As some of you may have noticed, I’m a “do-er.”
I like to dig into a problem or an opportunity – or ordinary daily business – and work out options, solutions, plans A and B (and often plan H or plan W, too), and I like to get stuff done.
While I do love a rainy morning with tea and a good book, or the unhurried pace of a slow baseball game or an afternoon nap, I am, for the most part, a person who finds it natural to be busy. To do, rather than watch, or wait.
So I’m a little out of step with Jesus’ farming parable today.
While “plant something, and then ignore it” is actually my personal gardening (and houseplant) strategy, (I am not a gardener), that sleep and rise and let stuff happen approach is not how I naturally operate in most non-plant-related cases. When it comes to work, or hobbies, or even spending time with friends, I keep digging around, adding water, worrying about weeds, pulling in grow-lights…”helping” and managing the natural processes as much as I can.
But oh, how this parable has been soothing my heart this week.
Because my heart is full – these days, and often – of the burden of things that are too big for me. Too much to manage. Beyond my capacity – often vastly beyond.
Things like the health of a couple of my friends.
Like the horrors of war around the world.
Like the partisan divisions – and the politicization of daily life choices and simple freedoms – that roil through the news and social media and even personal relationships closer to home.
Like the coming of the kingdom of God – the rebalancing of the world to operate fundamentally and fully in holiness and generous love.
I mean, I signed up for that idea we call the “kingdom of God” in baptism. I promised to shape my life and my heart around God’s love and faithfulness, to share that love and strive for a world of peace and justice and selflessness – and have renewed that promise over and over with every baptism I share with you.
But so much of the time, that “kingdom” seems so far away, so overwhelmingly more than I can manage.
And boy is it nice to listen to Jesus, today, pretty much saying: Sit down. God’s got this.
How many of you also need to hear that?
Listen to that truth today with me.
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; without the farmer understanding or managing the process.
The earth produces of itself, stage by stage, until everything is ready and we receive the fruits.
And the kingdom of God grows from the tiniest of seeds – to provide abundant shelter for the birds. And for us.
We busy people like me – and the patient, receptive people, the hands-off people, too – we all need to hear the power of this truth that God gives the growth. That God makes nurture and shelter and life grow in abundance, in ways we will never understand, or be able to accomplish ourselves, or to meddle in.
We must know that.
Because if we don’t know that, we won’t notice the miracles, the gifts, the graces of what grows without our help or interference.
We might miss the gifts of love and care and abundance that appear in things we aren’t tempted to meddle in. Like the glorious miracle of a weedy, uninvited bush giving shelter to the songs and birth of birds, outside the gardens we tend, or the homes and work that you or I pour attention and effort into.
We must know that we are an integral part of God’s story when we sit down and simply appreciate that God’s got this.
These are parables that invite us to steep ourselves in awe and wonder, to live not in busyness or in passivity, but in vibrant appreciation and trust.
These are parables that invite us to remember – joyfully and gratefully – that we are not God.
I am not. You are not.
Thank God.
But that is not our only role in these stories of God’s work.
Parables reflect light into many and varied corners of our world and selves – there’s never only one way to find God in a parable, never only one way to find ourselves.
There is a clear role for us – for humankind – in Jesus’ first story today, not only as the observer of mystery and the receiver of the harvest, but also as the sower of seed.
In this story of God’s work, you and I are going out on the earth scattering tiny bits of God’s word. Tiny kernels of God’s love.
By our everyday actions, or moments of great selflessness. By a strong and public sharing of faith and by one small word at the right time.
By a ride home, or to church. A small promise fulfilled or a meal shared. One word of kindness, or justice, or peace, or joy.
Each act or word equally one small seed to grow – through the work of God we don’t have to understand – into a stalk, a head of grain, a flourishing weedy bush full of thriving birds.
I think Jesus might be inviting us to notice those seeds we sow – sometimes without intention, sometimes on purpose. To sow intentionally and widely, yes, but also to simply notice the small acts and words we leave on the earth as we move through our lives. And to watch what God might be doing with those seeds as we sleep and rise, night and day, not interfering.
And I wonder if we also might discover ourselves in one other role in the story.
I wonder if perhaps sometimes – or all the time – you and I are not only observers, or sowers, but we are also in fact those grains in the story: growing inch by inch, stage by stage, through the incomprehensible and irresistible work of God.
That’s not as…restful a role as the grateful observer, the receiver of the harvest.
Growth is frequently the opposite of restful.
Experiencing the unfolding of our potential – individually or as a community – often takes the form of being stretched and expanded in uncomfortable ways.
Discovering that God has placed someone in your heart who you had no intention of inviting in – and yet you find yourself caring for this stranger, or neighbor, or annoying coworker or distant refugee, with compassion and empathy and love you didn’t know you had.
Discovering that I’m showing up for a meeting or class or task I never wanted to be interested in – and yet hearing myself volunteer because somebody has to make this peace, or repair that damage, or plan that project, or serve that meal.
Discovering that our community keeps changing – our habits, our language, our faces – because that’s how we become more truly who we are, and who God is inviting us to be.
Uncomfortable growth, often – and sometimes surprising or overlooked – but still we are growing and growing by the work of God. Growing by the love of God we can’t understand or resist, that unfolds us, inch by inch, grain by grain, into the whole harvest of God that nurtures the world.
And I find that possibility – that probability – is soothing my heart, too, as I listen this week to Jesus telling stories.
Soothing my heart to hear, again, that God’s got this.
Got the growth in myself I didn’t sign up for, the growth among us we can’t quite resist – all in God’s own hands.
It’s soothing my heart to remember, to trust, that I don’t have to over-manage this, either – that the stretching and expanding of my heart and mind and spirit, too, are something I don’t have to manage for God. That God grows the kingdom of abundance and wild beauty and holy care not just for us, but within us, and among us, too.
That you and I – as seed and soil and sower and harvest – we are in God’s hands, in every part of the story of God’s all-powerful love.
