As of Sunday, I have two kids (out of two) who have graduated from high school. I’m still processing this, and it’s leading to some reflection on life, the universe, and everything.
But before I could reflect on the big questions of life, I had to deal with a whole bunch of little ones. We had my son’s grad party at our house yesterday, and along with food and chairs and decor and did I mention food? one of my main concerns was the WEEDS in my yard. I cannot keep a houseplant alive, but man can I grow weeds! And there’s nothing like people coming to your house to make you notice all the weeds.
I want everything to be neat and clean. I want to be able to get rid of the weeds in the beds so that the flowers and plants can grow and things look neat. But there are weeds that grow up in spite of everything, in the cracks of my patio, through the landscape fabric that’s supposed to prevent them. It’s so annoying. They’re resistant to RoundUP. They’re resistant to everything. All I want is to have a nice clean flower bed to make my house look presentable.
Well, fortunately, our guests of course were there to see my son and our family, and not our weedy yard. And that was a relief. It’s also a relief to read this gospel, because it brings home the fact that Jesus isn’t into presentable. Jesus is kind of into weedy, wild yards.
In this gospel, Jesus compares the reign of God to a tiny mustard seed that grows up overnight into a tall, smelly plant that looks like a weed. Really?? Sometimes Jesus compares the reign of God to things that are cute like someone finding a coin or making bread, but not today. Today the reign of God is out of control.
What if the kingdom of God is a weed? What if it’s one of those nutty weeds that grow up overnight and take over your yard? The kingdom of God is a weed pollinating everything and populating your whole yard without anything to stop it? That, like weeds, is inconvenient and messy.
Oh no.
The reign of God is inconvenient. It is messy. It happens maybe even when we don’t want it to, and there’s no good way to root it out because it will JUST. GROW. BACK. I have experienced this in that I have said very clearly that I am good, I did 20 years of being in churches and I’m done, and now I’m back preaching, and I do feel like maybe that’s the weedy reign of God growing up through my unhospitable heart.
The reign of God is inevitable, it is tough, it is resistant to poison sprays that try to kill it, and it can grow in the unlikeliest of places.
Jesus is not talking about the church. For Jesus, the reign of God happens outside of the walls of any religious building. Jesus is talking about you, and about me, and what happens in our own hearts and then spreads to our communities because we simply can’t help it.
Did you know that there are over forty types of mustard plants, and they are all edible? Did you also know that you can eat a lot of other things out of your yard, like ramps, wild onions and garlic, blackberries, walnuts, stinging nettle (weirdly enough this isn’t poisonous), lambs quarters, and tons more?
I grew up in the suburbs so I knew some of these, but not all of them, and not well enough to be confident in what I was eating. And of course, there’s an Instagram account to help those of us who don’t know what we’re looking at. The name of the account is Black Forager, and it belongs to Alexis Nikole Nelson. Basically, she teaches you to love weeds and to be able to eat them safely, although her disclaimer is “Happy Snacking! Don’t Die!”
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She gets SO excited about weeds in her yard that she can eat, and she wants you to be excited too. And if you think she lives somewhere exotic where the weeds are all magical and amazing, she lives in OHIO. Talk about an unexpected place!
I like the vision of Jesus as a forager, and we have some evidence that it’s what he was a lot of the time. He wants to eat figs off a tree and gets mad because he can’t, he picks heads of wheat to eat on the sabbath, and he’s always talking about plants and food. Of course that’s how he would envision the reign of God.
It’s everywhere you look, he might say. It’s under your feet, it’s all around you, in so much abundance that it’s ridiculous. It’s annoying how it won’t go away, even when you might want it to leave you alone for a bit. And it feeds us with love, for free, each and every day. Amen.
I needed to hear this, as I am currently passing through a messy field with some pretty toxic elements. Thank you for the reminder that God’s reign is literally right here — in spite of it all — not something that is waiting on the other side. I’m glad you’re still preaching.
Great sermon!