Surprise! You're Dead!

2024-38
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6B), June 16, 2024
Ezekiel 17:22-24 ; Psalm 92:1-4,11-14 ; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10,14-17 ; Mark 4:26-34

Would you like to hear an amazing, fascinating story? Here goes …

Somebody planted seeds, and they grew. The end.

Isn’t that incredible?!?

No, really! This is astounding! Do you know how hard that farmer had to work to make these seeds grow?

That’s right! After planting the seeds, the farmer did … nothing! She went to bed and got up in the morning. Over and over again. And all that time, the seeds were quietly doing their thing. Days went by. Shoots poked up out of the ground. The rain fell, and the sun shone, and the farmer didn’t control those, either. Weeks went by. More growth. Months went by. The stalks shot up, the heads opened, and the grain revealed itself.

And that’s when the farmer came back to harvest it.

She did something at the beginning and something at the end. But in between, everything just happened naturally. The word “naturally” here means “in accordance with how God set it all up in the first place.”

This is such an amazing story! Maybe Netflix should make a multi-season series out of it! Wouldn’t you tune in to watch the grain grow? (OK, maybe not.)

Jesus tells this wondrous story of growth, and then he shifts gears and talks about a different seed: a mustard seed. And then, you know what Jesus does? He lies to us about mustard.

The mustard seed is tiny, sure, but in reality, it’s not the tiniest of all the seeds in the world. It grows into a tall shrub, yes, but certainly not “the greatest of all shrubs.” And it definitely doesn’t sprout branches thick enough for birds to build their nests on! So either Jesus didn’t know much about mustard, or he wasn’t being truthful—he was making the story just plain wrong. Everyone hearing Jesus the first time would have known this. They would have listened and said, “Wait, what?”

Because if there’s anything truthful to say about the mustard bush, it’s the thing Jesus doesn’t say, and this is that it grows everywhere. Mustard is an invasive species. It violates gardens. If Jesus told this parable in the Pacific Northwest, he might feature Scotch broom or Himalayan blackberries instead! Who plants blackberries? It’s a ridiculous idea. Nobody wants or needs to do that. The blackberries will just show up unbidden in every place they’re not eliminated.

In other words, the story Jesus tells is plainly ridiculous. And I think that’s the point. When he says wrong things about mustard plants, he’s planting a clue he wants us to pick up on.

For one thing, Jesus wants us to understand that the Kingdom of God subverts all our expectations. It is an invasive species, and no matter what we say about it or do or don’t do about it, it will grow. And it will be spicy! He doesn’t need to say these things, because he trusts his audience already knows this about mustard, and they’ve just heard the previous parable about the farmer not needing to tend to the seeds at all.

For another, Jesus wants his hearers to remember a passage from Ezekiel—the one we just heard this morning:

On the mountain height of Israel

I will plant it,

in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit,

and become a noble cedar.

Under it every kind of bird will live;

in the shade of its branches will nest

winged creatures of every kind.

All the trees of the field shall know

that I am the Lord.

Well, that passage is about a cedar, not a mustard bush. The point, I think, is who does the work of growing it. And Jesus flags that for his hearers by telling them something false about a mustard bush! When he says, “so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade,” they know right away that mustard bushes don’t do this, so he must be referencing Ezekiel. They know their Bible.

I just learned that connection this week, and I’ve been a priest for nearly ten years, and I’ve been preaching for twenty! So you can see how biblical literacy is truly a lifelong project. The better we know it, the more theological connections we can make to our own lives.

We could, for instance, see ourselves as the farmer who is planting seeds. That’s a good use for this story. We can plant our seeds of love and hope without anxiety, because God—through nature—is the one who will tend the growth—not us. We just need to wait for the harvest.

Or, to use the story another way, maybe we are not those who plant seeds. Maybe we are the seeds themselves. If that’s the case, then God plants us and stands back, and our growth is absolutely assured simply because God wants it that way.

There’s a third way to use the story, too, and that’s to envision ourselves not as the farmer and not as the seeds, but as the soil. The seeds are the Kingdom of God, and the farmer—who is God—plants them in us. They will naturally take root and grow because we are as God made us.

Again, Ezekiel speaks with God’s voice:

I bring low the high tree,

I make high the low tree;

I dry up the green tree

and make the dry tree flourish.

I the Lord have spoken;

I will accomplish it.

This is a real challenge to those of us who have been raised to believe that if we want anything good to happen in life, we have to make it happen ourselves! After all, if we’re not constantly fretting about the health of this soil and the growth of these seeds, what are we doing with our lives?

Could it be that we don’t have to work so hard to “get it right”?

Could it be that our lives are chock full of chancy circumstances that we simply cannot control—and that so are everybody else’s? So could it be that patience and gentleness are the only way to handle one another’s lives?

We didn’t ask to be born. Our parents took care of that, but even they couldn’t control that process completely. We didn’t ask to die. But Jesus has already made death safe for us. It’s just going to happen to us someday.

It’s so certain to happen, in fact, that Paul urges the Corinthians to think of themselves—and everyone else—as already dead. After all, there can be no resurrection without death. But Christ is already sharing his resurrected life with every one of us through the Holy Spirit! So in a manner of speaking, we must already be dead, right?

And that’s why this wondrous story of soil and seeds is so useful. Through the Holy Spirit, we are farmers who need not be overly anxious about what’s going to happen naturally anyway. Through the Holy Spirit, we are seeds cracking open in the earth like a dead body, then sprouting into something new. Through the Holy Spirit, we are soil being tilled, and literally everything that happens in this life is part of that process. Everything belongs. The full harvest of our hopes and longings—and the full harvest of our very selves—is assured.

I was pondering this gospel passage while I was also preparing a sermon for Doreen Davis’s funeral on Friday. Today’s reading from Second Corinthians overlaps with and follows on the epistle reading we heard then, so as both sermons were germinating in the soil of my mind and heart, they were helping each other to grow. I said this on Friday:

Paul [stresses] that Christians are those who commit to know nobody from a merely human point of view—“according to the flesh.” We are to approach life with the understanding that literally everybody is eternal, and that not only is God never done with anybody, but we aren’t, either. We’re all together forever.

In other words, Jesus’ death and resurrection change the way we are to live with one another! Having been assured of eternal life, and having been assured that it applies not just to Jesus but to all of us, our work as the church is to till the ground for the irrepressible growth of love. Love is an invasive species that will ultimately grow in spite of us! The only question is whether we want to be a part of it—whether we want to align ourselves with that growth and make a home for others—to allow the birds to make nests.

Eventually the grain will grow to maturity, and then comes the harvest. But in case you didn’t realize it—surprise! You’re dead already! So is everybody else. We have all died with Christ, as evidenced by the fact that Christ is raising us all up like shoots of grain to the sun.

Isn’t that a wondrous story? Congratulations on your birth, and your death, and your resurrection, all of which are simultaneously real. Amen.