3rd Sunday after Pentecost: June 17, 2012

3^rd Sunday after Pentecost: June 17, 2012

Mark 4:26-34

PREACHER: Pastor Carrie B. Smith

On this Father’s Day, it seems appropriate to tell a story that at least begins with my father. Therefore I’ll tell you how, in the summers after my freshman and sophomore years in college, my dear Dad kindly arranged a summer job for me, so I wouldn’t be bored sitting around the house. Wasn’t that nice of him? Happy Father’s Day, Dad! I had taught a few piano lessons and had held a job as  Sunday morning pianist at the Freewill Baptist Church in town, but this was my first non-music job—and it was a job working for one of my dad’s friends. No pressure!

But before you feel too sorry for me (I did plenty of that for myself), you should know this summer job was far from the burger-slinging or toddler-chasing I could have been doing. I had no reason to whine, in fact, because what my dad had arranged was a job working in the university botany lab.

Thanks to my dad, I had the privilege of working for eight hours a day in an air-conditioned, sterile, nearly soundless room, carefully placing Arabidopsis thaliana into Petri dishes. In plain language, my job was planting mustard seeds.

If I had known I would one day be a pastor, I might have appreciated the irony of spending the summer planting mustard seeds. As it was, I did appreciate the air-conditioning. But I was a music major, and I therefore understood exactly nothing of what I was going on in that lab.

Pick up seed with tweezers, wash seed in Clorox, set timer for 90 seconds, wait, rinse seed in water, plant seed in Petri dish. Repeat. Seed, after seed, after seed. Mark 4 verse 31 says the mustard seed is “the smallest seed on earth.” I’m sure this isn’t technically true, but let’s just say that mustard seeds are small. Very, very small.

And it was all very strange to me. What was the point? I’m sure I did ask that question, but even the answer was incomprehensible. And so I continued on: picking up seeds, washing them, and planting them. I simply had to trust that somehow, something was happening with those seeds.

On weekends, I was sometimes on watering duty, and it was then I could see the results of my endless hours of tweezing and bleaching and planting. Unlike my sterile planting chamber, this room was packed with mustard plants, and they were growing—like weeds!

Here were the results the professors and students were hoping for. Here were hundreds of flowering plants, growing to maturity from those microscopic seeds. Here was the harvest, mysteriously growing even though I had no idea what I was doing.  Later, I would learn that Arabadopsis thaliana became the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced. 

Jesus says the kingdom is like that: “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” 

We plant seed, after seed, after seed. We teach Sunday school. We’re kind to our neighbors and are active in the community. We smile at the check-out girl and invite her to church. We give our offering checks. We pray: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done”. And some days we wonder if it’s making any difference at all!

It’s especially hard to see the kingdom coming when giving is down, when it’s summer and the pews aren’t filled, and when our young people don’t come to church. It’s hard to see the kingdom at hand when our neighbors are losing their homes, when the cost of insurance means our loved ones can’t see the doctor, or when children are dying of malaria. And yet we trust. We keep planting, and praying, and trusting that the kingdom will indeed come, on earth as it is in heaven. 

And—thanks be to God—it does! While we sleep and rise, the seed sprouts and grows, though we do not know how. The kingdom “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.”

This weekend I had the privilege of attending the Northern Illinois Synod Assembly with your fellow church members Joel Thoreson, Ron and Pat Henning, Shirley Anderson, Karla Malpica, Bethany Gola, Michael Fortin, and Mel Meier. We heard reports from committees, passed the budget, honored retirees and clergy anniversaries, watched promotional videos and celebrated the 25^th year of the ELCA and the Northern Illinois Synod. (we also ate dessert at every meal!)

As fascinating as parliamentary procedures can be, the best moment of the weekend was yesterday when we welcomed Lord of Love Lutheran Church in Galena as a congregation of the ELCA and the Northern Illinois Synod. 

Bishop Wollersheim invited members of the congregation on the stage, and suddenly from behind us we heard the sound of a trumpet, a tambourine, and singing: “Amen, amen, amen, amen, amen!” And here they came: black and white and brown, young and old, singing down the aisle and onto the stage. Lord of Love’s pastor, Dennis Hill, had been ordained the night before, and they were clearly still glowing from that joyous event. 

That sight alone might have been enough to lift our spirits after a lengthy session of historical speeches and Robert’s Rules of Order! And then we heard the story of Lord of Love.

Lord of Love began as an informal group of just thirteen people. Some of had been members of congregations that left the ELCA. Some had been without a church home for years before, or had never felt welcome in one. But in 2009, those 13 believers came to the Synod office and asked if they could become an ELCA congregation. They had a vision of becoming a church for all believers in Christ, where all are welcome regardless of age, disability, gender, nationality, race, religious background, sexual identity or socioeconomic status. In their own words: “At Lord of Love, when we say “All Are Welcome,” we mean it.”

There were some problems to overcome: for one thing, their pastor wasn’t Lutheran, but Baptist! They had no idea what they were doing. As their congregational president said, starting a new church isn’t on anyone’s bucket list! And on that first day, when they opened their doors, they weren’t sure anyone would come to the kind of church they had envisioned and described. For the first few minutes, it was just the thirteen of them, alone. 

But then they started to arrive. Cars drove into the parking lot. Families walked in. Community members they had never seen darken the doors of their old churches were coming to this one.

That was in 2009. This year, at their official organizational meeting, there were more than 125 signers! Lord of Love, which at one time looked like nothing more than a handful of tiny stray seeds, has now grown and put forth large branches, so that the birds of the air—all the birds of the air—can make nests in its shade. 

The thing is, we often expect the kingdom to look like one thing, and it ends up being completely different. We too easily dismiss tiny seeds. We assume nothing is growing if we can’t see it happening.

And yet Jesus tells us to trust. Trust that in spite of our worries or statistics that seemed stacked against us, the kingdom is coming. Trust that in spite of dire predictions that the mainline churches are dying, Christianity has become irrelevant, or the world is going to hell in a handbasket, we have reason to hope. 

Our hope is in the One who said, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” and “the kingdom of God has come near”. Our hope is in the One who sees in a handful of discarded church members and lonely souls the seeds of a new church. Our hope is in the One who heals girls everyone else thought was dead and who gives blind men sight. Our hope is in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, friend of the friendless, voice of the voiceless, our master gardener, the water of life, our rock and our redeemer. Amen!