Sermon- June 17, 2018

Pentecost 4B- June 17

Mark 4:26-34

            I read a story recently about a boy named Reid who was absolutely crazy about playing baseball—like I was as a boy. When Reid was a teen-ager, he lived with & worked for his uncle, a holiness preacher who didn’t hold with the foolishness of ball playing. One day Uncle Arrington knew that Reid was scheduled to play in a baseball game; so he put him to working sowing peas in the cornfield--which was a common practice years ago, as pea vines didn’t harm the corn & grew up wrapped around the stalk. Uncle Arrington said, “Finish sowing those peas & you can go play ball.”

            Reid was devastated; he knew he didn’t have time to plant that whole bucket of peas & ride his mule over to the ball game. As he worked & fretted, he came upon a burned out stump in the middle of the field. He looked around, saw no one was looking, dumped that whole bucket of peas in the stump & covered them with dirt. He ran out of the field, showed the good reverend his empty bucket & rode off to play ball.

            Things were fine until several weeks later when Uncle Arrington was cultivating the field & came upon a stump…over-flowing with pea vines! Years later, Reid always finished that story by looking wistfully into the distance & muttering, “Who knew peas would grow in an old stump?”

            “. . . the seed would sprout & grow,” Jesus says in our Gospel.  “The does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.” There’s a difficult lesson here for those of us in the church who have a hard time letting go & letting the work of God take its natural, God-given course. Jesus says to us that we are to plant the seed & let God worry about the growth. Jesus says we’re not responsible for making the church grow. Jesus says we’re not responsible for making sure everybody “gets saved.” Jesus says we are not responsible for making the Kingdom of God a smashing success. Our job, our responsibility, our calling, is to plant the seed & reap the harvest. God is responsible for the growth.

            Faith is often defined as trust; & in this case, faith is trusting that the things we do for God will turn out all right…in God’s way, in God’s time. Faith is keeping on with the work of the Gospel & trusting that in God’s own time the crop will grow, even if we never live to see it. Faith is, in part, letting go of our control over the results. And for some of us, that is hard.

            We live in a world in which people are afraid of losing control, or more correctly, of letting someone or something else control their fate. We’ve been taught that in order to succeed one must have a goal–after all, as Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.” We’ve been taught that in order to succeed one must have a plan–a well-defined outcome & a strategy for achieving it. 

            But Jesus teaches us that the Kingdom of God, the work of grace & mercy & compassion & peace in the world, works with a totally different outline. These parables remind us that we are called to do the work--indeed we are called to do the work to the best of our ability--but they also remind us that the ultimate purpose & outcome of this work is not in our hands but in God’s.

            Which is a reality that is both frustrating & reassuring. It is frustrating for those of us who don’t like to wait, who like to be in charge & in control of our own fate & destiny, who like to see progress being made, who like to be able to measure & calibrate & control. But it is also reassuring & liberating to know that, in God’s eyes, success isn’t judged by the size of the harvest but by our faithfulness in sowing seeds.

            In our churches, we are planting seeds in God’s field, cedar sprigs on mountain tops. What they will be has not yet been revealed, but of one thing we can be assured: God has not finished the work God began in us.

            We are like that stump in the cornfield just before the eruption of growth; the seeds have been planted, the ground has been cultivated, the fertilizer has been put in. We have done & continue to do our work. Our calling today is to keep doing our work & to trust God to work in & through us to grow the Kingdom. Amen.