Sermon for the 16th of June - Third Sunday after Trinity

I wonder – are you someone who likes to be in control? Someone who likes to plan? Someone who likes to know how things are working?

If, like me, you are, the gospel today may be rather uncomfortable for you…

The gospel is all about what the Kingdom of God is like and Jesus gives us two parables to illustrate this.

In the first parable, the person scatters seeds and then does nothing until harvest – they sleep and rise each night and day.

Maybe I’m just a bit tired at the moment, but the thought of scattering seeds and then going to bed and just waiting is rather appealing.

Now I have to admit that, whilst I can be a control freak, I’m not a natural gardener… I only just managed to keep my daughter’s plants alive whilst she was at uni! The thought of having to ensure I’m giving the plants the right amount of water, pruning them the right amount and at the right times, ensuring they are in the right size pots and so on, so that they can grow, is exhausting.

And so this passage comes as an enormous relief. And the more I read it, the more I realise how radical it is.

We live in a world where we are frequently told, work hard, keep things in order, strive for achievement and you will succeed. It’s all about what we do and the effort we make.

Yet Jesus tells us that God’s Kingdom comes with very little effort from us – we just have to scatter the seeds and wait until harvest time – we can leave the growth to God.

The reading from Ezekiel mirrors this – God says “I myself will take a sprig from the cedar….I myself will plant it…..I will make high the low tree….I will accomplish it”. It is God who is doing the work here, not us.

This seems remarkably freeing – it means we can let go of having to control everything and make them happen by sheer force or will power. It means we can rest, we can trust God, and we can enjoy the harvest when it comes.

And then we come to the mustard seed….most of us will be familiar with this parable – the tiny seed that grows up to become the greatest of all shrubs.

Yet something I didn’t know until recently, was that mustard was considered a weed in Jesus’s time. No-one would have planted a mustard seed because they spread and took over everything.

Note the contrast to the first reading where it refers to cedar trees being planted and providing shelter – this is a much more noble image when thinking about God’s Kingdom. The cedar symbolises greatness, nobility and strength.

But Jesus subverts this image by replacing the cedar tree with the mustard shrub. God’s Kingdom is represented by a weed! Replacing the grand with the small and insignificant, the thing which is looked down upon and despised….

And this mirrors Jesus’s own life – he wasn’t raised as a wealthy king in Jerusalem but as a carpenter’s son in Galilee. This is what God’s kingdom is like – it’s a place where the small, the insignificant, the unlovely and unloved, can all grow, thrive and produce great fruit.

Both the cedar and the mustard seed provide places for birds to nest, provide shade and shelter. And here’s another thing about the kingdom of God – it is a place of rest, or shelter for all.

Usually when we think about planting seeds and harvest we really don’t want flocks of birds around – birds eat the seeds and fruit, they wreak havoc in cornfields – scarecrows are used to try and keep the birds away…..

Yet in Jesus kingdom, the birds are given a place of shelter, a place to nest and to rest. As Debie Thomas writes, “Jesus kingdom is all about welcoming the unwelcome. Sheltering the unwanted. Practicing radical inclusion. Its primary purpose is hospitality not productivity.”

I’ll say that again – its primary purpose is hospitality not productivity.

How counter cultural does that sound ? We live in a society where productivity is everything, when in the election debates there are numerous references to GDP, economic growth.

Labour’s first line is:

Labour’s manifesto for change is a plan to kickstart economic growth by reforming Britain’s economy and bring about a decade of renewal.

The Conservative party’s introduction starts with economic stability, financial security and building strong economic foundations.

There is not a lot about hospitality and welcoming the refugee – that isn’t the kind of talk that wins votes.

And this is why Jesus is so radical – he turns all the normal expectations of how we should behave and what is important upside down.

He says we should rest and trust God, we should provide shelter for all, and maybe most importantly – God will bring enormous growth and provision from the small and unloveable. God is all about transformation.

Just as the tiny mustard seed grows and provides shelter for others, we can trust God that whatever small actions we might take, whatever prayers we may offer, whatever contribution we feel able to make, no matter how small, God can use to create something amazing.

We can scatter seeds of kindness, of generosity, of empathy, seeds of compassion, of justice and of hospitality.

We don’t need to know how, just as most of us don’t really know how mustard seeds grow in the soil, we can just scatter the seeds, offer what we have, and let God do the rest.

So maybe today, we can take time to stop, to rest and to trust that God’s Kingdom will come – in God’s time, in God’s way?

And maybe we can have confidence that God will take what we can offer and transform it into something greater – we just have to keep scattering the seeds.