{"id":1410,"date":"2024-06-09T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-09T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/?p=1410"},"modified":"2024-06-09T07:03:55","modified_gmt":"2024-06-09T11:03:55","slug":"ohh-woo-wow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/2024\/06\/09\/ohh-woo-wow\/","title":{"rendered":"Ohh! Woo! Wow!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of Locust Grove, PA<\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor @ 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fourth Sunday After Pentecost\/Year B \u2022 June 9, 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/h2>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Mark 4:26-34<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA man went out to sow.\u201d It\u2019s simple, isn\u2019t it? Up in Galilee, where Jesus is speaking, most of the people are farmers. I imagine, just like us, they all have their morning ritual. What\u2019s yours? Three mornings a week my version of going to sow is to get up early, take my daughter to a coffee place called Lil Amps. I buy her a latte, or whatever she wants; I get black coffee. We sit and talk for five minute and then announces, \u201cWell, it\u2019s time.\u201d I wish her a good day, remind her I love her, and she walks off to her office in downtown Harrisburg. I take my coffee and go home, read the news, read my email and look at the scripture for the week. Jesus asks us to imagine a farmer, a regular guy, starting out his day: \u201cA man goes out to sow.\u201d Nothing special, nothing momentous, nothing out of the ordinary. But remember what he says first: this is an image, a parable, of the most momentous thing of all, the kingdom of God. Want to see God present? Look here, watch: a man goes out to sow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My dad grew up on a farm, so we always had a garden. Each person grew their own crop. My job was sweet corn, and he taught me to make a little mound of dirt, put some fertilizer in the middle, then poke five holes around the edges; each one got a kernel of corn. Maybe you have a garden, and you have your own way of sowing, so let\u2019s be clear what happens when a man in Galilee goes out to sow. He doesn\u2019t carefully put down each seed; he doesn\u2019t plow first and sow in the furrows. Grain was sown by walking through the field with a bag on your hip, reaching in, taking a handful and scattering it over the field In another parable, Jesus describes this. It\u2019s what we should imagine here. A man goes out to sow, scattering the precious grain this way and that. Maybe he\u2019s a poor man, and he\u2019s calculated just how much he can afford to take away from the family as seed; maybe he\u2019s worried about the harvest, maybe he\u2019s hopeful it will be a good year. This is the kingdom, and it begins with seeds that hold a secret.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not knowing is hard for us, I think. I had a class in biology in high school. One of the projects was to grow beans. Beans are usually pretty easy to grow but in my case, I was assigned to grow them in what was a new way, called hydroponics. Hydroponics is growing in water with nutrients dissolved. So I set it all up in a long half-tube, seeds and water and nutrients. And I waited. I waited about two days. Then I got impatient; the people who had been given little cups of dirt were seeing tiny sprouts, but I wasn\u2019t. So I pulled the seeds up just to check. No sprouts. A couple of days later, I did the same thing. I kept pulling them out and I never saw a single sprout. At the end of the project, everyone else had little bean plants; I had seeds that had gotten stinky and molded. The teacher asked if I had any idea what happened. I told him how I\u2019d pulled them up every day and I still remember how his eyes got wide, and he said, \u201cJim, you can\u2019t force it, you have to wait.\u201d I flunked. That\u2019s one reason I\u2019m here today instead of doing biology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A man goes out to sow, and then he does\u2014nothing. This is the part that always gets me in trouble with gardeners. \u201cWhat? What about weeding? What about fertilizing? What about all the hard work?\u201d Sorry, I don\u2019t know. I just know what Jesus said: he sleeps and rises, night and day; he waits. He just waits. He doesn\u2019t pull up the plants like I did; he waits. And Jesus points this out: \u201cThe earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.\u201d There is a process, there is a creative, God given process and the best the sower can do is wait. Waiting is hard, isn\u2019t it? I\u2019ve been to hundreds of church conferences over the years, times when clergy gather along with active lay people and talk about their year in the church. There are stories of successful stewardship campaigns, programs that turned out great, and things to try. I have never been to a single conference in almost 50 years when someone said, \u201cOh, we slept and rose, slept and rose; we waited.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark\u2019s gospel is the closest of all the gospels to Jesus, and it alternates between two times. One is \u201cImmediately!\u201d When Jesus is baptized, immediately, the spirit drives him into the wilderness. When he calls his disciples, immediately they respond. When he heals, immediately the person is whole. \u2018Immediately\u2019 occurs 28 times in this short gospel, more than in Matthew and Luke put together. The other time that happens over and over again is that Jesus tells his disciples not to talk about the amazing things they see, the healings, the time on the mountain when he shines with a heavenly glow. It isn\u2019t time to tell these things. Just like the man who went out to sow, they have to wait; they have to sleep and rise and let the unseen work of the Spirit go on, trust that God is working. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, the parable tells us, eventually the harvest comes. No sleeping then! I\u2019ve lived in a couple of rural communities, and harvest is a time when nothing else matters. You rush and work as late as there\u2019s light because once the crop is ripe, you only have so much time to get it in. Then, like Jesus in Mark\u2019s gospel, everything is \u201cImmediately!\u201d What does the man who went out to sow do when it\u2019s harvest time? He puts in the sickle, in other words, he uses everything he has to harvest the crop that was sown. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the kingdom like? It\u2019s a harvest, but it\u2019s also these other times: sowing and waiting as well.  And one of the most important questions to ask in a church is: what time is it? It\u2019s a question our consistory ought to be asking, it\u2019s a question for the search committee, it\u2019s a question for all of us: what time is it here? Is it time for sowing? Is it time for waiting? Is it time for harvest? Because if we wait when it\u2019s time for sowing, we\u2019ll never get anywhere; if we try to harvest when it\u2019s time for waiting, we just end up with moldy beans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps this is what Paul is trying to teach the Corinthian Christians. He says, \u201cWe walk by faith, not by sight.\u201d That sounds like someone who understands the Spirit\u2019s work is not always visible, like the sower who sleeps and rises while the earth produces of itself. And finally, he comes to the harvest moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
[ 2 Corinthians 5:16-17]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wow! God isn\u2019t just improving things, God is making a whole new creation!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jesus doesn\u2019t want us to miss that wow. So we have this other parable about a mustard seed. I used to think of this as a story about gradual growth, from little to big, but I\u2019ve become convinced that it\u2019s not about growth at all. It\u2019s about wow. You know the wow moment? In a couple of weeks we\u2019re going to celebrate the fourth of July and most places will have fireworks. We have a boat in a slip in Baltimore that\u2019s just across a little water from Fort McHenry, where the \u201crockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air\u201d actually happened almost 210 years ago. Every year there\u2019s the same conversation. A colored rocket shoots up giving off sparks and someone says \u201coooh!!!\u201d And then another, sometimes bigger and there\u2019s a \u201cwoooo\u201d and finally at the end when all the rockets shoot off, someone will always say \u201cwow!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christ invites us to the same \u201coooh! Wooo! Wow!\u201d With the story of the mustard seed. All over Galilee, mustard was a plant that grew wild in the ditches and along roads. Left alone, it spreads and grows up in the summer to big bushes. But this growth isn\u2019t the point: the point is that looking at tiny mustard seeds, you\u2019d never expect a big shrub. Look at Jesus: you\u2019d never expect a resurrection. Look at us: you\u2019d never expect a new creation. But there he is; here we are. The last part about the birds making nests isn\u2019t just artistic license; it\u2019s actually a reference to a story in the book of Daniel. The nesting birds are a symbol of God\u2019s New Creation. They\u2019re meant to make us go, \u201cWow!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does the kingdom of God look like? It looks like someone sowing, someone waiting, someone harvesting, each at the right time. What time is it here? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does the kingdom of God feel like? It feels like the unbelievable surprise of something tiny becoming the means of a whole new creation. Something small: like you, like me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Woooo\u2026wow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of Locust Grove, PA by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor @ 2024 Fourth Sunday After Pentecost\/Year B \u2022 June 9, 2024 Mark 4:26-34 \u201cA man went out to sow.\u201d It\u2019s simple, isn\u2019t it? Up in Galilee, where Jesus is speaking, most of the people are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[101,146,52,3,130],"tags":[26,5,249],"class_list":["post-1410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-after-pentecost","category-mark","category-pentecost","category-sermon","category-year-b","tag-parable","tag-sermon","tag-waiting-for-god"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1411,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410\/revisions\/1411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}