Surprising Seeds

 Ever wonder why Jesus talked about gardening metaphors to fishermen who knew more about ropes than they did plows?  Why did he talk about seeds to tax collectors and prostitutes?  And did he throw in a wink and a laugh with these stories to keep them from being too dry, too dull?    These stories seem simple and yet they still leave us scratching our heads centuries later.  This particular parable is perfect for us to wrestle with in June.  Many of us are digging in our gardens, pulling weeds that got a good head start from all the rain we’ve had recently, or throwing seeds in the ground so we can eat lettuce, spinach or radishes in a few weeks.  You don’t know which ones will live and which ones won’t. You don’t know which ones will grow fast and which will grow slowly.  Which ones will thrive this year, and which won’t. 

The saskatoons have already set berries, but will they produce fruit?  God knows.  We throw in marigold seeds from last year’s bedding plants, but many won’t germinate at all.  Then there’s sunflowers seeds that can produce massive plants taller than people, and my goodness the birds love them!

And other than weeding, watering, fertilizing, picking bugs off, and covering our prize petunias with netting, (at least here in Athabasca where the deer love to nibble on our bedding plants and everything except crabgrass and dandelions), there’s not much we can do to help the process along.  Sure, some folks start bedding plants indoors with grow lights, or test the soil to figure out what will grow where or read up on everything from companion planting to square foot gardening, but once the seed is in the ground, as many a farmer knows, it is out of our control.  That’s hard for those of us who like to be always doing. Like the kid who wonders when the warm weather will finally arrive so he can go have fun at the spray park, we wait impatiently for the seeds to sprout, the new potatoes to form, the fresh peas and corn to be harvested.  But sometimes, no matter how hard we try, the peas get washed away, the carrots don’t come up, and the raspberry canes don’t root.  It’s out of our hands.

Relax, Jesus said, God is taking care of the growing.  Hard to believe that in times like these.  And yet there are signs of hope we see here and there.  Perth Australia has so many solar panels installed in that city that city officials are asking people to use their appliances during the day to use up that excess power. And this is in their winter season!  The kids who survived the Sandy Lake school massacre are avid gun control lobbists and they graduated high school this month, determined to make a difference.  The British Isles are seeing storks fly overhead again after 600 years of extinction, thanks to careful wildlife rehabilitation efforts, farmers are finding crops like spinach that love growing under solar panels, not to mention sheep grow more wool when they graze on solar farms, and Norwegian researchers are heating homes with renewable energy stored in beach sand of all things.  Times are shifting, attitudes are shifting.  People are living into what Paul described as cheerfully pleasing God. 

Today we please God with a special day of prayer.  Back in 1971, someone somewhere came up with the idea to have an indigenous day of prayer.  There’s very little known about who had the idea, but the United Church formally recognized it at the 24th General Council and the Anglican Church of Canada also passed it in their court that same year. Eleven years later what later became the Assembly of First Nations called for the creation of a National Aboriginal Solidarity Day. Around that time the Sacred Assembly, a national conference chaired by Elijah Harper, also had a similar call for a national holiday to celebrate the contributions of Indigenous Peoples. And the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1995) recommended the designation of a National First Peoples Day. More recently, on June 21, 2017, Prime Minister Trudeau issued an intention to rename this day National Indigenous Peoples Day.

The United Church has traditionally referred to the Sunday before National Indigenous Peoples Day as Aboriginal Sunday. As part of acknowledging National Indigenous Peoples Day, communities of faith are invited to focus on prayer, as it was originally intended in 1971. 1971 was the same year that the Anglican Church closed its last residential school (as an aside, we closed our last one in 1968) and that might have been the reason for it.  

As a side note of interest, Elijah Harper who helped organize this, who is also the famous politician who helped block the Meech Lake Accord, went to school in Norway House, a residential school in northern Manitoba that was run by the United Church of Canada until it was closed in 1965.  So there’s a United Church connection on several levels to this date.

Seeds sprout up from a 1971 prayer request.  They seem small and innocuous, but they can grow into a national inquiry into truth and reconciliation.  Seeds sprout up from the frustration and heartbreak of being educated in a foreign language in a school far away from one’s family and parents into the courageous resolve to stand against the political machinery that forgot to consult first nations people.  Seeds sprout up from a simple time of prayer into a National Day of Remembrance.  What seeds are sprouting up even now in this time and place?

When we live lives focused on hopeful intentional values, as describe by Paul, we can find ourselves partnering with God in surprising and wonderful ways.  We can watch for God at work in the world.  And we can focus on living God-centred lives.  We do that best by setting aside time to pray intentionally and regularly, watching for those seeds to sprout up.  They will bloom in ways we may not imagine, but they will bloom because God is with us, we are not alone, thanks be to God!