Sermon by the rev'd. Pamela Snare

Sermon
The Reverend Pamela P. Snare
June 18, 2006

“So we are always confident…for we walk by faith, not by sight.” (II Cor. 5:6a, 7)

Katrina has provided the opportunity for me to get in touch with gardening. I’ve had to learn which plants can take full sun, especially the blistering afternoon heat, and which can take morning sun, but not the afternoon. It’s meant paying more attention to the natural world, like the pattern of the sun around our house.

I’ve seen geraniums and chives, on their last legs when I bought them, become lush, verdant, and abundant within only a week or so. I’ve watched wildflower seeds send up tiny green shoots which are now buds, almost ready to open. For the first time since it was planted seven years ago, our fig tree, flattened & stripped by Katrina so that I cut it off at the ground, has figs on it. I’ve watched tiny white wildflowers with slender green leaves crop up in abundance, a plant we’d never seen before, but the seeds of which must have been there all along. Katrina somehow provided an opening so that these hidden beauties could finally take root and grow. I’ve planted trees with the full realization that I will not live long enough to enjoy their shade, but someone will, I hope.

It’s actually been a spiritual experience, this cultivation of trees and plants. It’s put me in touch with the mystery of growth; with God’s power to bring up lush, abundant foliage where none existed; with God’s patient and hidden but ever-active work of growth and restoration; with the contrast between the smallness of seeds and slips of plants, and their slow but inevitable evolution into lush, green foliage.

Seeing that growth, the greenness, has somehow been good for my soul. It mysteriously brings joy, and hope, and faith.

So today’s parables about seeds and growth speak powerfully to me. They remind me of some very important things about Christian ministry and the way in which God works, things that I tend to lose sight of, to forget. And my suspicion is that I am not alone in this.

Much of the ministry I’m involved in during the week is hidden work, which is to say, one or two, or a small group of people are aware of it, but it is not visible to the general public. Like making hospital visits; meeting with individuals for spiritual direction; making home visits; planning for ministries like the Community of Hope, Contemplative Prayer, the Mother/Daughter Week end, Eucharistic Visitors; recruiting leaders and chaplains for diocesan retreats; leading the Christwood scripture study; officiating at burials. None of it is terribly glamorous. It doesn’t make front page headlines. Indeed, it is very mundane and ordinary, hidden and small. But it is the work God has called me to do. Does it make a difference? In people’s lives, in the world? Does it bear fruit? Is it helping to grow God’s kingdom? Perhaps you have asked yourself similar questions from time to time about the ministries you exercise in the world.

The truth is, most of the time I have no idea. That’s why today’s parables are such a boon to me. “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.” (Mark 4:26-27)

Christian ministry is not about trying to force, to cause, to make things grow. It is more like planting seeds, scattering seeds. For the gardener, there are a lot of things outside of her control: rainfall or the lack of it, animals that dig up and devour plants, insects that feast on foliage. The gardener can plant, but she cannot and does not give or control the growth or the fruit. The growth and the fruit are dependent upon God and his mysterious power. The gardener simply scatters seeds in faith, faith in God’s mysterious power to bring those seeds to fruition, to maturity, whether or not the gardener lives to see it – to see the fruit, to see the maturity.

And nothing is so small that God cannot and does not use it. No act of Christian ministry, no act of kindness, charity, compassion, or mercy is so small or so insignificant that God cannot or does not use it for his purposes.

“The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which when sown upon the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” (Mark 4:31-32)

There is a real sense in which Christian ministry is about accepting, embracing our smallness – the very mundane and ordinary, unspectacular and unglamorous opportunities of our everyday lives to exercise compassion and mercy and kindness and charity toward our families, toward our neighbors, toward whoever’s path we cross that day. The kingdom of God does not grow from headlines, it grows from mustard seeds. As Mother Theresa has written, “We can do no great things; only small things with great love.”

That is why, my friends, we walk by faith and not by sight. We may never see the growth, the fruit of our acts and our labors for the Lord. But as surely as God’s hidden, silent, mysterious power has brought forth heretofore unseen wildflowers, and caused our fig tree to bear fruit after seven years of barrenness, as surely as his power is present in the tiniest of seeds to cause it to flourish and bear fruit, so too is his silent, hidden, mysterious power present in our smallest acts done in his name and for his sake. He, not we, causes growth to come from the seeds we scatter.

God’s power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, and that power is always at work. We must learn to trust it, even when we do not see it.

Return to Recent Sermons