Toad's Garden; God's Garden

Mark 4:26-34

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a gardener, but years ago, my brother and I had a recording of garden stories and songs that I played over and over, and that I keep remembering when I hear Jesus tell the kind of stories he does today.

That tape included a recording of a story* from the award winning Frog and Toad series. It’s a classic little story that starts when Toad admires his friend Frog’s fine garden, and Frog offers Toad some flower seeds.

Plant them in the ground,” said Frog, “and soon you will have a garden.”

“How soon?” asked Toad.

“Quite soon,” said Frog.

Toad ran home. He planted the flower seeds.

“Now seeds,” said Toad, “start growing.”

Toad walked up and down a few times. The seeds did not start to grow.

Toad put his head close to the ground and said loudly, “Now seeds, start growing!”

Toad looked at the ground again. The seeds did not start to grow.

Toad put his head very close to the ground and shouted, “NOW SEEDS, START GROWING!”

Frog came running up the path. “What is all this noise?” he asked.

“My seeds will not grow,” said Toad.

[Too much shouting, Frog explains. The seeds are afraid to grow.]

 “Leave them alone for a few days. Let the sun shine on them, let the rain fall on them. Soon your seeds will start to grow.”

Does that sound familiar to you?
It should. It’s what we just heard Jesus tell us a few minutes ago. Leave the grain – or the mustard seed, or the flower seeds – alone and let it grow. God gives the growth.

But it’s easy for us to worry.

We may know we can’t make plants grow, but we sure like to get involved. Fertilizer, pesticide, watering, pruning, wishing. It’s frustrating to know something should be happening, but not be able to see it.

Toad feels the same way.

That night Toad looked out of his window. “Drat!” said Toad. “My seeds have not started to grow. They must be afraid of the dark.”

Toad went out to his garden with some candles. “I will read the seeds a story,” said Toad. “Then they will not be afraid.” Toad read a long story to his seeds.

All the next day Toad sang songs to his seeds.

And all the next day Toad read poems to his seeds.

And all the next day Toad played music for his seeds.

Toad looked at the ground. The seeds still did not start to grow.

“What shall I do?” cried Toad. “These must be the most frightened seeds in the whole world!”

Then Toad felt very tired, and he fell asleep.

Reading or playing music to your plants has gotten more popular – even been scientifically studied – in the years since Toad’s story first got published, but most of us know right away that Toad is wearing himself out doing the wrong things. He’s full of compassion, trying his best to keep his seeds from being afraid. But he’s guessing wrong about the reasons the seeds don’t grow, and he’s trying to do God’s work instead of his own.

It’s tempting to do God’s work. Tempting to try to fix things. To turn on the sprinkler when it hasn’t rained recently, or to pull or push a stuck or stubborn friend to the right answer, the right way of seeing or doing things, that you know will solve their problem. Tempting to nudge and network and persuade to get your kids into the right job, your parents into the right care, your beloved spouse into the right way of loading the dishwasher.

There are a lot of frustrating things that you know how to fix – if people would just cooperate – aren’t there?

Cruelty and injustice and foolishness and even violence in the news that could be cured by common sense.

I bet you can think of at least one situation where you’ve worked and worried and worked and it just doesn’t seem to change things.

It drives me crazy.

And it wears me out.

So Jesus and Frog both remind me today that maybe it wears me out because I’m trying to do God’s work, instead of my own.

Jesus reminds us that our work is sowing and resting and waiting; harvesting and gratitude. Our work is scattering seed, and then marveling at and enjoying the growth and fruit that God produces from the seed.

God’s work turns that seed into something completely different that blesses others. A grain of wheat scattered on the earth becomes, by stages, while the farmer sleeps: a stalk, an ear, a full head of wheat ready to harvest. Ready to feed and nurture God’s people. A tiny, tiny little mustard seed shoots up like a weed and becomes an enormous shrub, a home to shelter birds and little creatures.

Jesus encourages us to sow seeds. Lots of seeds. Impossibly tiny seeds. To keep sowing even if we don’t see growth. And let God work.

About ten years ago, I met a priest friend of mine in St. Louis for lunch. As she took me in to her local coffee shop, she told me how great it was that this shop had hosted her and some of her colleagues when they went out to pray with folks in the neighborhood on Ash Wednesday. I admired the collaborative spirit of the coffee shop and my friend, and promptly forgot all about it while we enjoyed lunch.

A couple years later, that seed stirred and sent up a shoot, when members of my suburban Chicago congregation told me about how hard it was to get to Ash Wednesday services. Before I knew it, six parishioners and I were at the local commuter train station, offering ashes and praying with strangers who were surprisingly delighted to see us on a drippy Ash Wednesday morning.

And I experienced the presence and generosity and grace of God in a way I never had before. So I told friends about it; heard from others who had done it; encouraged colleagues to try it.

A harvest from that tiny seed, and new seeds to sow.

Two years after that, the “Ashes to Go” movement was on the front page of The USAToday; now – eight years later – it’s an international movement that’s bringing the holy experience of repentance and welcome and the everyday practice of faith into all kinds of places – and seeding new ministries and relationships with God.

There’s hard work in the Ashes to Go story. Arguments. Long periods of waiting and barrenness. But friends reminded me to rest, and let God work – and helped me celebrate all the signs of a rich harvest of grace.

“Toad, Toad, wake up,” said Frog. “Look at your garden!”

Toad looked at his garden. Little green plants were coming up out of the ground.

“At last,” shouted Toad, “my seeds have stopped being afraid to grow!”

 “And now you will have a nice garden too,” said Frog.

“Yes,” said Toad, “but you were right, Frog. It was very hard work.”

There’s plenty of work for us to do – you and I – in sowing seeds for God to work with. Opportunities every day – not just with acquaintances and strangers, where it’s easy to let it go, but with the family we love and tend and see all the time, and in our public life – opportunities to sow just a tiny bit of kindness, or generosity, or gratitude, or faith, or trust, or skill, or perspective, or justice or truth.

And we can’t ever stop doing that; can’t stop giving God seeds to work with.

There’s plenty of work for us in harvesting, too; in receiving and sharing the gifts that grow from those seeds. Seeds we sowed, or that others sowed. Plenty of work in coping with the mustard plant of grace that got too big for the little garden plot you planned for it, and is now attracting birds who need shelter and rest. Plenty of work to be done in accepting and sharing God’s abundance, and bearing witness to the miracles we didn’t ask for. That’s hard work, sometimes, but not draining.

The work that exhausts us is when we try to do God’s share of the work; try to force growth, or force it to be visible. When we try to shape exactly what grows out of each seed, or try to get from seed to harvest by our own unrelenting effort without leaving room for God.

But when we remember that our job is to sow, then rest and wait, to harvest and rejoice, then the work strengthens us, and God’s work in us bears fruit, fruit from seeds that others have sown, in love, peace, patience, kindness, grace and joy.

*"The Garden"; Frog and Toad Together, by Arnold Lobel c. 1971, HarperCollins

You can also watch and enjoy this Claymation version of the story.

Deliver Us From Evil

Mark 3:20-35; 1 Samuel 8:4-20

The Jesus we meet this morning – surrounded by noisy, needy crowds, rejecting the norms of family and religious order and social niceties, and too busy to so much as stop and eat – isn’t the Jesus I like to hang out with.

I prefer the Jesus of quiet mornings with my coffee and prayer book, with a sense of spaciousness and calm that helps make me generous and grounded.

Or, occasionally, the Jesus who is fierce but focused in overthrowing the social order, with a clear plan in place that will bring us a better, equal, generous, loving world, quickly and conveniently.

Not this noisy, crowded, chaotic Jesus.

But this is the Jesus we have The Jesus we have in the assigned gospel story this morning, and the Jesus moving around a lot in our world and society today – insisting that we keep paying attention to the needs of the world that are more than we can easily manage, and disrupting the norms of a good family, a good religious order.

In the story we hear today, Jesus is disturbing the peace in his hometown; he seems to be publicly rejecting his family, denying his roots and relationships, and he is certainly upsetting the stable, trusted religious order.

“He has a demon!” say the scribes from Jerusalem, come down especially to warn people. “He may be curing people, but he’s doing it with his evil powers.”

Even his family agree that he’s out of his mind.

And at the center of that chaos, Jesus looks at the forces of order and says: “How can Satan cast out Satan?” Look, if I’m using the power of evil against demons and evil, then evil is divided, weakened, cannibalizing itself. Divided and already conquered.

If you’re right that I’m using evil powers, then evil is already defeated.

This is good news. Really good news. When we’re stuck in the chaos of change, seeing healing or liberation for other people that might be dangerous to our norms and expectations, excitement that might be bringing positive reform, or maybe the end of moral clarity; when we’re not sure whether the disruption of is of God, or of Satan, it’s good news that evil defeats itself.

It’s a truth we need to hang on to, because evil is powerful.

When you and I are lucky, when we exercise the different forms of privilege and protection that we have – from money or health or color or geography – we have things that shelter us from the pain of evil, or sin, or Satan. But it’s still real.

Even if we don’t talk about Satan as fluently as the first century scribes from Jerusalem, we know there’s evil around and among us. That’s why the first thing we are asked – required – to do in coming for baptism is to reject Satan. To renounce the evil that corrupts and destroys us, all of God’s good creation; to reject everything that divides us from the love of God as our focus and center. 

It’s why – after baptism – we all confess together most Sundays that our thoughts and words and deeds have been sinful, have fallen short of the love of God. Because evil is powerful, and present, and common, around us and among us.

Evil generates the distrust among God’s people that fuels the 24-hour cable news cycle, irreconcilable political differences, the walls we build around ourselves with security systems and exclusive neighborhoods, and real physical walls.

Evil hurts people – far away or close to us – in too many ways to list.

Jesus isn’t just talking to the scribes who are accusing him of evil when he says that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that Satan divided against Satan is self-defeating. He’s preaching us the good news that evil can be defeated, by using its own power against itself. And that Jesus has come to tie up that strong man, to bind the power of evil so that it can be plundered,  so that all the good that’s been burdened and hoarded by evil, captive in our divisions, can be freed to serve God’s purpose again.

And there’s a lot of good that’s been drawn into the power of evil.

In fact, evil often tempts us by showing us the good it looks like we can do or have by making choices that either hurt others or divide us from our dependence on and trust in God.

Good like the safety we can guarantee by building protective walls around our houses, our time, our country, our neighborhoods. By showing us how to use money, or color, or geography, or tradition to protect ourselves or unite us against others.

Safety is a good. Unity is a good.

Evil tempts us by showing us those goods, and trying to hide or minimize the damage our protections do – to God’s people on the other side of the barrier; or to our own freedom when the walls start to close us in, or demand more resources than what they were built to protect. Tries to hide the damage to our hearts and souls when we start to depend on the walls for our safety and identity, instead of on God.

That’s what Samuel and God are trying to tell the people of Israel in that other story we heard this morning, from that time about three thousand years ago when Israel wanted a king. They were trying to choose the good, trying to choose a way toward order, and unity, identity – a stronger representation of the community’s relationship with God – and someone to protect them against marauding neighbors.

At God’s urging, Samuel points out that this choice will cost them: A king, you know, may protect you and go in front of you in battle. But he’ll cost you. He’ll tax your goods, and your families, and your time. And God reminds Samuel that even though the people might think that a king will better unify them as people of God, this choice actually puts more distance between the people and God.

It turns out that a yearning for order, for clarity and stability and protection, often divides us from God. And that the uncomfortable disruption that Jesus causes may in fact be a protection from evil – that embracing uncertainty may protect us from choosing a damaging certainty. In fact, we may have to be vulnerable to disruption in order to not be vulnerable to evil.

Jesus – who redefines the normal order of family today, who stirs up noisy, needy crowds all the way to the cross, and then disrupts even the normal, predictable order of death – is here to tell us that in order to bind up the strong man, in order to bind up the power of evil, we have to be vulnerable to disruption; to change and discomfort and uncertainty.

Because it forces us to put our trust in God, instead of in ourselves, to question our long-held assumptions about what is good, and to be called back to a focus on the will of God, a focus that makes us Jesus’ family.

That may not be the Jesus I want to hang out with on a quiet summer morning with my coffee and a prayer book. But this is the Jesus who comes to us today, over and over again. Stirring up the normal order to make us vulnerable to grace, to the healing and freedom and gifts of God we never earned, to break open our norms and expectations so there’s room for a great big unexpected family of God, then in Israel and now in Moorestown, and everywhere and evermore.

Rules

Mark 2:23-3:6

A few weeks ago, at the Trinity Preschool Pizza Night, I watched a magician perform for a rapt and enthusiastic audience of two- through five-year olds and their families. I knew he was playing tricks on our minds to entertain us – sleight of hand – and some of the kids were watching for it. Though when they tried to call him out on it he doubled down and showed us even more magic.  He won more laughter and joy when he made us think we understood the trick – and then showed us our guess was wrong and there was still magic to wonder at after all.

I think Jesus might be doing something like that with the Pharisees – and maybe with us – in today’s gospel stories. On first glance, we see two short stories about Jesus breaking Sabbath rules to do good, to feed the hungry and to heal, to make a miracle. But when you’re watching closely – armed with a natural skepticism about magic shows or a little scriptural commentary – well, what we see may not be what we think we see.

Don’t worry about my disciples plucking grain on Sabbath, he tells the Pharisees. If King David, great and holy hero of Israel, could take the sacred temple bread to feed his starving soldiers, after all….

You and I, accustomed to Jesus being more right than the Pharisees, might naturally find this a satisfying explanation.

Except.

Well, except that Jesus’ disciples probably weren’t starving like David’s soldiers were. Just moments ago in the story they were in trouble for not fasting when the Pharisees did. They certainly get too busy to eat regular meals at a later point in the Jesus story – but at this point in the story, context suggests they were just snacking.

So they are breaking the Sabbath rules, and doing so in a way that certainly doesn’t meet David’s precedent.

Jesus looks like he’s defeating the Pharisees with truth and logic. But that’s not what’s happening. He seems instead to be creating a diversion: Look over there! It's King David!

Then it’s Sabbath in the synagogue, where Jesus already has a history of casting out demons, and now there’s a man with a crippled hand in the congregation. So Jesus knows the crowd – and the Pharisees – are going to be watching for another healing. And he immediately challenges them all: “Is it right to do good on the Sabbath?” he asks them. Duh. Of course, Jesus.

“Is it right to save life, or to kill?” It’s been established precedent forever that yes, you can break Sabbath rules to save lives. Didn’t we just cover this, with David and the starving soldiers? But to kill, umm….? No one answers him.

So he turns to the man they’re watching, tells him to stretch out his hand, and just like that, we see that he’s healed! Whole! A miracle! Jesus broke the Sabbath rules to do good!

 Except.

Except he didn’t.

Jesus doesn’t actually do any prohibited work in this story. He doesn’t treat the man’s condition. He doesn’t even lift the man’s hand for him.  He just says, “show us your hand” and we see that the healing has already been done.

It looks like he’s breaking the rules but he’s not.

He’s messing with us. Messing with the Pharisees, the crowds, the reader.

It’s sleight of hand.

Unlike your average stage magician, I don’t think Jesus is using this religious sleight of hand, this “what you see is not what you think” trick to hide something from us. I think instead that, Jesus being Jesus, he’s being deliberately provocative, messing with us in order to get us to wonder more, and to see something we are used to not noticing.

I think he’s trying to get us to see that the rules were made not to be broken, or to bind us, but out of our own benefit. And that the Sabbath itself is healing.

Jesus doesn’t do work on the Sabbath to heal that man with a crippled hand. Instead, he just asks the man to show everyone the healing that has already happened, in the midst of Sabbath. Show that the Sabbath, created for our benefit, is – in and of itself – healing.

And the rules about what not to do – no harvesting the grain, no traveling, no work for yourself or your servants or your animals – those aren’t rules to limit us, but to heal us. We don’t keep religious rules for God's benefit, or the church, or religion as a whole. Instead the rules keep us; the rules work for us to keep us whole in our relationship with God, with one another, with ourselves, created in the image of God.

There are two primary reasons given in scripture for the keeping of Sabbath.

One, that we stop all work this one day in seven to do what God does: to rest, in imitation of God, in the image of God, as God rested in creation.

 And also to give thanks. We stop work in thanksgiving for God’s action in freeing God’s people from slavery, from forced labor. We fast from work, and from receiving the work of others, one day in seven because our work – and the work of others that we benefit from – ultimately belongs to God, not to Pharaoh, or the boss, or the time clock, or even to ourselves.

Now, snacking on grain as you walk through a grain field may not seem like work to you, or to me, or apparently to those first disciples of Jesus. It’s not work, compared to actual harvesting, reaping, and the daily production of flour and bread and animal feed from that grain, or compared to the billable hour, the eight-hour factory day, or 24-7 parenthood. 

Snacking on grain as you walk through a field is skimming the emails on your phone while you’re in between things. 

It’s not fully work, perhaps, but it is a failure to rest; a failure to stop, a failure to resist the idols of the world, a failure to pay primary attention to the image of God in ourselves and in others.

And Jesus seems to be saying to the Pharisees, to you and me, that that’s okay. Because, you know, important and urgent things trump Sabbath.

But he’s not.

He’s saying that getting caught up in the rules is, itself, a failure to rest, a failure to stop what we are doing and attend to what GOD has done, is still doing.

When he tells the Pharisees that the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath, I think he’s reminding them that the Sabbath is about how God keeping us is more essential than us keeping rules.

And then he shows them that the Sabbath itself heals. Heals a man whose injury isn’t life-threatening; who could as easily have been treated the next day, whose need would never justify breaking the rules. This man is healed, in front of the curious and the eager and the plotters and the doubters, by the Sabbath itself.

Because the Sabbath has always been about restoring us to wholeness, and keeping the Sabbath has always been about rejoicing in the gifts of God.

But we forget that.

Sin – evil, the idolatry of the world – plays tricks on us, uses slight of hand to get us to believe that keeping the rules properly is what makes us whole, or righteous.

And by focusing our attention on that, hides from us the ongoing action of God that makes us whole and righteous; the action of God that makes keeping Sabbath natural for us, as a reveling in grace and gratitude, strength and love.

I’m pretty sure that Jesus did want his disciples, the Pharisees, you and me, to truly keep the Sabbath. Not to follow the rules, but to live so fully in the presence and image of God that the rules follow us.

To Sabbath so naturally; to rest so naturally, to fast from work and from the work of others, to renew ourselves in the image and imitation of God so fully, that the “rules” are simply how others describe what we do, and the ways others learn from us to be renewed and healed and whole, resting in the image of God.