All Saints’, Dorval
June 16, 2024
(I have been known to say that if you have gardening, music, and childbirth, you have all the metaphors you need for any imaginable situation. This sermon will use two of the three, including childbirth, so if topics around birth and babies are painful for you, this is your advance warning, and I won’t be upset if you need to step out for a moment.)
It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.
The greatest of all … shrubs?
“Shrub” is not a word, in English, one expects to be modified by the adjective “great”.
And in fact, “shrub” is at best a dubious translation for the actual Greek word it represents. Luke’s Gospel, in telling this same parable, uses the word dendron, which simply means “tree”; but that’s Luke trying to be dignified at the expense of accuracy, because a mustard plant is most definitely not some kind of majestic oak.
Mark – which, of course, came first, and is shorter and rougher and funnier than the more polished later Gospels – uses a different Greek word: laxanon. Vegetable. As C. Clifton Black puts it: “God’s kingdom is like the smallest seed that grows up to become the greatest of—zucchini.”
It’s not a tree. It’s definitely not a shrub. It’s literally a vegetable.
I imagine that any of us who have tried our hand at gardening at all, have probably planted zucchini. They’re practically foolproof. The seeds are big and recognizable; a three-year-old can help poke them into the ground and then jump up and down with wonder when the first leaves pop up a week or so later. Zucchini is the only one of the cucurbit family (squashes and melons) that can be trusted to provide a crop before the plant is devoured by squash vine borers; it grows lushly in all kinds of conditions, and bears abundantly – so abundantly that it’s become a joke.
(Why is August the only month when Vermonters lock their cars? Because if they don’t, their neighbours will leave zucchini on the passenger seat.)
Zucchini is the kind of plant that you find sprouting as a volunteer in your compost heap and harvest a fruit the size of a baseball bat. The internet abounds with recipes for getting rid of surplus zucchini. You could do a lot worse than zucchini as a metaphor for something that “sprouts and grows of itself, we know not how.”
And it’s fun to imagine the love of God as zucchini: perhaps an acquired taste, but something that lands in our laps in huge quantities, crossbreeds happily with many other kinds of plant from the same family, and with which we can make delicious things with a little effort – and which, if there’s literally more than we can eat, we can always throw onto the compost pile and it will turn into something else that’s nourishing. (One of the many joys of having backyard chickens was I could just throw the overgrown zucchinis into their enclosure.)
However, even zucchini is not always predictable. Over a couple of decades of intermittent gardening, there have been times when I planted zucchini and they just sat there, instead of engaging in their usual explosion. Sometimes the situation could be explained (soggy soil, failure to pollinate); sometimes it was a complete mystery.
Gardening is not an exact science, yet another way in which it provides an apt and endlessly fruitful metaphor for life in general, and the life of faith in particular.
And one of the principal ways in which that inexactness manifests itself is in the relationship of growing things to the nature of time.
Notice how, even in this short Gospel reading, the perspective of time seems to shift radically. “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” Days and nights pass, accumulating into weeks and most likely months, and the sower goes about his business, sleeping and waking and doing whatever else needs doing.
But then – “when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” When the moment comes – which he realizes because he’s been paying attention, even if it was very low-key attention – then the time for action is now. At once. Before the crop rots in the field and is lost.
In the meditation practice in which I’ve trained as part of my doula and childbirth preparation work, this is what’s known as “horticultural time” – precisely because it is so fundamentally the way that gardening works. Horticultural time is distinct from clock time, which is predictable and regular and schedule-able; it is the time on which crops grow and the time on which babies are born, and it recognizes only two states: not now, and right now.
The seed is planted; the crop – or the baby – grows, hopefully straightforwardly and uneventfully; the parents or the gardeners wait, with more or less patience according to their disposition; and in God’s time, which cannot be predicted or controlled, and not a moment before, comes the right now, in which the crop is ripe and the child comes to birth, and swift, skilled action is needed to ensure that everything works out as it should.
Perhaps not surprisingly, theology already has terms for the contrast between clock time and horticultural time, and definitely not surprisingly, they’re in Greek. Chronos – from which we get “chronology” – is the precise, orderly, predictable kind of time. And Kairos is horticultural time, God’s time, the time that ebbs and flows and touches eternity at both ends, the time in which babies come and gardens grow and God’s kingdom is revealed among us, like the greatest of all … vegetables.
How can you pay attention to the ways God is working in the world? Perhaps literally, as this is after all the season of growing things; the sprouting and fruiting described in the parable are happening all around us. Or perhaps figuratively, in whatever seeds of learning or caretaking or building or community involvement you’ve planted in recent months and years, which you are now watching and waiting until that expected yet unpredictable moment when it’s time to do something right now?
Or maybe your neighbour will dump a grocery bag full of zucchini on your porch, and you’ll have to figure out what to do with it. Of such, also, is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Amen.
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