A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Many years ago, back in my native New Jersey, when our kids were very little, it was my mother’s last summer. She wanted her grandchildren to know where food comes from, so she took them to a pick-your-own-produce farm, when the blueberries were ready for the harvest. I can still imagine the rows of blueberry bushes, full of fruit ready to be picked. My mother carried a bucket. Emma, a preschooler, picked a berry and put it into the bucket, then reached into the bucket for a berry. Sam, a toddler, mainly picked from the bucket.

Blueberries in a bucket … It was one of my mother’s many legacies for her family. My mother wasn’t a woman of many words; my mother’s love language was food.

God’s love language is Jesus …

In chapters 1 and 2 of Mark we meet Jesus through his mighty deeds: exorcisms, healings, miracles—he commands and it happens. Jesus shows who he is through his actions, by his deeds. Jesus is Lord!

In chapters 3 and 4 we meet Jesus through his public teaching, Jesus’ words show us God. Jesus shows us God by speaking in parables.

Parables are small—like a blueberry in a child’s hand, or the breadcrumbs that someone has left for us to show us the way through the forest.

Like a mustard seed, like the tiniest of seeds, a parable may take root in the human heart and grow and be fruitful.

Parables take something familiar and add a twist—they speak of things that are familiar to us from ordinary experience, but they turn on a logic that rubs against our sense of the way the world is supposed to work, or what’s fair and reasonable.

For example, the parable of the vineyard: An employer who pays the same wages to those who labor all day in the hot sun, and to those who work for one hour as the day is almost done (“that’s not fair!”); or the father who welcomes back the prodigal child with open arms and an extravagant celebration (“he didn’t hold his son accountable!”); or as in today’s gospel (Mark 4:26-34), a farmer who throws seeds, and doesn’t water or weed or fertilize—and the surprising result is a bumper crop, which the farmer harvests.

Today Jesus speaks in parables to teach about the kingdom of God.
The gist of his teaching is that the kingdom is not something we build—it is solely God’s initiative, God’s grace. We can’t control it, we can’t predict it, we can’t make it happen through our hard work. God surprises us with the kingdom.

As a young adult who was exploring Christian faith, I found myself in my twenties in a university chapel. In the middle of a sermon about the parables of Jesus, it was if the church was silent and all stood still and my mouth opened in amazement, and I thought: “This is true, and it’s worth giving my whole life to this truth.” It wasn’t anything in the scriptures, or the sermon (I can’t remember any detail of that service). It was my “lightbulb” moment. And it came as a surprise.

(Many years later the preacher, who had retired as the Bishop of Los Angeles, returned to the same chapel, and I had the opportunity to shake his hand on the receiving line and tell him about my moment of conversion—and also that it wasn’t anything he said that had turned my heart. I’m convinced that it was the grace of God, activating seeds, which someone else had planted. As a preacher, this realization keeps me humble.)

Then there is Janet Miles, who wrote a memoir called Eat This Bread: A Radical Conversion (“radical” as in a complete change of heart, a reorientation of one’s entire life). She was the grandchild of missionaries, but the child of avowed atheists who raised her in a secular home in which Sundays meant The New York Times, and Vivaldi on the record player, and brunch. As a mature adult, to her surprise one Sunday, she found herself going into a church she had passed many times before on her walks. She followed along in the service, standing, kneeling and sitting with the congregation—it was an Episcopal church—thinking how ridiculous it was. She, who was not baptized, went forward for communion. She received into her hands a small piece of bread—the body of Christ—and a tiny sip of wine—the blood of Christ. And in that moment of Holy Communion, she believed in the reality of the gift that was given to her. And she became hungry for the Bread and the Cup. And she was baptized and became a living member of the Body of Christ, the church. And she started a food ministry, which distributed bags of food from the same altar to feed those who lived without inadequate nutrition.

And how about you? What small seeds were planted in you? How did they change you? How has God surprised you?

I thank God for blueberries in buckets, and breadcrumbs on the trail, and those tiny seeds which are planted in every one of us. In those seeds, in those moments, are the mystery of the kingdom of God, which may suddenly sprout up and bear good fruit. They are fruitful, because they show us God.

God—who still speaks a lively and life-giving word.

God—whose love language is Jesus.

Jesus—whose love language is food: “This is my Body, broken for you … This is my Blood, shed for you.”

A mustard seed, a blueberry, a morsel of bread, one small sip of wine, one moment in time, a parable, which opens our eyes to see God at work in the world and in our lives … May God surprise us this day and always. Amen.

The Rev. Gregory Bezilla