Seeds and Weeds
by Anne Le Bas

With what can we compare the Kingdom of God? says Jesus. What’s it like
when God is at work? How do we recognize him in our lives and in our world?
Again and again in the Gospels Jesus looked for ways to help people
understand what this new kingdom was like. The Kingdom of God is like a
woman looking for a lost coin, he said, or like a man throwing a party, or
like a treasure hidden in a field. But here in our Gospel reading today it
is seeds which he uses to open the doors of our imagination.
There were in fact two parables about seeds in tonight’s reading. And they
have been put together for a reason. There is a logical connection between
the two.

So what do they tell us?

The first talks about something that any gardener can connect with. The
wonder of germination and growth. Someone scatters seed on the ground,
Jesus says, and sleeps and rises, night and day, and the seed sprouts and
grows by itself. There’s nothing the sower can do except sow the seed and
wait. The rest is a gift of God, a miracle. Even today, when we know so
much more of the biological processes at work in seeds as they grow, what
Jesus says is still true. We can do all sorts of clever things to encourage
germination and growth, but ultimately we can’t create life, not even the
smallest, simplest kind.

When we moved into the vicarage, I dug a vegetable bed. It was hard work,
but at the end of my labours it was still just a patch of bare earth. Now
it is full – in fact Philip dug out some more ground the other day because
I’d run out of space. There are courgettes and runner beans and peas and
carrots and parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes and tomatoes and lettuce…
And what did I do to bring that about? Not a lot, really. I just dropped
the seeds into the earth and waited. For a long time the earth stayed bare,
and I wondered whether anything would grow at all. But then the miracle
happened. One morning a little row of green feathery carrot leaves were
poking through the soil. It takes me by surprise every year. But every year
it happens. Not because I bring it about, but because it is in the God-
given nature of seeds to germinate and grow. In fact I can’t bring it
about, and that is the point of the parable.

In Jesus day they hadn’t heard of the phrase “control freak”, but I bet
there were just as many of them around as there are now. Most of us like to
feel in control of our lives and our world. We like to feel we can make
things happen, rather than just have things happen to us. We feel safer
when we are in control. We don’t like to feel like cogs in a machine at
work, for example, we want to have some say in what’s going on. Delegation
is often difficult – will someone else do the job the way we want it done.
Families are often hotbeds of control freakery too. As parents it is all
too easy to try to pressure our children into being what we want, rather
than respecting their individuality – and they will often try to control us
too! But in the end all our striving to control the world tends to come to
nothing. It’s like trying to sweep up the sea with a dustpan and brush.

We can be control freaks in our faith too. People often behave as if it is
up to them to make God act, up to them to find salvation, up to them to
build the kingdom. If we say the right prayers, believe six impossible
things before breakfast, do the right rituals, or just be good all the
time, then all will be well. We may know in theory about grace – that God’s
love is a gift, given because he chooses to give it – but how many of us
have really taken it in? And one of the reasons we haven’t taken it in is
because it we’d like to feel that we have some control over him. We’ve
pushed all the right buttons, we think, so God is surely obliged to help
us. We have kept our side of the bargain, now he must keep his.

Jesus’ parable directly challenges that, though. The seed grows not because
of anything we do but because God wants it to. God’s kingdom grows because
he wants it to. He’s in charge, not me.
I am loved by God not for what I have done, not for my prayers, or any good
I may do, but simply because I am here, his creation, his child. And the
same is true for all of us. We can’t make him love us – he loves us because
he wants to.

So, the first parable makes clear to us what is our job and what isn’t,
what’s our responsibility and what isn’t. It encourages us to relax and to
trust. It’s God’s kingdom, not ours, God’s love, freely given, not our due,
earned by the sweat of our anxious brows.

But the next parable takes things further. In a sense, it is the sting in
the tail of the first one.

Because now Jesus turns away from his image of the tidy field full of
delicious fat grains of wheat ready for harvest, and uses an entirely
different picture of an entirely different sort of seed. A mustard seed.
And I suspect that, at that moment, many of his listeners wondered what on
earth he was on about.

What is this mustard seed? Scholars argue about it, but the most likely
candidate is something like the plant we call wild mustard – charlock.
Pliny the Elder, a Roman author writing at the same time as Jesus knew it
well. This is what he wrote about it.

“With its pungent taste and fiery effect, mustard is extremely beneficial
for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being
transplanted: but on the other hand, when it has once been sown, it is
scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls
germinates at once.”

In its native Mediterranean habitats this plant grows up to 5 or 6 feet
tall. It is tough, with strong, pithy stems and, as Pliny said, once you’ve
got it you’re stuck with it. The seeds get everywhere, and it will form
great thickets if left to its own devices. It can be cultivated, and it
was, but introducing it to your garden is like taking a tiger by the tail.
You may soon wish you hadn’t. Think of brambles – yes, we all like the
blackberries – but they are a great nuisance otherwise, and they soon take
over. The mustard of Jesus’ day was like that – a stubborn, prolific weed.
And it gave cover to all sorts of wild life which gardeners might prefer to
keep at bay. All those birds! They’d be straight onto the crops wouldn’t
they!

This isn’t the tidy, manageable wheatfield of the first parable.
God’s kingdom is like a patch of weeds, says Jesus, cheerfully – a patch of
weeds full of voracious birds! Hmm…

It was a surprising picture to his first hearers – the disciples needed it
explaining later – and perhaps it is a surprising picture for us too.
The people of his time thought they knew what the kingdom of God was about,
and who it was for. It was for good, observant Jews. Like the kind of well-
behaved plants you wanted in your garden, these were the ones who they
thought God would welcome. But Jesus told them that actually the kingdom
was for sinners as much as saints, Gentiles as much as Jews, the sick, the
prostitutes, the collaborators. People they might have thought of as weeds.

The church still, it seems to me, has a tendency to want to set boundaries,
to place limits on God, to tidy up. It’s hard to escape the feeling, when
you look at the disputes and debates within the church that we are still
saying that you have to believe the right things, behave the right way,
have the right lifestyle to be welcome. Even those who have been coming to
church for years are often profoundly suspicious of each others’ right to
belong – evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, liberals – we look at each other
and wonder, “who let you in?”

But this parable tells us that God is at work far beyond the boundaries we
set. His kingdom is a great wild, diverse place, full of life. Just as the
first parable told us that we couldn’t make God love us, or stop loving us,
this one teaches us that we can’t tell him who else he must love, or
exclude either. While the church may concern itself with its boundaries –
anxiously keeping tabs on who is in and who is out – the kingdom of God
seeds itself about the world, wherever there is a patch of ground that it
can grow in.  If we really want the church to be a place where God is at
work, says this story, we had better make sure that our church is not too
well-weeded. Because if it is, we will be missing much of the life that God
is longing to give us – all that birdsong, all that diversity, with the
health and strength that diversity brings.

So, two parables that remind us, if we have ears to hear, that God’s
wonderful, overwhelming kingdom is not ours to control or limit, but ours
to enjoy, to share, to explore, and to find in corners of the world we may
never have thought of looking. May the seeds of his word grow richly in us.

Amen.

(Comments to Anne at annelebas@DSL.PIPEX.COM.)