Sunday: 2nd Sunday after Pentecost
Reading: Mark 4:26-34
Preacher: Anne Benvenuti

The last time I stood here to preach it was Good Friday, that solemn and silent day, so different from today! Then we still had to hang up our coats in the back of the church, and in quick succession came all the bright feasts of Eastertide-- Easter followed by Ascension, and Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. And here at St Paul and the Redeemer, we celebrated the mighty liturgical season creatively and in radically hospitable ways, from our Holy Thursday dinner tables to our cacophonous Pentecost.
We have done so much in this year! We've celebrated birth and death, memorials and baptisms. We have educated children and formed adults. We've trained and ordained candidates for ministry. We've made music, and liturgy; we have given service, and money. I think it's fair to say that we have realized something of the kingdom of God in Hyde Park this year. And today we celebrate the efforts we've made and the things we've done, and we celebrate being the community that we have become in the process.
Next year will be different for us; it will be a year of transition and of taking a new form that we can't yet imagine. But for today, we celebrate what we are now, as we look up from our labors, and we consider the seeds we have planted, and we wonder what forms they will take. Today we find that the great wave of liturgical feast days, and programs, and efforts, has delivered us to the shores of the liturgical season we call...Ordinary Time.
Today we hear Jesus say that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. He apparently explained that to the disciples but they have left us to wonder about it, and I'm grateful for the lack of explanation, for the space to in which to wonder. Ordinary Time and mustard seeds sound to me about as exciting as watching paint dry, but the readings for today hint at something that happens outside of our great efforts. What happens during ordinary time, during the summer months? Kids, out of classrooms, go to summer camps or wander around exercising their imaginations in any number of ways. People take vacations. Plants grow.
I wonder if you have ever made a serious effort to watch a plant grow? I actually have done while trying to attain that famous Zen level of awareness. I once managed to pay attention-on and off---for about 20 minutes as a poppy pushed off its green hood and un-crinkled its petals, a process that is lightning fast in plant time. I have to say it was memorable, though not an effort I made twice.
Trying to watch a plant take its form is not very exciting because it happens entirely without us. But some things are meant to happen without a lot of input from us, and our efforts seem to naturally slack during ordinary time, such that we can sense God doing God's great big part....God's magic show, the grace, the mystery, the unfolding of things in ways beyond our imaginations, much less our efforts. We awakened today, and it was ordinary. We breathe today, and walk, and talk, and it is ordinary. The trees grow in their greenness and crops ripen in the fields. It is ordinary. In ordinary time we go on vacation; we rest a bit from effort, but it is more than rest; it is an allowing for something other than our effort to take effect. The theologians of the reformation referred to this awareness of God's goodness and our choice to surrender to grace as Justification by Faith and they understood that this turning of our hearts can take us where effort cannot.
Today's reading all seem to point to the fact that God's part of our lives is the bigger part. They say that God does not do what we expect-he doesn't choose the well prepared oldest son to be king, or the biggest seed in the basket to serve as a metaphor for the kingdom of God. And it follows that part of our spiritual work in this life is to make room in our imaginations for something better than what our aspirations and efforts alone can do.
About ten years ago, I returned to a regular habit of morning prayer and I would begin my day by saying, "here I am God, I give you my day, and I give you my time, and my money, and my talents...." Then, after several years, I realized I had it all wrong, and now I wake up and say, "Here we are! God, what are we going to do today?" Because God does not do what we expect, but something better. God chooses the seeming runt of the litter to become the greatest king of Israel. God plants a tiny mustard seed and grows a great shrub, then uses this shrub to describe his plans and his presence, a place where the birds are sent, not to break rocks in the hot sun, but to build their nests and to shelter.
These images set me to wondering about how things know to take their forms, how they realize their potential, and, it seems to me that both making great effort and then, over and over, surrendering the results when efforts don't go where we intended-- that these two things in balance, making effort and letting go--allow us to grow in directions that are not of our own devising, but seem to be part of some other plan, something bigger of which we are a part. We often don't end up where we thought we were going, but somewhere else entirely, somewhere that turns out to be good, even better than where we were headed.
A seed is a little bundle of potential that's packed something like a picnic lunch for its journey, but the seed does not just sit there inside its little shell, eating its internal lunch and growing until it becomes a plant. The first thing that must happen if the seed is to become a plant is that it must be broken open, in any number of specialized ways, so that it can interact with water. The seed of a Sequoia Tree, that giant native of California, is broken open by fire. A tomato seed is broken open by digestive acids of the animals who eat its fruit. Other seeds are abraded as they are smashed by waters over rocky terrain. Fire, acid, abrasion. Not courses that any of us would sign up for. But the breaking open is necessary if the seed is going to get water, and we must be broken open if we are to receive grace, so that God can do his magical, mysterious and most necessary role in growth. And then, happy surprise!
Listen to this little poem, called "The Seed Cracked Open" by the Sufi poet, Hafiz,

It used to be
That when I would wake in the morning
I could with confidence say,
"What am 'I' going to
Do Today?"
That was before the seed
Cracked open
Now Hafiz is certain:
There are two of us housed
In this body,
Doing the shopping together in the market and
Tickling each other
While fixing the evening's food.
Now when I awake
All the internal instruments play the same music:
"God," they say, "what love-mischief can 'We' do
For the world
Today?"

Morphogenesis is the multisyllabic term for the taking on of forms held in a state of potential, and it is ultimately mysterious. You might say that morphogenesis happens. We don't know how a plant grows, how a runt becomes a leader, how SPR becomes the kingdom of God. But we know that first the seed has to crack open. So when we feel burned out from our strong efforts, when we feel digested by the needs of other people, when we feel abraded by the relentless flow of demands upon us, perhaps these are the very forces that crack us open, making us ready to receive the grace that will do our real growing for us. Maybe all of our efforts are just for the purpose of cracking open the seed. And this cracking open is not just for me and you and you, each of us, one by one cracking open, but us together as a community. We have to let the seed of St. Paul and the Redeemer crack open so that God can do God's magic here.
I had a friend who was a college administrator who had taken a position as interim president of my college, and I often remember passing him in the doorway and exchanging a few words about his arrival and the interim nature of his assignment. As he walked away, he said, ‘remember, Anne, all positions are interim.' And I think it might be a good time for us at SPR to remember that all things are transitional, but God's grace goes to infinite distances. Perhaps our readings today point us to relying on God and surrendering both our efforts and our fears, to perhaps even taking it easy, sitting back a bit and looking to see what God has in mind for us, as individuals and as a community in transition. We together might ask, "God, what love mischief can you do with us in the world?"
Today's readings--and, indeed, the whole of our spiritual tradition--suggest that God has something to do with things, and especially with things that last, with things that are substantial, that God decides what will flourish and how it will be formed. I feel an incredible relief that mysterious forces are at work and that grace brings about new things.
Justification by faith means that we know it is God who saves us, God mysterious, unknowable, yet revealed, will work in us to the extent that we crack open and allow him. So, lets go bravely-- and even lightly, together into Ordinary Time, expecting and looking for the great things that God will do with us as we relax into a new form. And today, let's go out to celebrate who we are, trusting in what we will yet become.
In the words singer Sarah McLachlan,
"It's not so unusual when everything is beautiful. It's just another ordinary miracle today."