Preached by Winton Boyd on Sunday, June 14, 2009
Each year as I volunteered in the fields at the Vermont Valley farm, the season had its predictable joys. Early summer – like this week – lettuce was abundant, strawberries started making their way.
By late July and early August – it was expected that we would harvest sweet corn and melons.
But each year on the farm had its surprises – an intense hot spell at the right time meant the peppers were growing like wild and instead of doing something else – all hands were put on picking ripe peppers. A large rain storm resulted in water in the fields and the zucchini’s had to be harvested quickly to avoid rotting. Not in the plan, unless of course, the plan is deviate from a plan so one can respond to the moment. Of course, good gardeners and farmers are appreciative of the mystery involved in growing things, and the humility. And so on this day when we will dedicate our Vegetable Village, it seems apropos that the lectionary texts seem to draw upon images from the early stages of a growing season like we are in right now.
In the first parable we read, …(the famer or gardener) would sleep and rise night and day, the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. No matter how well we study the seeds and plants, attend to factors of weather and pests and water… in the end, growth is always somewhat of a mystery. This, Jesus says, is like the realm of God, experiencing God in our midst. Surprising, mysterious, out of our control, full growth in ways we might not expect or imagine.
I recently finished the book Still Alice by Lisa Genova. It is a novel about a 50-year-old Harvard professor, mother of three young adults, who develops early onset Alzheimer’s. The story chronicles Alice’s rapid decline in memory and functioning; and her family’s reaction and various ways of relating to her. One of the subplots is the amazing transformation in the relationship between Alice and her actress daughter who lives in LA, hasn’t gone to college and with whom Alice has a very strained relationship. As the two other siblings and father struggle to come to terms with Alice’s changing abilities, this youngest daughter, Lydia, seems to be the only one understands that despite her increasing dementia, Alice is indeed still Alice.
Toward the end of the book, after Alice took too many sleeping pills because of her increasingly limited memory, she wakes us beside Lydia
“How long have I been asleep?
A couple of days now.
Oh, no, I’m sorry.
Its okay Mom. It’s good to hear your voice. Do you think you took too many pills?
I don’t remember. I could’ve. I didn’t mean to.Alice looked at Lydia in pieces, close up snapshots of her features. She recognized each one like people recognized the house they grew up in, a parent’s voice, the creases of their own hands, instinctively, without effort or conscious consideration. But strangely, she had a hard time identifying Lydia as a whole.
You’re so beautiful, said Alice, I’m so afraid of looking at you and not knowing who you are.
I think that even if you don’t know who I am someday, you’ll still know that I love you.
What if I see you, and I don’t know that you’re my daughter, and I don’t know that you love me?
Then, I’ll tell you that I do, and you’ll believe me.
Alice liked that. (p. 230-31)
Later, even further along in her progression with the disease, Lydia is “watching” or “babysitting her mom and says,
“Hey mom, will you listen to me do this monologue I’m working on for (acting) class and tell me what you think it’s about? Not the story…you don’t have to remember the words, just tell me what you think it’s about emotionally. When I’m done, tell me how I make you feel, okay?
Alice watched and listened and focused beyond the words as the actress spoke. She saw her eyes become desperate, search, pleading for truth. She saw them land softly and gratefully on it.
Her voice felt at first tentative and scared. Slowly, without getting louder, it grew more confident and then joyful, playing sometimes like a song…Her body and voice created an energy that filled Alice and moved her to tears.
The actress stopped and came back into herself. She looked at Alice and waited.
Okay, what do you feel?
I feel love. It’s about love.
The actress squealed, rushed over to Alice, kissed her on the cheek and smiled, every crease of her face delighted.
Did I get it right? asked Alice.
You did, Mom. You got it exactly right. (p.292)
These two grew in love in ways not possible before Alice developed Alzheimer’s. In loving one another in spite of life’s strange ambiguities, including those as painful and unwanted as a mother forgetting her own daughter, they experienced the realm of God in its mystery and beauty and grace. Like the farmer rising in the morning to see growth in the garden, their faithfulness in life allowed them to come one day to the unexpected and joyful realization of God’s Spirit in their midst.
In that same parable, Jesus continued, But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle because the harvest has come. In the realm of God, Jesus seems to be reminding us, we respond to the moment, to the grace at hand.
Tony is an 40 something, effervescent, high energy Italian American I have gotten to know through my work as a retreat leader in a program called Courage to Lead. I just finished the fourth of 5 retreats with the same group of clergy and other leaders from around the country at a center called Kirkridge in the Pocono Mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Tony is a Catholic Campus Minister in Cleveland. At every one of the four retreats he’s been on he has arrived a tad bit late full of energy and laughter and joy. Each night he stays up well past midnight – walking the center’s outdoor labyrinth, building bonfires for himself or anyone else who will stay up, and even canoeing in the little pond. When the group is assigned journaling exercises, he never finishes in the allotted time because he is furiously trying to reflect on his life. At meals, he always eats double what the rest of eat and talks twice as much as anyone else at the table. He is engaging and magnetic, loves life in a large way, and is a joy to be around. Just before this last retreat, he spent about 10 days in Italy, returning to a small village he lived in 27 years ago while in college to attend the wedding of an Italian friend he made at that time.
Having just returned the night before the retreat started, his heart was full of stories. One of the many things he did was spend a day just before the wedding helping the family by volunteering to chauffer four elderly aunts of the groom around several small villages as they ran a day’s worth of errands. With his broken Italian skills, he listened to them discuss family politics around the wedding. He ate meals with them. He joked with them. When they inquired about the CD he was playing on the car stereo, he told talked to them about the two Cleveland folksingers who put love poetry of the 12th century Afghani mystic poet Rumi to music (since they were arch conservative Catholics, he decided not to tell them Rumi was a Muslim mystic poet). They absorbed his metaphorical descriptions of Rumi. They laughed at his broken Italian, he laughed at their jokes. As he dropped them off at the end of the day, they thanked him and told him that because of him, they had ‘forgotten their pains” – physical and otherwise. One can imagine that for those four aunts, this crazy American was the highlight not only of the wedding, but possibly their whole year.
Responding in the moment, to the life in front of him, cherishing it in all its beauty and particularity, seeing in the eyes of old women the Spirit of the Holy, Tony embraced the realm of God that day. Living with the attentiveness of a gardener with sickle at the ready, he modeled Jesus’ parable to be alert to the work of the Spirit at odd times, in odd places and in odd ways. Today may just be the day.
The beauty of Jesus’ parables is that they tapped into the lived life of his audience. They weren’t esoteric, they weren’t abstract ideas. Pulling on images of the gardens and fields all around him, Jesus spoke simply and passionately about the realm of God as he understood it.
The beauty of faith is that we too can see the realm of God, the energy and ethics of Jesus, the grace and joy of the Spirit and the fruit of the God’s earth all around us. In re-reading these parables, we are reminded that if we but look around, if we but open our hearts and eyes and lives to the Holy, to the Divine, we too realize we have experienced the realm of God in our midst.
That same mystic poet that Tony talked about, Rumi, once said, “let the beauty we love be what we do.” Jesus said faith is like a mustard seed – the smallest of seeds on earth but one that grows into one of the greatest shrubs. May we embrace the mystery of life, relish the moments of holy encounter in our lives and in so doing know the joy and passion of a Spirited, loving life. Amen
Mark 4:26-34
The Parable of the Growing Seed
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.’
The Parable of the Mustard Seed
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.’
