sermon excerpts: "Unseen Harvest"

Jesus is offering parables of seeds growing, maybe he was trying to explain himself to his supporters and critics alike. They would have been wondering, If he is the Messiah, why isn’t he doing more? All he’s managed to do is attract a rag-tag group of illiterate nobodies. He keeps company with lepers and prostitutes and the world seems the same as ever.

This may explain why he’s reminding us that big things come from small packages, that we can’t ever see the big picture in the way God does. For the past 4 months, I had a very limited view of the world, wrapped up in the adventures and mishaps of a 3-year old girl and her baby brother.

My education and entertainment came from witnessing milestones like Rei using the big kid swings at the park, her fluency in her ABC’s, both capital and lower-case letters, and the expansion of her Spanish vocabulary, thanks to Dora the Explorer. Kai started sitting up on his own, pulling himself up to standing, clapping his hands, waving, blowing kisses. (And I have a very well-developed muscles in my left arm from carrying 20 lbs of kid around all day).

There were days when I wore the crusted food on my shoulder as a badge of honour. I’m thankful for the chance to take some parental leave, for your understanding as a congregation and willingness to give me the time with the kids in this wonderful, maddening, early years. These are all little things that turn into something more, groundwork for family foundation.

I think of my dad and how he left me to grow up on my own (that sounds worse than it is). He let me go off and try new experiences, to discover myself. Certainly he laid the foundation for my explorations and adventures; there was a secure home base from which I could fly and try my wings. I took for granted that would always be there and I know now that is not the case for every child growing up.

And now that I’m a dad, I’m trying to do the same: to create a safe and secure place that my kids can come back to and know they are loved and adored. I think it’s so fitting that this text about the mystery of growth and harvest is the lectionary reading for Father’s Day. At a certain point, we have to recognize that we’ve done all we can, and to leave the rest to what naturally happens.

The power of life will be unleashed, the crops will grow. How those seeds know how to root, sprout, bloom and blossom, we don’t know. The important piece is not solving the mystery, but going along with it anyway. It’s a lesson about having the patience to see things through until the end, even when it’s not obvious what is going on.

It may seem like a cop out to proclaim we don’t know what the future holds for us, to say we put our trust in God and hope things work out for us. We don’t do very well with living in the unknown, allowing mysteries to remain unsolved. It is humbling to face the uncertainty of what will happen in the future, knowing only that we can plant seeds. We turn the rest over to the power of life itself, and hope things will work out.

Like the stories Jesus told, farming is so much of the unknown: what the markets will do, what the weather will do, if crop and herd can stay healthy. We do know that seeds will sprout, livestock will grow, we hope the sun will shine and the rain will fall.

As a church, we struggle with understanding how a metaphoric harvest could be reaped from dwindling resources and increasing costs amid an unsympathetic society. Trust in the process. Trust that all the preparation that has been done is enough. Trust that growth will happen. Trust that a harvest will appear.