Jesus always spoke to the crowds in parables – parables, these seemingly simple, everyday stories about life meant to teach us lessons in unexpected ways. This week, Jesus challenges us to imagine the secret of the kingdom of God. I don’t know about you, but the more I dig into one of Jesus’ parables, the more of a puzzle it becomes. For example, take today’s two short parables about seeds…
· What are the seeds of God’s Kingdom? Are they our gifts of time, talent, and money that will later be harvested?
· Why take the time to scatter such valuable seeds on the ground, and then be passive as the seeds sprout and grow?
· And why, when there were plenty of great and mighty looking trees around, should we picture the kingdom of God…as a shrub?
One translation of our text today says that Jesus “was never without a parable when he spoke [to the crowds]. [But] when has alone with his disciples, he went over everything, sorting out the tangles, untying the knots.” (The Message, Mark 4:33-34) Don’t you wish you could be alone in private with Jesus, just like one of the disciples, so he could make sense of it all and put all the pieces together?
But perhaps acknowledging our unease in not knowing the big picture, leads us somewhere important: and that is that we have to trust God. When we scatter our seeds of time, talent, and money on the ground, we can trust that God is always providing a way to grow our seeds into good grain. We can sleep and rise night and day going about our business, and while nobody is looking, God makes our seeds sprout and grow, first the stem, then the bud, then the ripened grain to be harvested, in all in God’s time. We can neither hasten nor delay the work of God.
This, it turns out, is an important stewardship lesson for me. See, as my husband will attest, I’m a planner and a saver, perhaps some of you are too. I am the one in charge of the finances in our household, and I take great pride in researching our purchases and our giving carefully, and understanding exactly how it fits into my family’s financial plan. When we pledge to the church, I want to understand exactly how our gift of money will be used. What will it produce? How will it impact the bigger picture? Will my giving make a difference to the mission of Christ in the world? As a family, we have always volunteered at church in significant ways, which is of course, a very important type of stewardship. But for me, giving money requires a little more trust. It requires a little more faith that God is in charge of the big picture.
A beautiful illustration of this kind of trust comes in the story of a partner that Faith-Lilac Way knows very well, Wildfire EveryMeal, the organization that mobilizes the community, at the end of each school week, to put healthy food into backpacks for children in need.
EveryMeal is now a large organization. They have a website full of information about how they source their food, how communities can get involved, how to contribute, and how much of one’s donation translates into real food for real families in need. They make it easy to see just how your dollars can make a difference.
But did you know that EveryMeal was born of a small group of Christians from a new church start ,Mill City Church, who asked the Principal of Sheriden School in Northeast Minneapolis if they could begin meeting as a church in their auditorium each week? After months of building a relationship with the school, they asked the school community one question: how can we help? And the answer was provided to them: will you help the hungry kids in our school?
And the church began, in 2010, by providing one bag of non-perishable food to 27 kindergarteners each weekend. I wonder what those original volunteers and funders thought at the time. Could they, in their wildest dreams, have anticipated how God would be working in and through their seemingly small-scale gifts of time and money and relationships to create what is now a separate nonprofit that has, as of 2021, provided 6 million meals, serving over 10,000 children across 400 locations.
Seemingly small gifts grow into amazing and significant missions, with God’s help. As Jesus said, “the kingdom of God…is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds can make nests in its shade.” (Mark 4:30-32) Mill City Church’s work, and the work of all the people and organizations that partnered with them in mission along the way, started small, but grew in ways no one could have anticipated, by the grace of God. Just as the birds make nests in the shade of the mustard shrub, so too are millions of children and their families now finding food security through EveryMeal.
But sometimes trusting that our contributions of time, talent, and money are making a real difference is hard. We see our individual contributions, but it is harder to see the big picture, because the big picture is being revealed in God’s time and on God’s terms.
How many of you have put together more than your fair share of puzzles during the pandemic? Our family certainly has. Now, my question is: have you ever put together a big puzzle without looking at the picture on the box as a guide? It is hard and frustrating!
You might start by:
· turning over all the individual pieces;
· getting all the edge pieces together;
· grouping pieces by similarities like color, shades, shapes, and texture;
· picking up patterns, seeing what kind of themes come out;
· looking for clues and discovering more subtle hints; and
· taking lots of breaks and coming back at it with a fresh mind and heart for puzzling.
Maybe this is what discipleship and stewardship in God’s kingdom is like. We all have pieces to lay down the table. They are different sizes, shapes, colors, and textures to be sure. But they are all absolutely necessary to the big picture, the completed puzzle. As we are giving our individual pieces, laying them down, fitting them together, our faith is engaged and our hearts are changed, but we often cannot see exactly what God is doing in our midst. We can’t always see what the final form of the puzzle will be.
But the Good News is this: God puts our pieces together. God uses each and every gift we offer to the church and puts them together with a power beyond our understanding.
And when we trust that God is active in the world, that frees us:
· to give joyfully;
· to say “yes” to following the Spirit’s lead;
· to co-create something important with God; and, yes
· to be held in suspense as we marvel at the way God works to revitalize our mission and ministry.
Thanks to all of you for the beautiful gifts each one of you have to contribute to the witness of Jesus Christ, in this faith community, and in the world. And thanks be to God, for it is God who puts all our pieces together. Amen.