept.      

 

And always has been.  In the first century, in the infant years of the Church, Paul writes to the Church in Corinth, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”  We can plant seeds.  We can water.  But only God can give the growth.  The Kingdom of God does not come with step-by-step instructions.  It comes to us as poetry.

 

And there is a freedom in that.  But also there is a responsibility.  We are still tasked with planting seeds; or, better yet, do what Jesus says: scatter the seeds of the Kingdom.  Drop them wherever you go.  That is our job: to proclaim by word and example, and with holy abandon, the good news of God in Christ, to embody a powerful hope in an age of despair, to show mercy in the midst of vengeance, to live the love of Jesus in this desperate world.  We plant seeds; that is our ministry.  We scatter them; that is our work.  Every seed: an investment in the future of the Kingdom of God.  Every seed: an act of faith.  Every seed: an earnest prayer to the God who gives the growth.