Sermon afterthoughts: Who you callin' a weed???

 I am not a gardener, and I never will be. 

I have not nearly enough patience for that. I'm pretty strongly opposed to being out in direct sunlight for that long with no hope of shade. I'm clumsy. There are a lot of reasons for it. 

One of them, though, is I've gotten to be uncomfortable with the whole idea of how exactly one defines a "weed."

All of this comes on the heels of dealing with Mark 4:26-34, today's gospel reading in the lectionary, and in particular the seemingly familiar Parable of the Mustard Seed. We know that one, right? It's the tiniest seed in seed-dom, and yet it grows into this massive growth that produces large branches in which birds can build their nests and take shelter. We have, in the church-popular imagination, made that into a parable about how what seems small and insignificant can become great and mighty, or something like that. 

That really isn't the point.

After all, the parable is introduced with Jesus's words, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?" (NRSV) Jesus's words make the link explicit: "It is like a mustard seed...". The point of the parable isn't to tell a small or frail child that they can grow up to be big and strong, or that whatever endeavor we've decided to take up will blossom and flourish like that tiny seed. The point of the parable is that the kingdom of God is like that shrub that spreads out and grows and has the big branches to nest in.

And then there's that word "shrub." (Ed.-Allow me a moment for a Monty Python reference that won't go away...)

(There, that's better.)

Jesus calls it a shrub, as the NRSV translates it. Am I wrong, or is that a word that doesn't necessarily conjure up grand and mighty? I mean, it's the root of the above Monty Python joke, or how Molly Ivins brought George Bush the Younger down to size. It ain't the cedars of Lebanon, that's for sure. 

Furthermore (as noted in today's sermon), this particular shrub wasn't exactly super-desirable. It did have some medicinal properties, but that wasn't a thing you went and cultivated that shrub to get - there was plenty of it available in the wild. Worse was that if this shrub got into whatever you were cultivating, your harvest was quite likely in some trouble. It wasn't perhaps quite as pernicious as kudzu - the Vine That Ate the South - but it did invade and crowd out other plants in its path. You wanted it to stay out in the wild, not in your fields. 

Oh, and those branches that birds can nest in? The same birds that were plucking away the seed scattered by the sower earlier in that chapter, in Mark 4:4? 

And this is what Jesus chose to compare with the kingdom of God?

Yeah, it fits. The stuff that grows into our lives and crowds out our neatly laid-out plans and boundaries we'd just as soon stay out in the wild, right? We're not keen to see our best-laid plans disrupted or uprooted in any way. We don't like it, and we want to root it out and toss it in the trash. 

This gives me pause. In the face of such a passage, I am charged to wonder what God sees in a thing I might regard in the way Jesus's audience likely viewed that mustard-seed shrub. Is there some redeeming quality in that thing that is getting castigated as a "weed" that I'm not seeing? Or let's get more directly spiritualized about it: am I going to fail to recognize the moving, spreading, in-crashing kingdom of God because it looks like an invasive shrub messing up my just-so life-garden? 

This comic also comes to mind:

Image credit unknown, which is too bad because this is really good.

To abstract some point out of all of this, we are (I fear) too often or too easily conditioned to equate the good (or dare I say the holy?) with the pretty. We also tend to want to equate the good with the orderly, despite how often and how readily order (even "law and" order) becomes an excuse to perpetuate all manner of evils upon those not like us. When we let the quest for the pretty and orderly and beautiful-by-human-standards take over all of our perception, we are flat-out going to miss the in-crashing, invasive kingdom of God. What we call a weed or an invasive species may well be where the Spirit is moving. At this stage of my life, I really don't want to cultivate any habits that might make me miss that.

Thanks be to God, I think.