Word to the Wise
Sunday, June 16, 2024 - 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time - B
[Ezek 17:22-24; 2 Cor 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34]This is how it is with the kingdom of God; it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and through it all the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.....It is like a mustard seed that, when it is sown in the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth. But once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade.....[Mark]
The power of Jesus' parables lies in the appeal to ordinary life and to the power of God's creation all around us. We can take the ordinary for granted until the ordinary is taken from us and we then realize how much we depended on it. We can also forget that what we consider ordinary is not a static but a dynamic reality, always in evolution. The steps in that evolution may be tiny and not easy to observe until the changes become more apparent to our senses.
I am an avid but very amateru gardener. As a matter of principle, I grow everything from seed. The change that takes place in a basil seed or tomato seed to produce a plant thousands of times the size of the seed is truly amazing. Yes, there are horticulturalists and botanists who can give scientific explanations of each step of the way, but in the end they cannot tell us why this happens. Faith points to the creative force of a loving God who has handed unto us all kinds of seeds, both physical and spiritual that enable us to participate in the act of creation. The freedom and power to enable or destroy creation comes with the human being and the misuse of that gift of free will is evident in the crisis of climate change.
The kingdom of God on earth has been given, like seeds, to those of us who believe in that kingdom. In some cases, we can not only plant but control the environment to facilitate growth. In others, we have to leave the seed to grow as best it can. As a full-time itinerant preacher for some years, I rarely got to see the long term results of my efforts. As a campus minister, I have had the joy of seeing seeds of the gospel sprout and grow so I can be in touch with former student parishioners from undergrad to marriage to grandchildren. Parents experience this far more profoundly. As a gardener, I have to plant seeds if I expect to have plants. At baptism, we are not only handed seeds to plant, but we are, ourselves, seeds to sprout and grow and create more seeds to spread the kingdom of God. AMEN