Ezekiel 17:22-24
Mark 4:26-34

A few weeks ago, when we were still in the Easter season and reading from Jesus’ teaching in John about the vine and branches, I mentioned the advice given by a preaching professor that a sermon should not chase down a horticultural rabbit hole. I wasn’t too tempted that last time because I admittedly don’t know much of anything about growing vines. This week, as we hear the parable about a growing seed, I’m sort of tempted to fall down that hole, because my 3rd grade Brevard County Science Fair award winning project was titled “Are cotyledons necessary for the growth of baby bean plants?” The early growth of a seed is right up my alley. Or it was… at a 3rd grade level… close to 40 years ago.

That’s a familiar feeling, that anxious watching and waiting, and not just when we’ve carefully planted the tulip bulbs the fall and are waiting to see if they will come up in the spring. Not just when seeds have been started inside for this year’s summer vegetable garden and we don’t know if any of them will actually sprout.

It’s a familiar feeling when we have been dedicated to the task of developing our minds and experiences for meaningful work, and that job, that career, that vocation we have been striving for just still seems out of reach.

It’s a familiar feeling when we have launched the young people that we nurtured in our homes or a church and we aren’t sure which (if any) of the lesson seeds that we have planted in them will take root. Will they spend carefully and save? Will they nurture their bodies with healthy food and plenty of rest? Will they find community and purpose and meaning in a church and faith of their own?  

It’s a familiar feeling when we wake up each day to hear news that sounds like we aren’t making any progress toward a more just, more peaceful, more compassionate world, even when we have gotten involved, even when we have voted, even when we have marched. 

What in the world is happening under the ground, deep in the soil where the seeds have been planted? When will the kingdom Jesus proclaimed be more visible? When will we see the fruit of our labor? Will we see it? Ever? How does all this work anyway?

God’s words through the prophet Ezekiel tell us these are not new questions. Ezekiel was a prophet among the people of Israel in exile in Babylon. The 500 year experiment of rule by human king that began when Samuel anointed Saul had not played out well. Corruption after corruption, disobedience after disobedience, had ended with the the Babylonian empire destroying Jerusalem and taking many into captivity under King Nebuchadnezzar. The people of God were terrified. Confused. Hopeless. They felt abandoned by God. They did not understand how they got to that point. They didn’t understand how God could work through this desperate situation. It was a mystery.

I know a lot of people like to read mysteries or watch a good whodunit movie or TV series, but I know very few people who enjoy a mystery in their own lives. “What’s happening? What does this all mean? What’s coming next?” aren’t questions that excite too many of us when we’re asking them for ourselves. But both Jesus’ parables and God’s word to the Israelites in exile are a message to those of us who are whisper them in prayers of desperation, shout them in overwhelming frustration, or struggle with them across the dinner table or meeting tables in our homes, at work, or at church.

“Thus says the Lord God: I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar I will set it out.” When the exiles are feeling alone, when they feel like they have been abandoned, God speaks a word of action, of agency. I will help you, God says. I will do the work that is necessary.  “I will break off a tender one. I myself will plant it.” In the middle of your confusion, your weakness, your humiliation even, I will replant your community.

Whether they can see how it will happen or not, God will do exactly what it takes to rebuild the people of God. Whether they can imagine the way forward or not, God will grow a new nation. Whether they can understand what is at work or not, God will do a new thing, and it will flourish, and it will serve all of creation.

This may not fully satisfy the most curious among us – those of us who will go to sleep thinking about what is happening where we cannot see, those of us who wake up and run out to the field to stare at the ground wondering what’s going on in the dirt. Those of us who obsessively check our e-mail for the notice we are waiting for, those of us who read three different news apps trying to make sense of what’s going on. But it is the promise Jesus makes. God is at work in the world. Always.  When we can see it and when we can’t. When we are actively involved and when we are at rest. When we understand it (or think we do) and when we don’t. God’s kindom is near.

This parable about a seed growing where we cannot see it reveals, therefore, a kernel of truth about the kind of faith to which we are called. It’s a faith that can’t simply be reactionary, but that must be anticipatory.  We can’t only have faith when something good is happening to us or for us; we must have faith that, in the words of New Testament scholar, the Rev. Dr. Mitzi Minor, “looks beyond what it sees to that for which it hopes.” 

It’s a faith based on the truer story behind the story we might be living in this moment, for what we see is incomplete. It’s a faith that requires us to lean into the witness of those who have come before us, who tell us about the goodness of God’s love that they could see in retrospect, who point us in the direction of God’s justice because of the injustice they experienced, who share the good news that from death comes resurrection life. It’s a faith that God who has been faithful in the past, God who formed the earth from their own will, God who brings the seed to germination, the stalk through the topsoil, the full grain in the head, this God will be faithful even still today.

The growth of seed we scatter with great care or on a wing and prayer does not depend on us knowing exactly what happens inside that seed coat. Thanks be to God, am I right? The dropping of the roots and the sending of shoots in our own hearts doesn’t rely on us grasping the mechanism of God’s grace. Again, thanks be to God. The sprouting of God’s kindom throughout the world does not count on us understanding how it happens. Thanks be to God!

But it happens, and paying attention, waiting with hope for what we cannot see and anticipation for what we have only heard of, we can be a part of the kindom that grows without abandon by the grace of God. When the fruit of God’s mysterious work is ripe, we can move into the field to harvest what has grown, what will feed the community. When we see the movement of the Spirit showing us a need in the community and capacity in our congregation we can provide a tutoring program for nearby students. When we hear of ways to advocate for policies and utility contracts that care for God’s creation, we can speak at government meetings and write letters to our representatives. When our children or grandchildren at any age or stage are asking questions of meaning, with courage and humility we can speak works of our faith (and our doubt) that provide a witness to where we find purpose and know love.

These opportunities, Jesus tells his listeners, he tells us, may not always look like the mighty cedar of Ezekiel’s prophecy, but they arise, sometimes when and from where we least expect them. Maybe like me you have heard (well, I have also preached) sermons that attempt all sorts of homiletical and horticultural gymnastics to explain why the embarrassing mustard shrub is the star of the second of Jesus’ parables that we heard today.  “It’s not the same plant we know of today as the mustard plant. It was much stronger and taller, back in Jesus’ time. It wasn’t a shrub but a tree that he was talking about, a relative of what grows today.”

The attempt to make sense of this story is actually comical in light of the parable that precedes it. Here we are trying to understand a seed of a story sown for us by Jesus when the understanding by our own experience just doesn’t work. What if instead, Jesus means exactly what he says? The kindom of God grows like a weedy shrub – quickly, in any soil, spreading swiftly, without a whole lot of human attention. It’s an image that stands in stark contrast, of course, to the mighty cedar, but it so helpfully illustrates how Jesus describes God at work in the world.

As much as we’d like to predict where the kindom of God goes, as much as we’d like to understand it so we can control how it’s spread, at the end of the day the it’s up to God, not us. We may very well do nothing, and there it is – growing and flourishing from the tiniest seed, depending on God’s own doing, not our own. What we can do, though, is when we see the kindom growing this way, is get on board. Be a part of the harvest. Spread branches of welcome. Provide shade and rest to those who are vulnerable, and sow seeds that will spread even farther with God’s love.  

We don’t have to understand how God is working, we don’t have to (and can’t) control where or how, but when we see it we can and must join in the abundant, unexpected, underestimated harvest and get to work sharing it.

In this time in the church’s life it can be hard to see what God is up to. There are staff changes, shifting responsibilities and expectations of how God’s mission is accomplished in and through us, our understanding of who we are and what we have capacity to do is changing. They way we’ve always done things doesn’t necessarily work anymore, but that in no way means God is not at work in us and through us. That in no way means the kindom isn’t germinating, growing, sending up stalks, orputting forth grain for all who hunger in body or in spirit. 

We don’t have to understand how God is at work to grow the kindom; we just have to watch for, be ready to harvest the good work God is doing in us so that the community may be fed, that the abundance is shared. That the birds of the air will find places of rest in God’s gracious love.