“Wild Trust”
Sermon for Celebration
MCC- Naples, FL
June 17, 2012
Rev. Brian
Hutchison, M.Div.
Would you
pray with me? “God, we know you by many names, and yet all of them fall short
of capturing all of who you are. Our words fail us. We cannot put you in a box
because you are the Great Mystery who breaks through all boundaries. But we
remember that Jesus addressed you as Abba, Father. So on this Father’s Day, we
remember the positive qualities of all the people who have been father figures
for us. Even if our biological fathers have treated us as less than your
children, we know that you remain the loving, warm, caring, providing, gentle
Eternal Father in whom we put all of our trust. This day, Grandfather God, open
our hearts that your word may enter in and give us rest in you. In the name of
all that is holy we pray. Amen.”
Who here
has ever planted a seed? It may seem like a silly question since many of us had
gardens growing up. I know I did. It wasn’t a very large garden, but when I was
a kid in the suburbs of Maryland we grew cherry tomatoes, various kinds of
flowers, and we attempted to grow other things such as sweet peas but they
didn’t quite work out. My family came from Iowa where the soil is dark and
rich. My mother’s family was all farmers. They would take me out to one of the
family farms and I would feed the pigs and laugh at their flatulence. (My
female cousin was not amused. She would say, “It’s not funny. It’s gross!”) I
would chase after the geese as my mother chased after me. One day my uncle even
threw me on a small tractor by myself when I was only seven years old and told
me to drive. I had no clue what I was doing. I inevitably crashed into the cornfield.
When my parents
and I moved to Maryland when I was three years old, they realized something-
the soil was not the same. Instead of rich black soil, our backyard just had
red clay dirt. The only thing that seemed to grow well in it was crab grass and
weeds. My parents thought it was the strangest thing that we had to BUY dirt in
order to grow anything. “Buy dirt?? That’s like buying air!” they would say.
I think
that’s what the disciples would have said too. Unlike many of us who live in
suburbs or cities today, they lived in an agrarian world. Their whole existence
revolved around agriculture. It was common knowledge when to sow and when to
reap, what to plant when, how much water and sun exposure was needed for each
plant, and so on. So Jesus uses the parables we heard today (called the parable
of the growing seed and the parable of the mustard seed), meeting the people at
the root (so to speak) of their life experience.
What we can’t
immediately tell from reading this passage is that the parable of the mustard
seed is actually a joke. What the text doesn’t tell us is that the mustard seed
they speak of is a weed. So the punch line of Jesus’ joke is right up front: a
man takes a mustard seed and plants it in the ground. That’s like saying
someone planted a dandelion seed or a crabgrass seed. (My parents used to hate
it when as a kid I would run through the yard and kick up all the dandelion
seeds so I could see them fly around in the wind). Mustard plants multiplied
like crazy and were difficult to control. And when they grew into the large
shrubs that Jesus describes, they obstructed planting other plants. Obviously,
people do not intentionally plant weeds; they pluck them up (unless of course
we’re talking about another kind of “weed” that is consumed by a large percentage
of the US population, but even that is called weed because when left in the
wild it reproduces quickly).
With this
humor, Jesus is really saying something profound about the Realm of God here.
In this parable, Jesus redeems the
unredeemable. He takes as an example something that was considered an
annoyance and highlighted its so-called “faults,” calling them assets. We can
take several meanings from this. First, Jesus is embracing the outcast and the
marginalized. He is saying, “You may be considered a weed, a nuisance in our
society, but to God you are a unique and beautiful blessing. You give shelter
to those who need it. You surprise the world with your wild growth.” In the
words of God in the book of first Samuel that we heard today, “I do not judge
as people judge. They look at the outward appearance, but I look at the heart.”
Another
meaning is that with a tiny bit of faith (which really is just another word for
trust, not specific belief), a
seed is planted in our spirit that is designed to grow like a weed. Imagine
that we have built up different closets in our hearts, places where we know we
can hide when we are afraid. A small mustard seed falls between the floor
boards of each poorly built shack of a closet, takes root in the soil beneath,
and soon enough breaks through the floor, branches out through every wall, and
rips the roof right off! The Realm of God- the power of unconditional love,
peace beyond understanding, and joy unspeakable quickly takes over all space
within us. When that happens, we no longer hide in fear but rather rest in the
branches of the shrub, as the branches are in truth the arms of God.
Perhaps for
us the wild mustard seed is the all-inclusive gospel that we preach. We plant a
seed with a friend or even a stranger, letting them know that God loves them
just as they are and that rumors of an angry God are lies. And with fear moved
aside, that seed springs up into a great plant within that person, producing
more seeds to plant with others. The radical gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be
stopped! It is subversive. It is counter-cultural. It is scandalous. It is
indecent. Sometimes it’s even sexy. And stuffy religious types can’t stand it
because it can’t be controlled. It can’t be contained by creeds and codes and
rules. It’s too free for that. And what does this teach us? … It teaches us
that the life of faith is not about keeping our fists clenched tightly onto the
seed hoping that it will do something. The life of faith is about trusting that
when we open our hand, and drop the seed into the soil, we give God the
control. From then, we just trust God that the soil and water will prompt the
seeds to grow, all in God’s time.
How many of
us hoard our seed of faith, holding it tightly in case of emergency, in case of
some tragedy that might happen that might require some more faith? The funny
but sad thing about our crazy hoarding is that when those difficult times do
come in our lives, if we have not planted, all we have is seed. And what in the
world are we going to do with a handful or even a house full of seed? It is the
plant that will serve us by giving us shelter, not the tiny seed. All we have
done is put our faith in our own hands.
Or how many
of us plant the seed but then get up in the middle of the night and mess with
it, dig it up to see if it has grown any? Any middle of the night worriers
here? I know I’m as guilty as anyone else J. We think
that by worrying we can somehow control the situation when all we are doing is
making ourselves sick. We struggle so hard to understand life, but I like what protestant
reformer Martin Luther said, “If you truly understood a single grain of wheat,
you would die of wonder.” In other words, we are trying to grasp what is not
ours to grasp, but is rather ours to stand in awe of. Science and a healthy
sense of curiosity are good, and a gift from God. But when our wondering turns
to worrying, we have lost our way.
Proverbs
3:5-6 tells us this: “Trust in the LORD with your WHOLE heart and do not lean
on your own understanding. But in EVERYTHING (somebody say, “everything”!) acknowledge
God, and God will direct your paths.” (Some translations say God will make our
paths “straight”, but that never really sits right in MCC J ). I think trust is the greatest challenge of our lives. It
comes back again and again when we take our control back again and again. We
may keep praying, keep coming to church, keep living a religious life, but
still hold onto control.
Again, I
know I’m guilty of it. There was a time in my life when I was worrying all the
time. I was unhappy with my job, and yet afraid to lose it. I kept asking
myself all the “What if?” questions. “What if I lose everything? What if we
can’t eat? What if my reputation is damaged? What if all my efforts have been a
waste?” I expressed these concerns to a close friend of mine. He doesn’t
profess any particular faith, but he respects mine and respects the work I do.
So in response to what I told him, he said to me, “Aren’t you supposed to trust
God?” That was my epiphany moment. With tears and snot running down my face, I
laughed out loud because it was so obvious.
I had lost
my patience with life, with God even. I had planted the seed, but I was digging
up the soil every day to see what it was doing. And my actions were doing it no
good. My friend told me to quit it, slapping my proverbial hand away
from the soil. His tough love is just what I needed to awaken from my nightmare
of fear.
In her
devotional called Faith in the Valley,
Iyanla Vanzant writes, “Trust is a decision we make within ourselves when we
surrender control to God. If you believe you have been betrayed, used, taken
for granted, or in some other way had your trust violated, decide now never to
give up on people or yourself… Always remember, no matter what happens, or how
bad you feel about it, or how much you don’t like it, God knows exactly where
you are and what you need. If you realize that your Creator is in control,
there is never a reason to not trust people or yourself. ALL you have to do is
trust that God will help you understand the value of your experiences… no
matter what they look like.”
We have
been conditioned to so quickly put a value on the situations we are in. Waiting
in line: negative. A hug from a loved one: positive. A visit to the dentist:
negative. A vacation: positive. A rainy or cloudy day: negative. A sunny day:
positive. The list goes on and on, stretching over our whole lives. What if we
could do what Jesus did with that poor mustard shrub and see it for its beauty?
Of course,
it’s not the easiest thing to do to “Let go and let God.” I remember a story
Yvette Flunder (Presiding Bishop of the Fellowship of Affirming Churches) told
about her Pentecostal upbringing in the Church of God in Christ. When she was a
small child, he aunt would get her up in the middle of the night randomly to
take her to the church and pray at the altar. She would get down on her knees
on the kneeler and her aunt would stand behind her as she prayed. And what
confused her is her aunt would first say, “Hold on, Yvette! Hold on!” and then
she would switch to saying, “Let go, Yvette! Let go!” It was a bit of a mixed
message. How can you hold on and let go at once!
But in
retrospect, it now makes perfect sense to her. In order to let go of all our
doubts and fears, our regrets and resentments, our hatred and our negativity,
we have to hold on- instead… to the hand of God, in trust.
We wake up
each morning with the decision of how we will focus our attention that day,
with what lens we will view the world. A Course in Miracles teaches, “God and
God’s miracles are inseparable. How beautiful indeed are the Thoughts of God
who live in God’s light! Your worth is beyond perception because it is beyond
doubt. Do not perceive yourself in different lights. Know yourself in the One
Light where the miracle that is you is perfectly clear” (3:VII: 60).
Friends,
don’t underestimate your ability to sow the seed in this word that will build
God’s realm of unconditional love, one heart at a time. You are doing it here,
and you are doing it beyond these walls. Keep sowing those seeds of love! Amen.
