June 16, 2024 – The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost

The Rev. Claire Keene

Remember those two creation stories in Genesis? Do you?

At the end of Genesis, Chapter 1, we hear, “So God created humankind in his image; in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

 

God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.: And it was so.”

In this creation story the humans were to be representatives of God– in charge, in other words, of ordering the good earth as God would. But then in Chapter 2 of Genesis, we hear that when God made the earth and the heavens, no plants yet lived on earth because God had not yet caused it to rain and there was no one to till the ground.

“Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. (Adam meaning earth— Adam is a creature made of earth and for the earth.) In this creation story, the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the East; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the Tree of Life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

In this second creation story, Adam is to serve the earth, instead of ruling over it. His life and livelihood depend on that earth from which he is made. The Lord God then puts Adam in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

In both of these origin stories, we hear how central is humanity’s relationship with the earth, its plants and its creatures. And that relationship with the earth is central to humanity’s privilege under God and humanity’s duty to God and to all the living things that God has provided for us.

Today, in Mark’s gospel we read the parables of the secretly growing seed and the tiny mustard seed, in which it is the seed’s contact the earth itself that triggers the growth toward a harvest. “The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head,” we read. In due time, when the grain is ripe, the one who scattered the seed on the ground can reap a bountiful harvest. In the parable of the mustard seed, again it is contact with the ground that brings vegetative life so that the tiny mustard seed grows into a great shrub, creating shelter for birds of the air.

The life-bestowing action in these parables is not ours. Neither are we commissioned to redesign how the world works nor to constantly try to master-mind just what bounty should look like, or exactly where it should come from and when. Instead, we are to recognize that God’s kingdom, God’s reign, God’s life is shared with us, as we are invited to share our own, through the productive soil in which living things thrive, where they are transformed, and bear fruit– not only for ourselves, but for everyone around us. We are to cooperate with the world as God has made it, not to tear apart and reinvent the miracle that is already given.

These metaphors are surprises, aren’t they. At first glance, they seem to picture our role as a bit passive. These transformations of life, these miracles of abundance happen not by human power, not by human striving, not by our “straightening up and flying right,” but by God’s drawing forth and setting free the life-expanding power already present in each life’s inner core, even in my life and yours.

We are to let God open-handedly receive and release into this world the living centers of our own souls, the powerful seeds of our own lives as God has created them. Our part in this shared life is to trust God enough to lean back against the Spirit already at work around us and to let transformations happen.

So, Mister Gary and Mistress Mary, how do your gardens grow this summer— are your silver bells and cockle shells, and pretty maids all in a row? Has it been easy for you to let go and watch life slowly unfurling? Or are you constantly disappointed with a less-than-perfect display? How is your garden doing?

I have to admit that I like to read and to dream and to plan about gardening more than I actually like to do the work. I could give you all my excuses— my sloping lot, the clay just under the mulch, the rabbits in our neighborhood, my busyness and my preference for reading and playing with clay at the pottery study over putting my muscles and spine and all my joints to the test in my garden.

Between my garden dreams and my garden reality, there is a great gap. But sometimes the resilience of my plants—for better or worse— amazes me in spite of my lackadaisical gardening. There are flowers and bushes in my front bed that have probably been there more than 30 years. To that I’ve added knockout roses and rosemary and northern sea oats and oakleaf hydrangeas that I planted a couple of years ago, after I reached a temporary cease-fire with the 30-year-old monkey grass whose roots had reached down through the landscape weed barrier, staking that monkey grass ferociously in place. Then there are the rabbits that grace our neighborhood: a day or so last week after I transplanted some sunflowers that I had just sprouted from last year’s saved seed, the rabbits ate the just-opened blooms right off the stalks.

On the other hand, my garden has received free, self-seeding, spreading clumps of native flowers that seem to have made a home in the empty spot created by the removal of a large paper-bark birch tree a couple of years ago, when its roots were lifting and tilting the concrete slabs that form my driveway. Once I had cleared out some soil and made room for some sunshine, hidden seeds sprouted flowers I never expected.

“We are always confident,” Paul says in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians. “We are always confident, because we walk by faith, not sight. The love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all. . . . From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view. If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

We walk through our gardens and our years by faith in God’s design, not our own! We can, we may, we should always be confident— that is, we should live with trust in the One who grows our tiny seeds of faith into bounty to share, who brings forth from tiny seed-offerings shade and shelter to nourish us, who offers a new creation in community for all who seek it. So, as St. Paul says in his Epistle, we should be confident—be in fidelity with—not our piety or our purity, not in our achievements or our aptitude. We should be acting with such certain trust in God’s desire for us to know abundant life that we can relax into partnership with the living earth as it is given and stop looking so anxiously at the changes and chances of our days.

Earth’s good soil is the gardener for many forms of earthly abundance. It just so happened this week that a scientist friend of mine gave me a book on the amazing lives of fungi and their biological partners. So I’ve just spent the week reading about fungi, growths we may not even see except when their fruiting forms (a.k.a. mushrooms) pop to the surface to release their spores and so propagate themselves, as they did in my damp mulch bed this spring.

Fungi reproduce through tiny spores instead of seeds, much smaller than even mustard seeds. But the world-changing power of growth within them is just as important as the work of seeds. Did you know that? Think about penicillin, yeast fermentation– we couldn’t have even our bread and wine for the eucharist today without them and they are older than humankind. God, the Lord, gives victory through them, too. One species, the shaggy ink cap mushrooms, can push their way through asphalt and lift heavy paving stone, although they are not themselves even composed of tough material. What power and resilience lives in and through the lives of these shaggy ink cap mushrooms! And that drive to life–upward and outward , changing into tomorrow— is a God-given victory— in fungi, in the seeds of plants, and in us.

“Life wants to live!” one of my relatives said years ago. And it’s true. Right now there are almost as many stresses and competitions for dominance in my garden as in our current political climate. That drive to life– upward and outward and into tomorrow— is there inside us, too, often perplexingly so. Knowing what to do with that energy, that changing trajectory, that push to live and grow beyond who we have already been— that’s the question that Jesus asks us to consider in today’s gospel, the question all our scriptures for today ask us to examine. It’s a question we bump into in every turn of our lives, “What am I supposed to be doing now?” The daily mustard seeds we hold in our hands are so tiny—round, 1-2 millimeters in diameter, smaller than a grain of rice. Our days can seem that short–that tiny and insignificant–too. But remember—the Lord does give victory in situations we haven’t yet imagined and in ways as odd and mysterious as mustard seeds and fungi.

That desire for life–the desire to grow and to become who God has created us to be–is the seed God has planted inside each one of us. We may not understand exactly what seed is growing inside us or others. We may look at what seems like concrete paved over us and wonder, “What good is ever going to come of this?” or, “What in the world can we do we do about this?”

The seeds planted inside us are tiny. It’s hard to imagine what they could become, just as it’s difficult to imagine our babies doing brain surgery or designing airplanes as they someday may. But growth happens, change happens, the Lord’s guidance happens, even when we don’t see it ahead of time. Sometimes that growth is painful or confusing, and we resist it because we don’t know how to take charge of it.

But whatever comes bears within it the seed of our Lord’s victory, as we are willing to trust God’s tending to the daily mysteries of the garden already growing. So have confidence in the Lord’s victorious work that can be so hidden from our imagining. And thanks be to God for all the care already planted and growing among us!

Year B  –  Proper 6  –  The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost  –   June 16, 2024   –  The Rev. Claire Keene