June 16, 2024 - Fourth Sunday after Pentecost - Showing Up to Simply Scatter Seeds

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous

Matthew 5:43-48

The above verse is what Matthew's account of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus begins the Parable of the Growing Seed with “This is what the kingdom of God is like..."

Father's Day Hymn

This parable is particularly meaningful given the context of our current national discourse. There are topics and words that are currently being repeated as we come closer to the November 2024 election. Retribution, retaliation, accountability... are all now on our tongues. Many people assume there are certain needed countermeasures to what is happening, even if these actions feel ill-advised. If they don't happen, evil wins in some minds. 

Perhaps this gives us more assurance that, despite what has or will happen, we can be more confident that the kin-dom of God itself will produce what can be harvested.

The Parable of the Growing Seed is, frustratingly, both humbling and instructive. Man's role in this parable is only to scatter seeds. There is no anxiety about what happens after the seed is scattered.

Pastor Emillie's preached she sometimes "struggles" parables but she does like this parable. She feels she is a gardener with a black thumb, so she appreciated the simplicity of planting seed and trusting it would grow without help. She thought the parable also helped with her anxiety regarding the faith we have placed in the Creator cottage meetings we are in the midst of holding. 

She has felt nervous about the "simplicity" of discerning direction by trusting we could start by focusing on building congregational relationships. She was worried that she did not have a backup plan to fall back on in case this did not work.  Harvesting the good of God’s kingdom does not rely on our understanding or efforts but rather on God’s generosity.

The Parable of the Mustard Seed   

Both the Ezekiel reading and the second parable liken the Kingdom of God to different trees. Not to an army, not to a people or a city, a temple or a man-made structure but something majestic that has nothing to do with man. Both readings speak of the majesty of trees but also take pains to highlight that majesty does not exist outside of God. In the Ezekiel reading we have "All the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord. I bring down the high tree, I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish." With the Parable of the Mustard Seed Jesus says "It grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs".    

So what are these mustard trees / shrubs that Jesus spoke of? They weren’t mustard plants as we know them. They were large evergreen shrubs or small trees, Salvadora persica, known as the toothbrush tree, is an ancient plant native to the Middle East, Africa, and India.  

Toothbrush trees possess remarkable properties and have served as the basis of folk medicines across their native regions for generations. The name comes from one of the tree’s most widely known benefits — as a natural toothbrush! There’s even a record of the Prophet Muhammad using this traditional tree in his oral hygiene practices.

Both readings also expound on how birds live in the shade of these trees. To make understanding more mysterious and complex in the Parable of the Sower, the parable that begins Mark Chapter 4 characterizes birds as actively work against the Sower who scatters the seed, "As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up"

Father's were honored at this worship on Father's Day at Offertory. After the service we briefly gathered to remember Mary Lou, who felt herself called to work as a gardener on Creator's landscape and contributed to the congregation's outreach efforts but rarely attended any Creator Sunday service. We honored her memory and what, to us, may have been her somewhat mysterious ways she was called to be connected with our church.

These are other ways to emphasize our role in simply sowing the seed without questioning the harvest. The kingdom of God moves mysteriously, both producing and harvesting what planting the seed yields.