Margie Quinn
It has been exactly a year since I joined this community and I’ve learned a lot. Some of you take classes in mixed martial arts. Some of you are prolific musicians. Some of you have the hook-up to free tickets to Vanderbilt sporting events. Some of you have gone through yoga teacher training. Some of you are published authors. Some of you have countless flamingos decorating your front lawn.
One common thread that seems to run through many of your stories is that many of you have found respite here after growing up in a church or attending one more recently that insisted on a dogmatic, authoritarian way of living out your faith. I’ve heard the words “hell, fire and brimstone” tossed around. I’ve heard of the pressures to perform bible exercises, to remain pure, to get saved, and to avoid what some Christians have deemed a “lukewarm faith.”
What is a lukewarm faith? I read a book in college that described it in a few ways. One quote that stuck with me was, “Churchgoers who are lukewarm are not Christians. We will not see them in heaven.”
No pressure, but according to this line of thinking, those of us who rarely share our faith with our neighbors or who think about our life on earth more than our eternity in heaven, those who equate our “partially sanitized lives” with holiness, or who love our things but rarely give to the poor in a truly sacrificial way…we are lukewarm.
I had my own season of trying desperately to make my faith more of a “boiling hot” than lukewarm by reading my Bible every day and attending church every Sunday and Wednesday. I sought purity and moral perfection, evangelized to friends, especially Jewish friends with whom I feared wouldn’t get to heaven, and even questioned the holiness of my friends of various sexual and gender identities. I even told my boyfriend at the time that he wasn’t holy enough. My love for others and myself became conditional. My faith life became a rigid practice in avoiding sin for fear of not receiving salvation. “You’re either walking toward Jesus in everything you do,” my pastor said to me, “or you’re walking away from him.” No pressure.
Call me a heretic, call me a little too reliant on God’s grace, but this understanding of the gospel feels impossible for me to live out.
This morning in our text, Jesus, a guy who spoke in wild parables that mostly perplexed his followers, speaks to a group who are huddled around him, who ask him about these elusive stories he keeps telling. So he offers them one after the other, trying to describe to them something he keeps calling the “Kingdom of God.”
And in a parable only found in the gospel of Mark, we get a pastoral account from Jesus. He speaks about farming to a group of fishermen and offers this: the Kingdom of God is like someone who scatters seed on the ground, and then sleeps a bunch. The seed grew and the scatterer doesn’t even know how. The earth “produces of itself,” which in Greek is where we derive the word “automatic.” The earth is worked by God alone, this means, without human effort. The earth produces of itself, the stalk then the head, then the full grain and when it’s ripe, the scatterer goes back to harvest it because it’s ready.
I read this thinking that the Kingdom of God is like a sleeping gardener, who can put the seed in the ground but can’t do anything about its growing; a sleeping gardener, who trusts in the process of growth rather than tamper with the seed, coming back time and time again to check on it, spraying it with pesticides, drowning it with water. The gardener, who may not understand the process, waits patiently for a growth beyond his control to occur.
Hearing this parable, I feel a deep exhale. I feel my shoulders sag and my brow unfurrow. I feel, once again, the sting of grace, in which my efforts to “do faith right” only prevent me from witnessing the kingdom at work.
Perhaps in my eyes, the Kingdom of my God is like a church that implements new programming, and then counts week after week to see if membership increases based on these efforts.
The Kingdom of my God is like an employee, who refuses to take a sick day for fear that their work will falter, that no one will be able to pick up the slack.
The Kingdom of my God is like a parent, who monitors their child’s academic or athletic progress, anxiously hoping to prevent their child from mistakes, failure, or embarrassment.
The Kingdom of my God is like an activist, who posts relentlessly on social media and shows up to every organized event, holding themselves and others in strict expectations for doing justice correctly—not allowing for rest or self-reflection, to let their hearts break before they put their shoes on to march.
The Kingdom of my God is like a choir in which no one takes a breath in between notes, not trusting that their fellow singers will carry the tune in between their breaths.
My Kingdom requires so much from me. That Kingdom heaps on more and more pressure. It tells me that I can’t do anything lukewarm, that I must remain vigilant, watching the seed, scooting it closer to the sun, repotting it, measuring its progress…that I can’t possibly “Let Go and Let God.”
I so often fail to trust God’s grace in my life. I fail to believe that God continues to work in mysterious, unseen ways that don’t depend on my faithfulness or insight. And yet, as A.J. Levine notes in this parable, some things need to be left alone and sometimes, we need to get out of the way.
Which doesn’t mean that we are exempt from planting seeds. The Kingdom grows only from someone getting up, grabbing the seeds and planting them in the ground. It does mean that we are not responsible for how or when they grow.
Yeah, that’s the Kingdom–a pure gift that requires us to sleep a little as it flourishes. It’s a Kingdom in which we have so little to do with Christ’s nearness to us that we can actually rest because the spiritual growth and intimacy with God arises as naturally as seeds growing and not by force or perfection. What a relief.
A sneak peek into the next chapter tells the story of Jesus calming a storm. The storm rages and the boat is swamped with water. The Disciples are freaking out! They look toward Jesus and what is he doing? Sleeping. Resting. Trusting. He gets roused and woken up and says, “Be still now,” and says, “Why didn’t y’all have faith in me?”
This morning, can you trust that you alone are not responsible for the growth of God’s kingdom? Can you believe that your faith is not dependent on how much you accomplish, how closely you monitor your seeds, how desperately you try to tend to them in the “right” way. Can you notice how God’s grace abounds, that the harvest comes when you are resting?
The earth’s got your back. Take a load off. Get some sleep.
Amen.