Musical Prelude and Service.

Sermon
By Ellie Bloomfield
Matthew 4:26-32
When I was a little girl, there was one sure sign of spring: milk cartons on the windowsills. That was what my mom used to start the seedlings for our garden and flowerbeds. Tomatoes, petunias, marigolds, zinnias—she would slice off the side of the carton, fill it with soil, and then plant the seeds, water them well, cover them with plastic wrap and set them along the windowsills. They were like tiny greenhouses, and I used to look every day to see if those seeds had sprouted yet. Once they were a certain height, the plastic needed to be removed, and once that was done, I got to be the waterer!
I knew, too, that once those seedlings got to be a few inches tall, that one of my very favourite things was about to happen: we would be planting the garden! For me, planting the garden was as good as decorating the Christmas tree—and it sort of followed the same pattern. My brother and I would wait—with varying degrees of patience—while my dad set the tree in its stand and made sure it was secure and put the lights on it…in the meantime, my mom was getting the other decorations out of their boxes and setting them out for us.
When it came to the garden, my dad would get out his shovel and head down to the back. While he dug holes for the potatoes, my brother and I would finally get to open some of the seed packages that had tantalized us for days. Just the peas, and yellow and green beans, though—we would carefully open their little cardboard boxes and pour them into the little bowls of water to soak. Once that was done, we were allowed to head down to the back ourselves, where we continued to wait while dad got everything ready for those potatoes to be planted.
Oh, that was some excitement! One of my earliest memories is my dad cutting up a seed potato and explaining what the eyes were and showing me how to place it in the hole he had dug for it. And while we were planting those potatoes, he would start making rows for the other things that would be planted—the things that grew from really little seeds, that only my mom was allowed to plant.
But every year, we grew—and so did our fine motor skills—and we graduated from potatoes to the beans and peas, then beets, and lettuce—but always, I had my eyes on those carrot seeds. Mostly, because one of the most marvelous gastronomic experiences on our planet is to eat a carrot that you have just pulled from your garden—but also because I wasn’t allowed to yet—and then, finally, one year it happened. My mom opened a packet of carrot seeds and handed them to me. Oh, how excited I was!
And oh, how surprised my mom was when I asked her for some more just a few minutes later. Carrot seeds are pretty small to work with—and I had just planted an entire package of them in the first two-and-a-half feet of the row.
Now, while I have been telling you this story, you have been listening—and you have been thinking and making connections to your own lives. Maybe you’ve been thinking about a garden you have right now…or maybe you have been remembering your own experiences as a child in a garden, maybe when someone first showed you how to crack open a peapod right off the plant, or about the times you showed your children how to plant seeds…or maybe you started thinking about carrots and lettuce and wondering whether you’ve got everything you need for a salad later. Or maybe you have been thinking about what Joanne read from Mark 4 and you’ve predicted that I will soon make the
connection between those little carrot seeds and the mustard seeds that Jesus said were like the Kingdom of God.
That’s how stories work: each of you has heard the same words, we have this shared experience, but because of who we are and what we have experienced in our own lives, we experience the story in a different way. That, for me, is the wonder of the parables that Jesus told. Hearing a story and actively working through the truth of it and its meaning for our own lives: what a marvelous gift—and duty—we’ve been given. To think…and to ask questions… What is this story? How does it relate to what I already know? How does it relate to who I am and to what I do? And will anything change now?
Very soon I am going to make that connection between the little carrot seeds and the mustard seeds, but before I do that, I’m going to backtrack a bit. Remember what Joanne read before we got to the part about the mustard seed?
Mark 4 verses 26-29: He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”
Now, my dad and my mom were both amazing gardeners—they cut down trees, and hauled soil, and turned a quarter acre of swampy Northwestern Ontario bush into a garden that fed our family of four for most of the year. When my dad planted potatoes, potatoes grew. And when my mom planted radishes, radishes grew. We can have some control over the growing conditions, and we can choose which seeds we sow, but the growth process? That’s within the seed itself. And no matter what, we reap what we sow.
I have though a lot about that sentence over the years and as I planned this talk for today, and I realized that in all the times I’ve heard it used, it has always been as a threat or a warning—a summation of someone’s negative experience, a ‘getting what they deserved’ sort of thing.
What if we turned that warning into a promise? You reap what you sow….
My parents planted more than vegetable seeds when we worked together in the garden. They planted a seed that grew into knowledge about gardening, a seed that grew into respect for the earth, the land, and anyone who works it, a seed that grew into the understanding of how important it is to work together as a family on a project, seeds of love….
But those little carrot seeds? Well, my mom wasn’t just surprised when she saw what I had done. She was a little angry, too. After all, it was late in the day, she wouldn’t be able to buy more carrot seeds until the next day and we lived out of town, and of course, there was the waste…. But together we went back down the row and did our best to discern the seeds from the dirt and plant them the right distance apart. A seed took root in my heart that evening—one that sprouted immediately. That was a sense of guilt that I had not only disappointed my mom after begging her to let me plant the carrots, but that I had doubled or tripled her work.
And whenever I hear about the size of the mustard seed, at the back of my mind, from my experience, comes my memory of that row of carrot seeds. We laughed about it in later years, but deep down, I still feel echoes of that shame and guild, 55 years later. That was not a seed that was intentionally planted—it is definitely a weed, but it grew all the same. And I bet that some of you have
similar pernicious weeds growing in your memories, growing from a seed that was very tiny: a thoughtless word spoken, a careless action, something that took perhaps just a moment in time.
We know that our hearts and minds are fertile soil for all sorts of seeds. Jesus knew that too—and when he talked about the kingdom of heaven being like a mustard seed, he wasn’t talking about a hard-to-grow exotic plant. The seeds are tiny—but the plants he was talking about grow quickly, have an incredibly high yield, and in fact would probably be classified as an invasive species. The Mishnah, rabbinical teachings written down around the year 200, set down rules that mustard should, in fact, be planted in separate fields where it could be controlled.
You may not like the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven being compared to the growth of something that might be considered an invasive weed but think about it.
We do not know when what we say or do plants a seed in someone’s heart or mind. But if we, as God’s children, lived every day in that awareness, with that mindfulness, would things be different? We reap what we sow.
What would Dunnville be like if we remembered the parable of the mustard seed before we spoke or acted, or before we chose not to speak or to act?
We reap what we sow! We can use that sentence to pass judgement on others or to shake our heads in warning….or we can use it as a promise.
Mark 4:30-32: Again he said, “what shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.”
Thanks be to God!

 

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