Tiny Seeds in the Palm of God's Hand - A Homily for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

This sermon was preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on June 16, 2024, the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 7B.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

A few years ago I was visiting a college friend of mine in Chicago. It had been a few years and she was showing me her new life there, so I was treated to this lovely tour of everything she most liked in the city. It’s a delight to be with someone so easily—and genuinely—delighted. You’re going to get the wrong impression of her—you need to know she is one of my more sharp-edged and critical friends. But this was a tour of delights. She took me to her favorite coffee shop three blocks from her apartment, where everything came served in retro glassware, and she gushed about the patterns and textures on the cups the coffees came in. She was in love, so I got to meet her new girlfriend, and we all went to see a movie at the adorable vintage theatre in her neighborhood, and again she’s pointing out architectural details and the movie poster originals in the lobby. We took the train to the lake, and she loves public transit and it was a great day for the beach—but even after all these lovely things, I hadn’t seen nothing yet. When we went to the Art Institute, there was a special level of enthusiasm that made its appearance only now as she expertly charted a course to the basement hall where the Thorne Miniatures are exhibited. Even more than trains and vintage glass, this friend loves tiny things. 

Narcissa Niblack Thorne loved tiny things, too, and she devoted her life and considerable wealth to the creation of approximately one hundred miniature rooms depicting interior spaces in a range of historical styles from around the world, 68 of which are housed at the Chicago Art Institute. Thorne worked at scale, one inch for every one foot, 1:12, with a shocking realism and detail. She commissioned artisans to weave tiny rugs and weld tiny railings and paint tiny paintings, which she assembled into these scenes. The project seems to have started as a way to display her private collection of tiny objects, and quickly grew into an artistic obsession-slash-calling which she continued until her death in 1966. Viewing the rooms feels sort of like going time traveling as a giant, if the giant had a preoccupying interest in interior design. Diorama is elevated to an art form here, far beyond my 3rd-grade sugar-cube igloo. Peering through the glass, each scene is completely distinct and transporting: now a Shaker living room, now a Gothic cathedral, now Marie Antoinette’s salon, now a dining room in early modern Japan. Each room is a world, teeming with life on a different scale, like an anthill or a coral reef or a drop of blood on a microscope slide, alive with meticulously crafted texture and pattern and detail.

The mustard seed parable we heard today is a treasure, as hospitable to multiple interpretations as it is to the birds of all feathers who find a place to roost in the branches of that overgrown shrubby weed that took over the whole garden you weren’t actually supposed to plant it in anyway. What a grace, to have that tiniest of all seeds interrupt all our neat-rowed plans with their popsicle stick labels! Mustard bushes couldn’t be any further from the majestic cedars of Lebanon, and yet it delights God to give this trash tree pride of place and to welcome winged creatures of every kind in its shady, law-breaking branches. Yes, the kingdom of heaven turns all our usual hierarchies upside-down to reveal God’s particular presence among the poor and the outcast. Yes, the kingdom of heaven flourishes in hospitality, in radical welcome to friend and stranger alike, giving others a safe place to land as we are rooted in the unconditional love of God calling us beloved and calling us to share the Good News of the indiscriminate belovedness with all people. There is a home here for all strange-feathered friends and for all the estranged chirping parts of ourselves, too. And yes, all is accomplished through the tiny mustard seed of faith, our trusting assent to God’s grace-sown kingdom of heaven which springs up overnight as a place to nest. 

Yes, all of these, and I also want to simply stay with the littleness of that mustard seed. It’s tiny. Have you ever tried to pull the seeds out of a banana, or pick them off a strawberry? That’s approaching a 1:12 ratio right there. You’ll need tweezers and toothpicks, can’t even distinguish the seed from the fruit at that point. Now someone’s going to come tell me about all the seeds that are technically smaller than mustard seeds. It’s a figure of speech! Please let Jesus have this metaphor. The point is that it’s itty bitty. It’s tiny, and God loves it. God pores over it to craft it and care for it. God makes much of it, without the seed doing one blessed thing but falling to the ground. 

In Mark’s telling, the Parable of the Mustard Seed is preceded by the Parable of the Plain Old Seed. “The kingdom of God 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.” The seed grows by itself. We see the plants come up in blades of green that unfurl and flower, but that flowering depends not at all on our poor little understanding. The kingdom of God is like seeds that grow even when we don’t know how they could. Much like the Holy Spirit who blows as wind where it chooses: you hear the sound of it, but you can’t say where it’s come from or where it’s going. Plants grow to maturity and people are born again without ever being able to say just how this has come to be. We walk by faith, not by sight. The grace of God makes the dry tree flourish. And Christ died for all, so that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him who died and rose for us. He lives in us. See, everything has become new!

We are each so little. Tiny. What happens when we set our littleness next to the vastness of God? Does that littleness fall into nothing? “Lord, what is man, that you should be mindful of him?” A different friend of mine got married in Zion National Park a couple of years ago, out under that giant Cottonwood tree outside the park lodge. Looking up at those red rock walls that simply insist on a different scale, I remember  finding such comfort in the height of the cliff face and the vastness of geological time: none of my problems were the whole story, or even much of a blip in the whole story. And it wasn’t all delights just then—though it was a happy occasion, I’d gotten news of a tragic death on the trip down, and grief was very present. There was no escape from littleness or limit, but it was held. My friend cried in the car with me. We were simply little, both celebrating and stormed with grief, and the whole thing presided over by eternal rocks and bits of cottonwood fluff being carried off on the breeze they know not where, each one a tiny world.

In the record of her “showings” or visions, Dame Julian of Norwich records a series of encounters with the crucified Jesus the meaning of which she of course sums up saying “What was his meaning in this? Love. Love was his meaning.” Love is always God’s meaning. One showing regards a hazelnut, about which she records the following: “In this he showed a little thing, the size of a hazelnut lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me; and it was round as a ball. I looked thereon with the eye of my understanding and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled at how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for its littleness. And I was answered in my understanding, ‘It lasts, and ever shall, because God loves it. And so all things exist and are sustained in their existence because of the love of God.’”

The world exists because God loves it. Little things are held in being by the love of God. God holds the world in the divine palm like a hazelnut or a coin, a strawberry, a pearl. God loves tiny things, like you and me.

Amen.