The Need to Know

Looking toward preaching on Sunday I re-read Mark 4:26-34, and I realized that I had missed something before. Jesus tells this story of what the kingdom of God is like: 

"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."

That was the part I missed. The gardener scatters and then goes on doing what they do. They sleep, they rise and mysteriously the seed sprouts. In our modern age we have a greater sense of how this all happens. Even so, there is some mystery to it all. We don't have control. God calls us to scatter the seed and then live our lives. The kingdom will sprout without our having the details. The Holy Spirit is not a project manager. 

So it goes that a parable I have heard all my life rings new like a weed sprouting a day after I sprayed my beautiful garden. I don't know how, but it has sprouted and wrapped around my present need. So I will sleep and rise night and day trusting that the Spirit is moving us and we don't have to know how. 

Lectionary Reflections for Palm Sunday

“I have heard the whispering of the crowd;
Fear is all around;
They put their heads together against me;
They plot to take my life.”

Psalm 31:13

I am riding on a high from what I felt was a pretty good sermon yesterday (A sermon that I delivered.) Reading the lectionary for this coming Sunday (April 5) I see some more opportunity to elaborate on what I was thinking when preparing for yesterday’s sermon (one of those “I wish I had said that!” moments).
In brief, my sermon highlighted the anxiety so many of us feel surrounding economic issues of late. I have heard all sorts of worries expressed. Some are important and painful concerns. Some (even from my own lips) are too embarrassing to name. Many of us are concerned about choices that others don’t even have available to them.
In the Gospel reading for this past Sunday Jesus declares that a grain must fall to the ground in order to bear fruit. Something has to die before there can be new growth. The things that I am so concerned about losing sometimes must be lost in order for change to come. Something has to die. Sometimes I get to choose what it is. I get choose holding on tightly or letting go for the sake of truly living.
This coming Sunday is Palm/Passion Sunday. In a brief period of time we will go from celebration to the crucifixion. As I read the lessons, the lines quoted above from Psalm 31 caught my attention. “Fear is all around” describes much of the talk I am hearing. The wealthy and the poor express some anxiety about the future. The crowd is whispering, and the noise is deafening. I would even say that some feel that there is a plot against them. What they have will be taken away. Their lives will be taken away.
While the sentiment may have been actual and apparent when written, most of us can only read this passage metaphorically. There is not a plot to put me down. I know that, but I sometimes feel the opposite. I often feel that losing all the stuff by which I define my life will certainly kill me. Somewhere in my heart I know that life isn’t founded on all the things that I put my trust in.
“But as for me, I have trusted in you, O Lord” the psalmist declares, and the Lord is worthy of our trust. God has a plot to forgive and heal. Christ brings life out of what is lost. That life may well be different than what we have planned, but it is real life that can’t be taken away by economic failure, sin, or even death. An impassioned prayer that reveals our honest feelings will not separate us from God either. So Psalm 31 stands as and apt prayer for these times. May we as the psalmist does in verse 15 proclaim to God our “times are in your hands.”