The Second Sunday After Pentecost - June 14, 2009

"The Seed Should Sprout and Grow, He Knows Not How"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.

This very brief parable may be one of the most unknown stories of Jesus, in part because it only appears in Mark’s Gospel and in part because it does not have much of a riveting plot! A man plants some seeds, they grow pretty much on their own, and then he harvests the plentiful crop. Not much to grab our imaginations. Let’s go on to the mustard seed; at least we have birds making nests in the shade of its eventual branches!

That is what I thought a week ago when I first read over this Gospel passage. A unique week lay ahead of me, vacation time until I returned to the office Friday morning, and I knew I would not have much time to compose a sermon for today. So I thought it would be helpful for me to let the seed of these scriptural words gestate in the furrows of my mind during the time away, and perhaps they would sprout and grow into a sermon, I knew not how, to be more easily harvested in the brief writing time available!

You will have to judge at the end of this sermon whether that strategy worked, but I found it very helpful. The medium was the message, if you will, and by scattering some seed and trusting it to grow, I was able to do a better job than I usually can of trusting God to cause the seed to bear fruit, I know not how. That, I believe is the essence of Jesus’ parable, trusting the lavish grace of God to make things grow and increase and being grateful for, and good stewards of, what is reliably a harvest “infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”

First let me tell you about Betsy’s and my trip. Michelle and Barack have nothing on us; we had five consecutive date nights! It was my birthday in the middle of those days, so we first drove to the Elkins family beach place at Emerald Isle on Sunday afternoon. Having read over today’s Gospel before we left, I was struck by the fields and fields of tall, lush corn that stretched mile after mile. The stalks are not yet to the stage of “the full grain in the ear,” but their height and abundant, verdant leaves are obvious proof that we are not having a drought this year. Although these farmers have done much more than scatter some seed, their efforts would be fruitless without the vibrancy contained in those seeds, the rich soil in which to plant them, and the abundant sunshine, rain, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. which nurture their growth. Despite our advances in scientific knowledge and farming techniques, seeds still in a real sense “sprout and grow, [we] know not how.” And not just corn, but countless species of domestic and wild flora: crops and grasses and wild flowers and bushes and rugged trees that survive and flourish, even alongside the ocean, whose winds and waves can often threaten to obliterate them. All this of course, in just one tiny section of the world.

On Tuesday morning, we took the Cedar Island Ferry over to Ocracoke, on the Outer Banks, bringing our bicycles with us. Pedaling through the beautiful tree-lined streets, we enjoyed many unique houses and yards and several scenes we had never encountered before. On a dock several fishermen were cleaning their catch, and one by one over several minutes, seven pelicans flew in and landed in the water just below them, waiting patiently for any castoffs. Lined up side by side, none of them seemed to resent the others as competitors. Riding over a bridge spanning a small canal, we stopped to watch a bearded summer resident cast his weighted circular net off his dock, pulling it back in with an occasional fish in it. His catch was not for him. A few feet away, an Ibis whom he had named “Bob,” waited to be rewarded for his daring so close to a human by being allowed to spear and gobble this provided breakfast.

In our time at Ocracoke, in our travel across the sound and across rural eastern North Carolina, in our walks along the beach at Emerald Isle, where the ocean has been ebbing and flowing and teeming with life for millions of years, the words of the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, echoed through my mind: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. …Nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

Those words hit at the mystery Jesus points us to with his parable. God’s abundant life, shared within the Trinity, as we celebrated last Sunday, but also overflowing into creation, including our planet earth and the dynamics of human life, is never spent. No matter what we worry we may run short of, water, food, beauty, friends, meaningful activity, opportunities for our children, even money, there is always much more where that came from. No matter how much we fear that God’s grace is absent, that nothing positive is happening, that we had better dig up the seeds and see what is taking so long, we are to trust God’s time and God’s presence and God’s abundant life. No matter how much we may worry that nothing will ever get accomplished unless we personally make it happen, we are to remember that literally and metaphorically, seeds sprout and grow, we know not how, and that increase and growth come much more from God than from us.

That does not mean, of course, that we should be lazy, passive bystanders in the lives that God gives us. In Jesus’ parable, the man is expected to sow the seeds, even if he did not create them, and to work at reaping the harvest. More than that, we should remember that a parable is always an exaggeration to stress a point, not an allegory to be followed literally. As balance we could add in the story of the man hoeing in his garden when his pastor walked by and commented, “What a beautiful garden God has provided you!” To which the man replied, “Yes it is, but you should have seen it when God was caring for it all by himself!”

We are stewards, those charged with taking care of all that God gives us and making the best use of it, whether that be our physical, mental and emotional health, our educations, our responsibilities, our opportunities for service, our families, our temporal goods, our money, including our estates, our faith, our friendships, our common ministry, certainly the environment of the gift of this earth, – whatever God graces us with. But we are also to know and to believe that the source and nourisher and replenisher of all that comprise our world and our lives is the lavish, dynamic Triune God. As the Psalmist (46:1) declares, “God is our help and strength, a very present help in trouble.” And in the words of Paul, written to the early Christians in Ephesus (3:20-21) from the confines of his prison cell, “Glory to God whose power, working in us [and in the world], can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.”

Mark 4:26-34