St. Paul's Episcopal Church

St. Paul's Episcopal Church
425 Cleveland Ave SW
Canton, Ohio 44702
Phone: 330-455-0286
Fax: 330-455-9818
E-mail: office@stpaulscanton.org

Second Sunday after Pentecost
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Canton OH
I Samuel 15:34 – 16:13, Mark 4:26-34

June 14, 2009
The Rev. Barbara L Bond

Abundance

Norm and I have been gone to Chicago for a week. When we left, we noted a few buds on our rose bushes. When we came back, the bushes were heavy with big blossoms. When we left, Norm carefully mowed the grass. When we came back, he nearly had to go at it with a scythe. When we left, the tomato plants were beginning to show promise. When we came back, I had to quickly tie up the heavy stalks to supporting stakes.

Well, it is nearly summer, and we are seeing that incredible growth, which, if you take a week off, seems to come overnight. And I can assure you that we did not have anything to do with that growth – we weren’t even here!

Jesus is giving us gardening metaphors again, and they seem so familiar, describing what we have experienced. Someone sews the seed, and presto, before you know it, there is phenomenal growth, all by itself. This is precisely the scripture reading that the Natural Church Development process uses: that God plants the seed, and the growth comes all by itself. We have certainly experienced that in our parish life, as we went through two rounds of NCD process and now begin a third one, a new growing season, we trust.

And so, at one level, Jesus talks about observable vegetative growth, and we can jump to organic parish growth. What about another level of interpretation?

What if this parable is about you and me? What are we in this story? The sower? The plant? Those are two possibilities, but instead, how about the ground? You and I are the dirt, the fertile garden plot. The seed is the Word of God that has been cast into our lives. It has been nurtured by the community, in our baptism, in worship and prayer, by our learning, by our sharing and caring for each other. Our life in God has grown, and continues to grow. Are we supporting a faith as big as a huge plant, grown from a seed as small as a mustard seed? Does our life in Christ support others, who come and roost in the branches? Is our life in Christ like a field of grain, which will be harvested and gathered together for purposes beyond ourselves? What will God do with this huge harvest? Will the grain be made into bread, the bread of life, to nourish others at the Lord’s Table? Will our faith nourish others and bring forth a harvest far beyond our imagining?

God can clearly work with unlikely material. Have you ever seen a mustard seed? Have you ever planted carrots? The seeds are like so many specks of dust, and look what comes forth!

I love the story of the anointing of David. Talk about an unlikely seed! Samuel is looking for a new king for Israel. The first king, Saul, has proved disappointing – he promised much, but produced little. Samuel knows he must find another king. God sends him to Bethlehem, to the house of Jesse, where many likely candidates are paraded before him. One after another, the seven sons of Jesse are presented, each one a magnificent specimen. But something keeps Samuel from selecting any of them. When the parade is finished, he shakes his head and inquires, “Is there anyone else?” Well, yes, but he’s keeping the sheep. Samuel wants to see him, and knows instantly when young David arrives, that this is the one. The smallest, the most unlikely, becomes Israel’s greatest king.

Sometimes it is hard for us to figure out God’s choices. Apparently God has different criteria that we do. The world admires power and money, and growth for the sake of growth, unending progress and profits. Much of the fear in our society right now is because those standards are in jeopardy. Well, gee, if the GNP doesn’t keep going up, what does that mean for our lifestyle?

As churches struggle with living authentically in this world of change, we have to reexamine our assumptions using God’s criteria, not ours. We’d love to have more people, more money, more programs – growth to insure our health and survival. But what about God’s kind of growth? It might not look like our idea. God’s growth could be growth of service, growth of learning, growth of prayer, growth of spiritual life, growth of understanding the kingdom of God in our lives.

The Kingdom of God is like… is like… a mustard seed which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.

AMEN