Noticing The Kingdom

 

Mark 4:26-34

Pentecost 4 Lectionary 11 June 16, 2024

Epiphany Lutheran Church Richmond, Virginia

With my first mug of coffee in the morning, I go out and sit on the screened porch. It’s a time to just sit, and to accomplish not a single thing. Instead, it’s a few minutes to calm my monkey brain that’s been going full speed since the moment I woke up. It’s a time for listening to the birds in the trees – songbirds and the woodpecker farther away in the woods. It’s a time to watch the activities of the bluebird couple who have built a nest in the bluebird box, and the cardinal couple who have built a nest in a boxwood 100 feet away; a time for watching the sun first peek through the trees. It’s a time of paying attention to the freshets of air, the breezes. It’s a time to pay attention to this moment.

It’s sabbath time!

During these 15 minutes, or so of sabbath time, I become aware: of what God is doing and has been doing when I was asleep, of the natural world that continues whether I’m paying attention to it or not. As my monkey brain quiets, I come to remember that life is not all about me. I remember that each day – this day! -- is a gift from God; that my physical ability to get up and walk out of my bedroom is a gift from God on this day; that my mental awareness of who I am and where I am is a gift from God on this day. I come to give thanks for this day. Who knows if God will give me another?

Sabbath time allows us to center in God’s presence, and to be conscious of God’s grace.

In his recent newsletter article and in his sermon a couple of weeks ago, Pastor Joseph suggested that we use this time of Pastor Phillip’s sabbatical to receive the gift of sabbath in our own lives. You can begin by setting aside as little as 15 minutes! When can that happen for you? Are you a morning person, like me? I have a friend who would close his office door for those minutes, at noon. If you’re a night owl, your prayer could be just before bed. Those minutes are a gift of time. All time is a gift, of course, from God; sabbath time is an opportunity to be conscious of that. During sabbath time, you and I are freed from the need to accomplish anything, to achieve anything, or to “do something constructive” (as so many of our parents urged us when we were growing up!). Even a few minutes of conscious sabbath is time to pay attention, and that’s important: because, often, you and I are not paying attention to what God is doing!

* * *

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus tells two parables describing the Kingdom of God, and I’m struck by two things. First, the Kingdom grows because God causes it to grow. You and I are not responsible for that; it’s not up to us! And, second, when we’re not paying attention, we miss it!

That’s especially true in the first parable: Jesus 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.”

“Would sleep and rise night and day,…” You know what it’s like, don’t you, to be going through the motions, day after day: going to work so you can come home to go to sleep so you can get up the next morning to go to work? Day after day, night and day, losing the ability to pay attention to this day!

What makes it worse is that there’s so much to distract us from what God is doing, on this day, as we’re going through the motions, night and day. All those Instagram and face book posts, all those Tik Tok videos, all those emails; how many of them are about anything that we really need to be paying attention to? How many of them are simply distractions from what is important?

I love how David Bentley Hart translates these words of the parable. Listen for the last words of the sentence: “Such is the kingdom of God: just as a man might cast the seed upon the earth, and might sleep and arise night and day, and the seed sprouts and increases while he does not observe.”¹ While he does not observe! While he’s not even paying attention to it! How often does that describe you? (It sure does describe me, too often!)

* * *

In our back yard, Patty and I have some variegated euonymus bushes, and the deer love to eat them when I’m not systematic about spraying Liquid Fence. One day a few months ago, I discovered that the deer had reduced the bushes to stalks, leaving only a leaf here and there. So I pruned them back pretty severely, hoping they’d come back and fill out, even though they’d be much smaller. And then I just plain forgot about them – until a weeks or so ago, when I noticed how many hundreds of new shoots that branches and leaves have emerged from those stalks! The bushes are flourishing – on their own! I didn’t cause that to happen. I hadn’t even noticed!

* * *

That’s the grace and hope and joy in the parables Jesus tells about the kingdom of God. Isn’t our default to think that it’s all up to us? That, if anything is going to be accomplished, it’s you and I who need to make it happen? And, if it’s not happening, then it’s because we’re not working hard enough to make it happen, to get results?

Instead, look at how Jesus is describing the kingdom of God in these parables: that any growth, any results, are what God is doing. Certainly, you and I are called to work for the kingdom. But all we can do is plant the seeds, in the words that we speak and the acts that we undertake. What grace there is in this: that any growth, any results, are up to God!

Perhaps that’s why we pray over and over, “Your kingdom come” – because that’s up to God. In the Small Catechism, Luther explains that petition in the Lord’s Prayer with these words: “In fact, God’s kingdom comes on its own without our prayer, but we ask in this prayer that it may also come to us.”

All of us are here right now because others have planted the seeds of the kingdom in us – those who who mentored us in the life of Christ, those who have modeled the life of faith. But they haven’t caused those seeds to sprout and grow in us. That’s what God is doing!

* * *

As it happens, this building was full of joy and noise and activity this past week – as the children, youth, and adults in Vacation Bible School were immersed in all of this. There was actual dirt. There were actual seeds. Groups of children were named for flowers: roses, tulips, zinnias. (I never knew before last week that there are two “n”s in “zinnias!”) The theme of Vacation Bible School was the first parable Jesus tells in this fourth chapter of the gospel of Mark: the Parable of the Sower.

This morning’s parables continue the same agricultural imagery. The kingdom of God grows when we’re not even noticing it, because it’s God who causes the growth; it’s not up to us. The kingdom of God grows from the smallest of seeds to become like the largest of bushes. Every word and act of love is a seed of the kingdom.

Becoming conscious of this, paying attention to this, is most often only possible during sabbath time: that pause, that full stop – even if it’s only for 15 minutes! – that clears the way for awareness.

In this, in fact, is an antidote to the despair that’s so much around us and is so easy to fall into. Where is there hopefulness? It’s in what God is doing!

* * *

Our lives, as followers of Jesus, are rooted in our experiences of God’s love. We respond to God’s love by loving God back – which means loving other people. And, as the old saying puts it, “Justice is love in action.”

And so, wherever we see that: there is the kingdom of God. Whenever we receive that love from God, whenever we receive acts and words of love from others: there is the kingdom of God. Whenever we speak and act with love towards others: there is the kingdom of God.

A decoration for Vacation Bible School that’s still up in the commons area names “love,” “generosity,” and “kindness” as three fruits growing from kingdom seeds. That made me think of Paul’s list of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”² Whenever we receive these, whenever we enact these, isn’t that the kingdom of God bearing fruit?

How do you sow the seeds of the kingdom of God in your daily life? That’s all we can do: to sow the seeds, speaking in love, acting in of love.

Where do you see the fruit of the kingdom, growing, in you and in others, in daily life?

What joy there is in that!

And that fruit is not up to us. It’s up to God!

What grace there is in that!

Indeed, what hopefulness there is in that!

In the name of God, who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pastor Andy Ballentine

1 David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation (Yale University Press, 2017)

2 Galatians 5:22-23