Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Today’s text

Mark 4:26-29

He also said, 'This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the land. Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how, he does not know. Of its own accord the land produces first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the crop is ready, at once he starts to reap because the harvest has come.'

Reflection

Some of Jesus stories are opaque to me. I can’t see through them. Perhaps they are a bit like Zen koans, dense, obscure sayings that make little sense to common ways of seeing. Only in living with them and allowing them to unsettle us do other dimensions of meaning appear.

Perhaps it is not even correct to speak of ‘meaning.’ Perhaps his sayings provoke us, agitate us through our lack of awareness until common ways of seeing iare dislodged and a new conscious emerges.

None of his stories can be reduced to a single point of meaning, but each resonates anew each time we dare look at them and watch what they awaken in us.

Today, I see the farmer … the one who scatters the seed, and I am moved to quietness, perhaps even to patience, a contrary move for me and many in our society who are socialized to work harder and with greater diligence to make good things happen.

We are a driven people for the most part, and we honor those most driven to be successful among us. Only later seeing how badly unbridled ambition can disfigure lives and relationships.

I am impressed that the sower in Jesus story does his part … sows seed. Then he watches and does little, if anything.

He does not understand the processes by which growth and maturation occur. He knows his part is to plant and watch, being ready when harvest time comes, recognizing that life and growth are a mystery he does not control.

He knows his part and patiently awaits the mystery of growth to appear, with little apparent anxiety of what he cannot understand and with no attempt to ‘push the river’ to make something happen.

He can only do what has been given him to do … and to trust the mystery: an inner, hidden dynamic of goodness and grace will work its magic. Beauty and fullness will come … as a gift, a given, a grace, and he will have what he needs.

His is a life of knowing his part and waiting for mystery of goodness and grace to unfold, patiently trusting that it will because God will have it no other way.

Not such a bad way to live.

Pr. David L. Miller