St. Mary's Episcopal Church

The Reverend Beth Fain
June 18, 2006
Pentecost 6b: Kingdom of God of cubes of cheese, $20, prayers and Kids Camp (Mark 4. 26—29)

My next door neighbor has a red bud tree.

It must be a very happy tree because it sends out little redbud trees all over his yard.
And mine, too.
My neighbor has carefully dug up many of those volunteer red bud trees and systematically planted them in every yard on our block.
Mine included.
One spring, when you drive to the Rectory for an altar guild brunch or a newcomer dinner my block of Laneview will have a canopy of hot pink blooms in yard after yard after yard.
I can’t tell you what year to put on your calendar.
But the redbud trees are already there.
Someday we’ll see their flowers, too.
This is what Jesus is talking about in our first parable this morning. So simple.

The Kingdom of God is like this:
Scatter seeds. (show sunflower seed and then put in pot).
Wait. (hold up pot)
Growth. (hold up bouquet of sunflowers)
Take note: The Kingdom of God is not just the harvest; the kingdom of God is also the scattering of the seed.
Yes, the kingdom of God is also the hidden growth that will take God only knows how long.
Yes, the kingdom of God is also when we wake up one morning, having done nothing at all to help along the seed we planted, and there’s a whole field of grain ready to be harvested.
But first the Kingdom of God is the seed planted.
What’s great about this little parable is that there are no extra details to distract us from this great truth about God’s kingdom.
There are no weeds choking out growth.
Or rocks in the soil.
Or crop failure.
Or all the work we have to do to make the harvest come.
Or all the people we’ll have to hire to harvest the crop.
Or the ultimate removal of weeds to a fiery destruction.
In other parables, but not this one.
Because Jesus wants us today to not worry about all the things that can go wrong or all the work we have to do but with the one thing that always goes right.
The Kingdom of God is the seed planted.
By God, through us.
The rest is really, ultimately up to God.
In our lives in the Kingdom of God, which is already here, right now, don’t you know, we plant seeds. Every day.
Put $20 in the offering plate and wait.
Teach an hour of Kids Camp and wait.
Bring cheese cubes to VBS and wait.
Pray for the youth on the Mission Trip and wait.
Give a bottle of water and some crackers to a homeless man on the street and wait.
Say a kind word to a stranger and wait.
In the waiting, God acts.
Growing the Kingdom of God.
In the waiting we go about living life.
Getting up. Brushing our teeth.
Driving in to work.
Answering email.
Picking up groceries on the way home.
Taking the kids to karate.
Doing a load of wash.
Going back to bed.
While we’re off doing this, the cheese cubes become new Christians.
The prayers for the mission trip become a one of the youth coming back and wanting to lead a monthly mission trip to Houston.
The$20 becomes a new assistant rector.
The teaching becomes a child who brings a friend to church.
The kind word becomes a person whose day is turned around.
In my own life, I have found the almost random, forgotten seeds that I sow are the ones that bear the most extraordinary fruit in the Kingdom of God.
Some of you have heard me tell this story.
But it’s so full of the Kingdom of God that it’s worth retelling.
A rerun. It is summer after all.
Since I’ve been a priest, I have always prayed for pregnant women and their unborn child or children when I give them communion.
One Easter at St. Dunstan’s, when I was the Assistant Rector there, a woman came to receive communion.
She had just found out that she was pregnant.
Her marriage was seriously on the rocks.
She had come to church that day looking for the light and hope of Christ.
So far, the worship had left her "feeling" as depressed as she was when she walked in the door.
I knew nothing of this "Something" made me ask if she were pregnant.
Surprised, she said that she was pregnant and so without another thought, I prayed for her and her unborn child.
I had completely forgotten about this little seed of the Kingdom of God. Until she wrote me several years later.
That morning something quietly, silently, invisibly shifted in her.
Her husband left her but he ended up coming back and through a lot of work, their marriage began to turn around.
She had the baby.
The family moved to Arizona.
She returned to God and to God’s Church and became very active.
Then she heard a call from God to the priesthood, and after all of the twists and turns of that whole process, she wrote me a letter telling me this shortly before being ordained.
A casual prayer.
Time passes.
A priest in Christ’s Church.
Sowing the seed is the Kingdom of God.
For today, Jesus reminds us that God does all the rest.
AMEN