Seeds of Hope 6-13-21
Ezek 17:22-24
Thus says the Lord God: I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out. I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain. On the mountain height of Israel I will plant it, in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind. All the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord. I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the Lord have spoken; I will accomplish it.
Mark 4:26-34
He also said, “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. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It 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.” With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.
Prayer – Mighty God, to you belong the mysteries of the universe. You transform shepherds into kings, the smallest seeds into magnificent trees, and hardened hearts into loving ones. Plant seeds of your life-giving Spirit in us, re-creating us in your image, and shape us into your purposes, through Jesus Christ – amen.
I want to share two stories with you to start off this morning – pretty powerful stories and how they may relate to our gospel passage about seeds. The first story is about a crime-scene in Chicago some 80+ years ago. Some of you may remember that back in the 1930’s there was a man in Chicago who called himself a ‘businessman,’ but who most of the public knew him as a gangster – Public Enemy #1 – a man named Al Capone. He virtually controlled the city of Chicago for an entire decade, involved in everything from buying off government officials to running bootlegged liquor to gambling to prostitution to racketeering to murder.
Because Capone was very smart, as well as very corrupt, he employed a very good lawyer – a man named ‘Easy Eddie.’ Eddie was such a good lawyer that he managed to keep Capone out of jail for a long time, in spite of massive amounts of money and massive numbers of police officers authorized specifically to bring Capone to justice.
Because Eddie was such a good lawyer, Capone paid him well – well enough that he could afford a huge mansion, so large that it occupied an entire city block of Chicago. His home was filled with every convenience of the day and a full-time staff. Eddie apparently enjoyed his high-living life style, and for a long time didn’t seem to give a second thought to the corruption and evil that he was helping to support.
He had a wife he loved and one son whom he adored. Nothing was too good for his boy, and Eddie saw to it that he had the best of everything – clothes, toys, education and cars as he got older. Despite his own career path, Eddie also did his best to teach his son right from wrong. He wanted his boy to be a better man than he knew himself to be – perhaps he was trying to plant some different seeds – seeds of hope.
Yet, with all of his wealth and power and fame, there were two things Eddie couldn’t give his son – a good name, and a good example of honesty and integrity. So one day, Eddie made a very difficult decision. He decided to rectify the wrongs he had done, as well as he could, by going to the authorities and agreeing to testify against Capone. When he did, his testimony was a key piece of evidence that finally sent Capone to prison. Eddie’s decision came with a very high price. Capone had no mercy for anyone he believed was disloyal to him and only a couple of months after Eddie’s testimony against Capone, Eddie was gunned down on a lonely Chicago street.
The second story comes from a very different setting – it comes from the South Pacific during WW II. Stationed there on an aircraft carrier called the Lexington was a young Lieutenant Commander named Butch O’Hare, who was a fighter pilot. One day, O’Hare’s squadron was sent on a mission. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until after he was already airborne that he checked his fuel gauge and realized that someone had forgotten to top of his fuel tank. It meant that he wouldn’t have enough fuel to complete his mission and make it back to the carrier. So, his squadron leader told him to return to the carrier immediately.
Reluctantly Butch dropped out of the formation and headed back to the fleet. As he was returning to the Lexington, he saw in the distance a squadron of Japanese aircraft coming toward the American fleet. Since the other fighters were gone on the mission he had just been ordered to leave, the ships in the fleet were all but defenseless.
Butch knew he couldn’t get the squadron back in time to save the fleet, so he did the only thing it seemed possible. To divert them from the ships, he flew straight into the formation of Japanese planes. He charged into their midst, firing his wing mounted 50 calibers, damaging as many of the Japanese planes as possible until all his ammunition was spent. Even then he continued to attack, diving at other planes, hoping to clip a wing or tail, in order to damage their ability to fly, and actually downing five enemy aircraft. Finally, and somewhat surprisingly, the Japanese fighters took off in the other direction. Even more surprisingly, O’Hare and his tattered fighter made it back to the Lexington.
Not surprisingly, Butch O’Hare’s act of heroism became instant news. Some of you may remember the black and white newsreels that used to run in movie theaters before the main attraction, and the film from the gun-camera mounted on O’Hare’s plane was played in every movie theater across the country. Butch was invited to the White House by President Roosevelt, where he received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the first naval aviator to do so. One year later, Butch O’Hare was killed in aerial combat at the age of 29.
His hometown, Chicago, honored him by naming their airport after him. If you ever fly through Chicago O’Hare Airport, you might stop between Terminal 1 and 2 and see Butch’s memorial and his Medal of Honor. And you might reflect that Butch O’Hare was the son of Easy Eddie O’Hare. (Sharyl Peterson, Seeds)
Our gospel passage this morning comes from Mark’s fourth chapter where Jesus offers several parables about seeds and sowing. To what can I compare the kingdom of God, asked Jesus one day before his disciples? The kingdom of God is like, well, it’s like a tiny mustard seed. The kingdom of God is like that tiny, insignificant mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds on the earth. Yet, when that seed grows, says Jesus, it will grow into a bush, actually a weed about several feet high.
The little mustard seed might seem like a sweet image, as if it’s the underdog, the good seed that survives against all odds and flourishes. However, during Jesus’ day, no self-respecting farmer would plant a mustard seed because it is uncontrollable weed that can take over the garden; it had a tendency to take over where it is not wanted. Think kudzu along the interstate or the bamboo in my backyard. I’m sure Jesus’ hearers were both surprised and offended by his comparison. A weed? The kingdom of God is a weed? I can imagine that Jesus’ disciples were overwhelmingly let down by Jesus’ suggestion about God’s kingdom and a mustard seed. I can imagine that they wanted God’s kingdom to be something great and lasting, not small and insignificant much less a weed.
We must also keep in mind that Mark’s Gospel was written about 70 BCE, or 70 years or so after Jesus’ death. The Romans had either already destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem or were about to. For Mark’s hearers, imagining the kingdom of God within the context of the Roman occupation, hope would be an important seed to plant – no matter how small or seemingly insignificant that hope might look like. For Mark to use this story from Jesus’ time may not make sense to Jesus’ hearers, but from when Mark wrote this gospel, hoping and trusting that God was indeed going to bring small pockets of faith into being was a gift and seed of hope beyond imagining.
One of the best things about Jesus is his stories. If you expect your religious leaders theoretical or immediately practical, apophatic and aloof, obvious and orderly, direct and straightforward, then go worship obviousness and practicality rather than Jesus. On the other hand, if you delight in being teased, cajoled, surprised, jolted and tossed about, there’s nobody better than Jesus when he’s on a roll with his stories. “Tell us who God really is,” we ask, and Jesus replies not with a lecture or an enunciation of biblical principles but with a story, “A farmer went out to scatter seed . . . “
In word and deed, Jesus was and is a parable, the storyteller who becomes the story. And a favorite parable of us preachers is told in this morning’s lesson from Mark’s gospel. A farmer sows some seed, uncertain of what will happen, but goes away trusting that the seed sown, is a seed of hope that will grow and provide sustenance. The farmer does nothing to make the seed germinate, the farmer simply throws out seeds, hoping they will take root and flourish. Seed sowers are people of great hope and faith. To dare to plant a seed is to put oneself at the mercy of the future, to risk failure, to hazard your work to factors beyond your control. Harvest is hoped for, but never guaranteed. Still, harvest is promised and every farmer and preacher clings to the hope that words, seeds of hope, will take root and grow.
We don’t hear Jesus’ words with the same filters that pick up these meanings and associations, and yet, it does pose questions for us about the reign of God which seems to be found in some of the most unlikely and unexpected and unworthy people and places after all. Just as the parable baffles and surprises us, so do God’s ways, which are mysterious and deep and bringing something great out of something very, very small, and the wonder and power of it all.
In her sermon, The Automatic Earth, former Episcopal priest and now college professor, Barbara Brown Taylor, focuses on our anxiety amid the uncertainty here, living between the planting and the harvest. Symptoms of that anxiety include perfectionism, driven-ness, moral outrage, restlessness, dread of being alone and estrangement from God. Anxiety, she says, is “an occupational hazard of being a finite creature in a universe of infinite possibilities” and suggests that we repent from our conviction that we must work out our own salvation, on the one hand, and that, on the other hand, we are doomed to fail. “What is absent when anxiety is present – hope and faith that God will be God, that the automatic earth will yield its fruit, that life can be trusted.” The antidote to this anxiety is hope and faith and courage chosen over and over and over again to scatter your seeds.
Edward Bowen, a Presbyterian pastor, shares the story of a woman in Chicago, today is Chicago stories I guess, anyway, every day on her way to work she would come across a rather heavy-set, middle-aged man in a shabby coat, who asked the passerby for some spare change. And each day, that woman would say, ‘Good morning’ to him and give him a few coins. But after almost a year of that routine, the beggar disappeared.
Some months later, that man with the shabby coat once again was back on the sidewalk where he had always been. But as the woman on her way to work reached into her purse for some coins to give him, the man stopped her and said, “No, today I came here to thank you for helping me all those days when you did. You won’t be seeing me here anymore, because I got a job.” And having said that, he reached into a bag and handed the woman a doughnut and explained that he had returned there to thank all the people who had helped him over the previous year.
Now you can imagine that many of the people who gave that man handouts over the year probably thought that they were throwing their money away. Sure, they gave him some coins, but they probably never expected that anything good would actually come about from what they did. But again, Jesus tells us to be prepared to be surprised, to trust in seeds of hope. Even a seed as small as mustard seed can bring hope and new life in unexpected ways. God’s kingdom has a way of popping up in some very surprising and powerful ways.
There is so much around us today, as there always has been, that may press us down in spirit. We see war and hatred, prejudice and injustice, hunger and violence, the everyday grind of ordinary lives, the apparent homelessness and intractability of some problems and conditions. It is difficult indeed to know the ways of God, so often hidden from view, or not detected or noticed by us. Nevertheless, God is at work always and everywhere, bringing about God’s will in unexpected and marvelous ways, like the amazing things that can grow from the tiniest of seeds. I am reminded of the words of Henry David Thoreau who said, “I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”
We live not so much in optimism that thinks we can fix everything but out of the hope that God is in charge of everything, and we are simply called to participate in what God is doing in the world. That is why we find flashes of brilliant hope and the promise of a greater day to come. They may only be flashes, but they are powerful epiphanies nevertheless. Here and there, in longed for reconciliation within families and among friends, in healing from illness and grief, in the decisions by a community that places its most vulnerable members at the top of the agenda rather than at the bottom, in sharing and celebration and the release of past grudges, in acts of great and unexpected generosity even if it is only a few coins, in the end of war and the seeking of peace, in the breaking of bread and the nourishment of our souls and our bodies, in giving voice to the voiceless and the lifting up of hope of those in despair, we see the mysterious and powerful seeds of God’s grace and hope that can sustain. That is the power of even the smallest of seeds, seeds of hope – thanks be to God – amen.