Seeds of truth, beauty, innovation
Based on Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23.
My first several weeks spent quarantined at home did not yield tidier closets and drawers. My covid-19 flirtation with sourdough bread was thoroughly disappointing. And it was a struggle to get the kids to play board games with us after dinner, even though they had no where else to go.
However, after long days exploring new and safe ways to be Church and oodles of zoom calls in my dining room, I burst out of the house every Saturday morning to play in the dirt. It was a lovely spring to observe up close and personal.
Celandine Poppies
I discovered native celandine poppies growing in clumps between the gutter down spout and the pine trees. Celandine means swallows - these are the flowers of early spring, heralding the return of the swallows each year. They mark the new season, and they stick around long enough that I had time to transplant them all around my pine trees.
These are beautiful flowers, bright yellow and simple yet showy flowers with four flat petals, crowning a bushy clump of lacy lobed bluish-green leaves. I presume that our Celandine poppies were pollinated by our local team of bees, and thanks to the bees they grew lovely silvery fuzzy fruit pendants. The overall effect is a cheerful little flower headed that looks like it’s home from market with fuzzy packages in each hand.
I want to give credit for these lovely clumps of cheerful flowers where credit is due - the same little chipmunks that drive my dogs crazy by hiding in the down spouts must be the sowers of the seeds, planting Celandine poppies behind them as they ran for the safety of either the trees or the downspout. Inadvertently sowing seeds, I imagine, as all they know is that the fuzzy fruit packages taste delicious.
As they inadvertently drop the seeds into the moist, pine needle undergrowth, they drop a little of God’s creation magic into the soil.
Each seed is a container complete with a starter kit for roots, and a starter kit for the poppies.
Drop a seed in the ideal acidity of the pine needle floor, shade the area with the house and pine trees, and water it with all the outflow from the downspouts, and abracadabra, fifty or more Celandine poppies dotted the ground in early spring.
The same God who connected the chipmunk to the Celandine poppy fruit to the perfect soil and shade and water combination also connects us to the conditions that most glorify God with truth, beauty and innovation.
God sows in each one of us the seeds of truth, beauty, innovation.
Given that we have more intellectual capacity than chipmunks, no offense to these cute creatures, God partners with us to sow the seeds. God utilizes us to plant seeds, and God entrusts us with seeing to the type of conditions that best support the starter kits within us.
God put in each one of us a starter kit for roots, and a starter kit for a beautiful growth- to grow a flowering plant that feeds others, brings joy to others, is destined to flourish.
We rely on both- the roots that nourish us, and the growth that nourishes the world around us.
Jesus came to a rooted people, a people who had deep roots in a religious tradition that offered meaning, offered an ethical and moral way to live, offered a way to be connected intimately with God. Jesus came to pollinate these rooted people to enhance the fruit they bore for the world around them, especially in the face of soul-crushing oppression under Roman occupancy.
Jesus pollinated using parables, and parables are really tough to understand.
Parables are disturbing stories that threatened the people’s secure mythologically constructed world. When Jesus told a parable, people did not smile and nod. They were startled, confused, shocked, maybe even terrified. The mythologies they held dear may have trapped them, but they were familiar, and the parables undoing the trap was frightening.
Parables still challenge the assumptions we hold, the unnoticed frameworks we habitually use to interpret our lives, our thinking. Parable expose traps that have us in their grip.
Jesus uses parables to pollinate the people, to move from what is fruitless unconscious mythology to create a new way of thinking, a new way of making meaning. Jesus uses parables to disrupt, to wake up, to remind people that it is alright to take some risks- that the starter kit for life and joy and flourishing is already within them, that it’s time to bear some fruit and share it, it’s time to grow.
A parable is more of a lifelong conversation partner than a riddle to solve.
Studying the parables of Jesus opens us to a little disruption, a little self-examination. Well, goodness sakes, following Jesus in general really does that as well. Being a Jesus follower often disrupts some things we’d rather leave alone, some old ways of thinking or acting that we’d rather not examine under a microscope.
So many things become much less entertaining when we let the power of Jesus disrupt us- things like dishing about other people’s failings, petty arguments, our closely guarded sense of our own status, mythologies of shame and secrecy that lurk in the darkness. When Jesus comes in, with his teachings and healing powers, and enters our lives, and when we give in to that teaching and healing- so many demons go running for the hills.
The demons go running for the hills, and the old mythologies lose their power over us, and we find our lives open to the freedom, open to the joy, open to the clarity God offers us in that original starter kit within our soul.
To follow Jesus in such a way that it bears fruit in our lives, that it bears freedom, joy, and clarity, we want to say to ourselves the following - and often:
“Let me consider that idea/perspective I hold dear in the light of Jesus’ teaching.”
Calmly, with trust in God, we can discern what is mythology, and what is rooted in Jesus’ teaching. We believe more in the active, ongoing power of Jesus to change us and society than we believe in the power of the old mythologies that choke out new growth.
A word about Jesus’ teaching- to hold something up against Jesus’ life and teaching, we need to know about Jesus’ life and teaching. For many of us, that’s where we go next. We commit to an earnest, scholarly and spiritual study of Jesus. If that’s your next step, I highly recommend a wonderful book that you probably already own: Luke.
Yes, I know that we are reading Matthew today, but Luke is my favorite. And I recommend my favorite of the four Jesus stories to you.
Read Luke. Make a list as you go about Jesus- What did he teach & do? How did he teach & do it? If you want, you can join me in a new spiritual practice that I’m starting this week- writing out the Gospel of Luke by hand. Slowly a few verses or a chapter at a sitting. I want to really know Jesus, so that I can know his teaching and apply it to my life. So I can experience more joy, more freedom, more clarity.
As you can imagine, holding on to the old mythologies is a lot easier than understanding and applying Jesus’ teachings in our lives. Following Jesus has its challenges, yet if we pause to notice, we find that growth starter kit already taking shape within, by the grace of God that calls you to grow and flourish. Not only is the growth for the benefit of each of us- as individual followers of Jesus - the growth is God’s gracious gift for the people and communities and institutions all around us. This is the way out of whatever mess or problem or intractable situation we find ourselves in- to follow Jesus faithfully, to wrestle with the old mythologies, to plant seeds of grace that grow, and grow, and grow.
