The Kingdom of God is Growing Wild

Mark 4:26-34

June 14, 2015

Pr. June's garden.
Neat and tidy. A lot of work.

We have been in our house for three summers.

And this is the third summer 

I’ve tried to grow

some vegetables in a garden.

The last two years 

I got about 6 mutant, giant zucchini,

a few pitiful tomatoes and a lot of leaves.

I tried something different this year

and maybe things are looking better.

We’ll find out later this summer.

So to plant a garden, I read a bit about it

and I’ve gotten some advice from neighbors.

All different by the way.

And I added sand and fertilizer

and planted one thing here, but not over there.

Whenever you have a garden,

you think about it, you worry about it.

You fuss over it, trying to do the right thing

at the right time to get the right results.

That is what farming and gardening is like.

Farmers have to do the right things,

they have to hope for enough rain to wet everything

but not enough rain to wash everything away.

They have to put enough fertilizer, but not too much,

Enough sun, but not so much heat that everything burns.

It’s a fussy business.

Lots of worrying, especially if you have your

life invested in your crops like farmers do.

I think that a lot of pastors and religious people

kind of see their job as gardeners or farmers.

We read and look and ask for advice.

When do you have confirmation?

What do you do for service projects?

What hymnal should we use?

What classes should we teach?

Church councils discuss staffing

and facilities and outreach ministries

and worship times and children’s programming.

If we just get the right formula,

if everything comes together,

then it might be what we want it to be.

Then God’s work will get done.

It’s a fussy business.

And if you read things in Christian Magazines

or on the internet, or listen to conversations between

church leaders or pastors, the prevalent message we’re sharing

is that the church crop isn’t doing well right now.

Most articles roaming around the internet

have Chicken Little titles like

“Why the Christian Church is dying”

“five reasons your church is dying”

“How you can prevent your church from dying”

  

And it’s true, to some extent.

The church does not look like it once did.

Christianity does not have the prestige the power,

the people, the money that it once had.

Lots of churches are irrelevant to a lot of people.

So we rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

And we get more fussy

just trying to figure out what’s we’ve done wrong.

We like to think that God’s work is somehow

in our hands, in our control,

that it comes down to us.

But Jesus says the Kingdom of God is not like this.

Jesus says that the Kingdom of God

is like someone scattering seed on the ground.

They scatter the seeds and then they go inside

and sleep and rise and on and on

and then one day the plant is just grown.

There’s no worry and no fuss at all.

Throw the seeds, go inside, come outside, and harvest.

it must have seemed like a dream to those farmers listening.

Jesus says the kingdom of God is like this.

And just to stress this,

he tells them another parable.

The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.

A very small seed, that grows into the tallest of “shrubs.”

Which is a weird turn of phrase.

  

We’ve talked about this mustard shrub before.

It was a really undesirable plant.

It was invasive and smelly.

It’s actually so invasive that

there was a Jewish law that you couldn’t

plant it in your fields because

it could infest everything including your neighbor’s field.

It was called “a malignant weed

with dangerous takeover properties.”

I’m sure that when Jesus said
“the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed”

those agrarian people were groaning

like, “Oh no. Don’t plant that. That gets out of control fast.”

So the kingdom of God is less like my garden

that I fuss and watch and pay attention to.

And it’s more like this part of my yard

which grows and grows without me doing anything.

The vines strangling the pine tree,

these large thistle weeds, keep on springing up

Pr. June's wild, unruly weeds.
No plans or work required.

no matter what we end up doing

all we can do is put some chicken wire up

so that the dog stays out of it.

It’s completely out of our control.

It’s thriving and doing 

its thing without any help.

And even when we try to thwart it

and tame it and redirect it, it still keeps going.

That’s what God’s kingdom is like.

The church might need constant fussing

to try and keep up with God’s kingdom.

But God’s kingdom, God’s work,

we don’t have to worry about .

That’s growing all the time,

out of our control and doing wonderful things.

And when God’s kingdom does grow,

Maybe it’s like that mustard shrub -

maybe it doesn’t grow exactly where we want it to be,

maybe it doesn’t attract the kind of creatures that we think it should.

maybe it doesn’t do the things that we want it to do.

So maybe instead of just watching the church for growth

and wishing things were like they were before.

We should be looking all around us

to see where God’s Kingdom and

God’s work is happening

not just in the pre-ordained safe spots where we plant things,

but seeing where God is working  and growing

and taking over uninvited, opportunistically,

where it’s growing wild.

Maybe at a school where someone’s sticking up for someone else.

Maybe at a hospital where people are cared for.
Maybe in an apartment where people are watching out for one another.

Maybe in a food pantry where people are talking to one another.

Maybe in a bar where people are supporting one another in their lives.

This is what the kingdom of God is like.
It’s God’s.

The Spirit of God moves where it wants to.

It works where we don’t work, whether or not we’re watching.

As people who are alive in the Spirit

our job is not  fuss over it. our job is to notice  where the Spirit is going

Try to catch up with it, embrace it, love it, look with wonder at it

and then reap the harvest of God’s work all around us.