Mustard Seeds and the Bright Field

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost, July 26, 2020 by The Very Rev. Tyler Doherty.

     One of the things that following Jesus down the way of love teaches over time is that we always have to be ready to have our preconceived ideas about who and how God operates in the world overturned. Too often, our fixed notions of who we are, who others are, and who God is, blind us to the actual truth of how God is present and active in the most unlikely of places--literally the last place we would think to look. The crowds around Jesus were no different than we are. Living under the oppressive yoke of Imperial Roman domination, they yearned for a time when the Messiah would come and lead them to freedom. The Messiah was seen as primarily a military-political figure who would restore Israel to its former glory. And the primary symbol of the greatness of Israel in the Jewish imagination was the Cedars of Lebanon--towering botanical marvels up to 140 ft tall that can live for up to five millennia. They remain to this day symbols of resilience, strength, and hard-scrabble toughness in the face of adversity.

Into this whole matrix of associations, Jesus inserts his parable of the mustard seed. To an audience that was groomed on 140 ft. cedar trees that seemed as old as the earth itself, likening the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed would have been shocking to the point of being absurd. Not only is the mustard plant a small shrub that barely grows over four feet tall on a good day, it is also forbidden by rabbinical law from being planted in the garden. Mustard plants spread like crazy and choke out the other vegetables. Mustard plants are wild, unruly, and creep across prescribed boundaries. They don’t “stay in their lane,” as the saying goes. As such, they were considered to be agents of disorder, chaos, and unruliness. Hardly the thing for a gardener who desires a place for everything and everything in its place.

So when Jesus starts comparing the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed, it’s clear that he is up to a radical act of subversion. Indeed, he’s going so far as to make the claim that the Kingdom of Heaven is somehow illegal, illicit, and uncontrollable when seen through the eyes of conventional religious piety of the day. Jesus is trying to wake his listeners up to the reality of the Kingdom of God that doesn’t follow our best laid plans. Jesus is trying to point out the ways in which our ideas about God function to trap God in a box--an orderly, manageable box, of our own making. Sometimes, our images of God actually get in the way of us enjoying union and communion with God. Perhaps we grew up in a strict household and God was spoken of as a kind of hyper-vigilant policeman who kept a tally of when we were naughty and when we were nice. Perhaps we grew up with an image of God as distant, and removed, someone whose attention we had to capture through the frantic flapping of our arms. Perhaps we grew up in a secular household where talk of God was at best non-existent and at worst treated with a degree of scorn and derision.

Whatever our particular images of God, the path of discipleship will eventually bring us to a place where these old, fixed, static images are revealed as too small, too cramped, for the wild, transgressive, boundary-crossing love of God we see revealed in the person of His Son. Meister Eckhardt (c.1260 -c.1328) the German Dominican friar writes in one of his sermons, “I pray God to rid me of God.” That’s a curious thing for someone to preach on a Sunday morning isn’t it? It sounds almost blasphemous! But Eckhardt is just taking Jesus’ project with the parables seriously. He’s praying to have his image of God undone, so that he can see, can experience, God as God is in Godself. Echoing Jesus, Eckhardt knows that any image of God that is clung to or reified, can become an obstacle, or worse, an idol that separates us from God.

That’s part of the reason, I think, that  we get Jesus piling up images one on top of the other in rapid fire succession--mustard seed, leaven in the bread, treasure hidden in a field, fine pearls, the gracious net that catches fish of every possible kind. It’s not that we should try to reconcile one image with another necessarily, but that we should allow for the uncontainable mystery of the Kingdom to come to the fore. The parables keep us on our toes, and prevent us from arriving once-and-for all at a single, final, fixed understanding of the Kingdom in favor of a sharp-eyed, attentive, discerning of God’s presence and action in our lives in every moment. Because part of the meaning of the mustard seed is that we shouldn’t just look for God in the big, fancy, momentous experiences (in “high and holy things” as our opening hymn has it), but also in the midst of our hum-drum daily lives. Doing the dishes. Watching a downy woodpecker drill for grubs in the trunk of a cherry tree. Dropping food off for a friend. Just feeling the breeze on the back of our neck on a hot day. When we chop up our lives into spiritual bits and ordinary bits, we miss the wonder that is at the very heart of existence.

And so, we’re called actually to hold our ideas about ourselves, others, and God a little more lightly so that that wondrous reality has a chance to break through, to break in upon us. That’s why Paul tells us that we don’t know how to pray as we ought. He’s not saying that we find navigating the Prayer Book offices with its lists of different canticles to be read after each lesson a little daunting. No, Paul is saying something far more radical than that. He’s saying that prayer isn’t really about knowing in the first place. It’s about letting our ideas about prayer go so that the Spirit can pray itself in us. Prayer is not something we do, but something God in Christ through the Holy Spirit works in us. We’re called in a way to let prayer pray us. To surrender. To open and allow the prayer that is Jesus to do its work in us with “sighs too deep for words.”

When we finally realize that our life in Christ is not about getting something or going somewhere else, but opening instead to the gift that is always already given, something shifts in our spiritual lives. It’s no longer such hard work--with ourselves and our efforts at the center of the picture. We come to recognize that the treasure that we’ve searched for in externals, “out there,” has already been buried in the field of the heart. The pearl of great price that we’ve sought in that distant country like the Prodigal Son, was with us all along. We look for God and experiences of God everywhere else but the very place we are standing. It’s here in the weeds! It’s here in kneading bread! It’s here in the midst of ordinary activity whenever we drop our ideas that “this isn’t it,” and step into the reality that this very place, this very moment is the gate of heaven. James Joyce’s way of putting this in Ulysses is, “That is god. A shout in the street.” Or as Teresa of Avila puts it: “Our Lord walks among the pots and pans.”

Sometimes we get so obsessed with the Cedars of Lebanon, that the small, hidden, easily missed ways that God is always working through micro-epiphanies is overlooked. That’s what Jesus is trying to point out to his listeners and to us--you’re looking for God within the confines of what you think you already know. No wonder you can’t see Him! No wonder you get the sense that you are somehow separate from God, estranged from the mystery in whom you live and move and have our being. But when we start to get the knack for simply stopping, pausing, and just let ourselves be, we notice that as Paul says, that nothing, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We move from a place of “this isn’t it,” to “this is it,” and gratitude and gratefulness start to sprout in us like mustard plants taking over the entire garden of the heart.

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)--Welsh poet and Anglican priest--probably says it better than anyone in his poem titled, “The Bright Field”:

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Where, brothers and sisters, is this Bright Field? Will you sell everything you have to dwell there? Your life, eternity itself, awaits you.