Scripture can be found here and here…
It’s gardening season, and some of the people I love best in the world are at their happiest. These are the kind of people whose dreams of their gardens carry them through the months when the world is covered in frost, or even 42 inches of snow. They look through catalogs an imagine all those seeds and seedlings; they see assemblies of different colors and shapes; the garden is their happy place. Even planning for it gives them joy.
It’s gardening season in the church, too. Ordinary time, the time after Pentecost, is the time when the official church color is green, reminding us that the stories we read at this time are often about how the gospel takes root and spreads and grows. The summer often brings us parables just like the ones Doug read for us this morning: Jesus using images of seeds and growth to talk about God’s kingdom, and the ways in which it takes root, and spreads, and grows.
And, I don’t know, maybe these parables don’t appeal to super-dedicated gardeners, because they’re a little lame, by master-gardening standards. The first one talks about the gardener or farmer sowing the seeds and then just…going about their everyday life, pretty much ignoring what they’ve planted. And it says right there, “They basically don’t know anything about how things grow.” But… the seed germinates… roots go down, the stalks climb up, and the gardener does know what to do when the plants are ripe for the picking: they pick them. Harvest time!
The other parable—maybe one of the most famous of the parables—is about the tiny little mustard seed, which is the smallest seed, but which—here’s the build-up—when it is grown produces the greatest of all… shrubs. I swear, Jesus is giggling when he tells these parables. First he describes someone planting who doesn’t really know what they’re doing but who just lucks into a good harvest; then we think he’s going to tell us that the mustard seed produces the largest trees in the world, the giant sequoia, the cedars of Lebanon… but no. It’s a good-sized shrub. That’s all.
These are parables of the kingdom. What’s going on here?
In the letter to the Ephesians, the author uses imagery of roots and plants as well, but they’re not woven into homely parables about unimpressive gardening skills and middling vegetation. The parables are (at least a little bit) about what we might do—plant a seed, do our part try to spread the kingdom. But this prayer—which makes my heart hurt, it is so beautiful—is about what God is doing. What God has done. What God did from the beginning of all time: rooted and grounded us—all God’s people—in the love that never fails.
It begins with bending the knees to God the Father, “from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.” Everyone—every single person—finds their origins in God, the creator of all. We are all God’s children. That’s the starting point for this prayer, and it’s breathtaking. In this month when we are all seeing more rainbows than usual due to the celebration of Pride, we are acutely aware of the people who have been excluded, who have been told they are not good enough, they are not welcome, as if God somehow made a mistake with them. But this prayer begins with an expansive, maybe explosive statement of welcome. We are all God’s children.
Then the author prays, for three things. First, they pray that God would strengthen us, in our inner being, which is to say, the deepest truth of who we are, with the power of the Holy Spirit. The letter goes from the macro—God, creator of all in all—to the micro—the inner being of the likes of you and me—in an instant, because that is God’s way, God’s intention. The creator of the universe, who knows each one intimately, down to the hair on our heads.
Secondly, they pray that Christ would dwell in our hearts—here, the word for “dwell” in Greek is “down-home.” That Christ would regard our very hearts as ‘down-home,’ as we are being rooted in love, and grounded, planted in love… maybe like a seed, or maybe, like the foundation of a building.
Finally, the third thing the author prays for, is this: that we would know the breadth and length, the height and depths: the absolute expanse of the infinity of the love of Christ “that surpasses knowledge.”
Now, no human mind can comprehend infinity. We may, from time to time, have experiences that make us aware of something like infinity—that it exists. I’ve never been there, but I can imagine standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, or on top of a mountain would be among them. For me, floating in the ocean, and knowing that I could not see the boundaries of what held me was my first awareness of that reality. We can understand that infinity exists, but that doesn’t mean that we can fit it into our brains. But this is the author’s prayer: that we might begin to have even the tiniest glimmer of the love that is there, in Christ, that is particularly for us. It is infinite.
For some of us, we may have had those kinds of experiences in great, glorious churches somewhere. Saint John the Divine in New York City. Ancient cathedrals somewhere in Europe or the Middle East—the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Think, though, what kinds of churches that original community that read this letter had available to them. They were house-churches. People gathering to worship and share the Lord’s Supper in someone’s home, whoever had room. The people who had the large, impressive buildings? Well, those would have been temples to the pagan gods of the day, and the Imperial structures of the Roman Empire.
But here, in this passage, we find an appeal to the imaginations of those people, who would, perhaps, be gathered around a dining table, as evening fell. Glory to God in the church! the letter reads. And here, the truth of the church is revealed: in its truest essence it is not a building—but people. Glory to God in the hearts of the faithful, where we may begin to get a glimmer—the tiniest hint—of the scope of God’s great love for us, that love that is rooted so deeply in us, the love that turns the most modest gathering into something glorious. The kingdom is really a kin-dom—a gathering of God’s people, God’s kin, ready to do God’s work.
We carry the seeds of that kin-dom. We are the ones who, like the sower in the first parable, cast them—maybe even drop them! But it is God who gives them growth, it is God who understands that, like a squirrel that carries a tulip bulb from one end of a garden to the other, we may even unintentionally spread the seeds that bring forth God’s reign.
God has planted the faith in us, and we get to share it in the way most genuine to us. We get to plant it in the fields where we spend our time. We get to throw it around, trail it behind us like a flower-girl dropping petals, or push it deep into what we know will be good soil. We are the seed-carriers, and whatever sprouts, it will be enough. The kin-dom shrub will welcome all who need a home to nest in its branches. It will be enough, because God will see to it that it is enough. We get to plant in our own little patch, part of the infinity that God has already prepared. And it will be enough.
Thanks be to God. Amen.