First I want to tell you all that each week as I come here to St. Andrew's
I observe the expanding number of boxes and raised beds
as you all put such energy and loving care into creating
a truly community garden,
and I pray that all the little seeds and seedlings planted here
will thrive and grow into their full potential,
and that your witness and generosity in this neighborhood
will also continue to thrive and grow into a full harvest.
This project, you know, is very biblical.
It is deeply grounded in scripture – pun intended!
But before looking at the readings for today,
I want to call your attention to this Sunday’s collect:
“Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love,
That through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness
and minister justice with compassion…”
Massey Shepherd, who was the great liturgy authority
of the last century in the Episcopal Church,
was the author of this collect,
and he incorporated within the collect
references from Galatians and Ephesians.
He linked together twin ideals of truth and justice
with courage and compassion:
truth with the boldness of courage
and justice linked with compassion.
This, he declared, was the fullness of Christian duty and service.
If you want a good, solid guidepost for living out your faith,
there it is.
We have prayed that collect each year on this Sunday for decades.
We ask for God’s help in being steadfast in both faith and love.
That’s good that we keep asking,
because it takes God’s help to keep on being steadfast.
And note that in this collect we learn that faith and love go together.
The Apostle Paul must have realized this also.
In today’s reading from the second letter to the church in Corinth
he states that we walk by faith and not by sight.
Things are not always as they appear.
We can be deceived by appearances.
Something that appears so very small
may actually contain something so very huge.
“…we walk by faith, not by sight…”
That great Apostle and missionary Paul wrote this
to the faith community in the Greek city of Corinth 2 millennia ago,
in a time of turbulence and uncertainty.
He was writing to people who knew the truth of these words,
who experienced what it was like to enter the unknown
and place their faith in this new Savior,
people who discovered the presence of this Savior
in the Holy Spirit as an intimate encounter with the Divine
in their innermost beings
and in the midst of their fellowship with one another.
“…we walk by faith, not by sight…”
And that is why it is so important to be steadfast in faith and love,
the two together help provide balance and give us perspective
as we go about navigating a world that is so full of
issues, problems, dangers, and contradictions
that loom so large that they can eclipse our seedling faith.
Paul continues,
“For the love of Christ urges us on…”
It’s all there in the huge, loving act of salvation
through the death and Resurrection of Jesus.
That is what brings about a new creation in us.
Just like in a mustard seed that is sown
that has within it all the DNA that makes it possible
to grow and become its destiny,
big enough to shelter all the birds of the air,
so in Christ there is a new creation, a new DNA, so to speak, Christ DNA,
that makes it possible to grow up into
and actually live into that new life.
Creation is giving us such examples all over the place
and is reflected in numerous scripture readings.
The Gospel reading from Mark for today is such an example.
You plant your garden with peas and green beans, carrots and cabbage,
you water the soil,
but you can’t make the seeds sprout and grow.
They do that because they are faithful to the way God created them,
fulfilling the blueprint of the DNA in the tiny seeds
until they are full grown and fruitful,
just as God intended.
Jesus said the Kingdom of God that he came to bring us into
is like God’s Creation, natural, spontaneous, growing, abundant,
ever expanding.
If we could get that into our vision, that naturally occurring expansion,
we would see that we are just like tiny mustard seeds,
tiny but with huge potential,
potential beyond appearances,
beyond what our eyes see and our minds comprehend.
Steadfast faith and love,
keep us steadfast in your faith and love, we prayed.
That’s our big challenge,
so that we are not just settling for stunted growth,
but have the audacity of faith to look beyond what we currently see.
Then there is another ingredient to add to our personal gardens,
continuing the gardening metaphor – God’s manure.
Yes, manure.
Jesus told another parable, one of so many about the Kingdom of God
in terms of the creation and spontaneous, abundant growth.
But this parable is one in which a fig tree was not thriving,
but it was given another chance.
And the instructions were to dig around it and work manure into the soil.
Get that amazing grace worked into the soil of our lives.
We are not in this whole enterprise
of being Church or living a Christian life on our own.
We are gifted all along the way
in ways that sight cannot see, but faith can.
Life may give us challenges, difficulties and devastation in so many ways,
but we are given new life in Christ, we are a new creation.
The DNA of the Kingdom of God is there,
but we need to walk by faith and not be distracted by what we see.
“…we walk by faith, not by sight…”
It 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.
The earth produces of itself,
first the stalk,
then the head,
then the full grain in the head.
As sure and as certain as this natural, organic process
of a seed sprouting and growing,
so faith is planted by Holy Spirit in us where it sprouts and grows,
and grows and grows
with the same potential as a mustard seed.
This statement, “…we walk by faith, not by sight…”,
can become truth for us
when we experience that Holy Presence in our loves,
moving us in that innermost part of our being
that is so hard for us to put into words,
but which we know to be as real as anything.
“…we walk by faith, not by sight…”
This faith is putting our trust into that Holy Presence
in our innermost being
which has no tangible dimension to measure empirically.
This faith is a surrendering of the illusion we hold onto
about being in control of our lives.
This faith is a letting go,
like raising your hands on the roller coaster ride at the amusement park
as you go over the top of that first big drop.
The Collect for today again:
“Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love,
That through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness
and minister justice with compassion…”
So let us allow the Love of Christ to urge us on
Christ’s love for us, the new creation in us
that we may be equipped to proclaim truth courageously
in a world of distrust
and to minister justice with compassion
in all the multitude of situations that cry out for it.
And thus we will be living more fully into
our God-given potential
for the sake of the world.
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