I don’t think it’s news to point out to you all something about life, that sometimes all the things we work for, all the things we hope for, get excited about, even dedicate ourselves to, often just don’t seem to pay off in the way we expect. On Father’s Day today I think of someone like my father, who worked for the same big company for more than 40 years, dedicated and working hard his whole life for one place, and about two years after he retired the company filed for bankruptcy, and now it’s long gone. I’m not sure there’s a recognizable bit of it left anywhere, and most people under 30 I’d guess have never heard of it. To say it makes you wonder about life and how you spend your time is a bit of an understatement.
But that’s not the only kind of example we could think of. All the time, we see noble projects that somehow fall apart, good people die too soon, way before their work is done, great people succeeded by disappointing ones, injustices that never seem to get addressed despite good people working hard. And you know, if we’re honest, over time that sense of futility can wear on us. We lose hope. It can turn us into people who narrow our expectations, we turn inwards, we can become people who work only on things that have a definite payoff, things where we won’t get hurt or frustrated, things we can control, or think we can.
Today’s gospel has a parable from Jesus about seeds, but one thing it’s really about is the gap we inevitably feel between what we do and the results, between the hope we want to have and the disappointment that can water that hope down to nothing. Today we’re told that the kingdom we are supposed to live in now, is like a tiny seed. Somehow, we don’t know how, it’s not us that does it, somehow this seed turns into a great flowering tree.
What Jesus is telling them and us is that God always looks underwhelming in this world, that’s God’s choice. We could argue with it, but there’s no point to that. The kingdom of heaven, the parable says, if you read it again, is not the grown-up tree, but the seed, the gesture or the act of love or the relationship that looks like nothing, but has all of God contained inside it. We do have no idea how it grows, that’s not our job, but we plant anyway, without regard to the results. God wants us to see the seed and realize that is where God is.
When we hear the words “the kingdom of heaven” in the gospel, we almost always think it means this is how things will work in heaven. But Jesus offered us the kingdom of heaven here and now, and it is a place where seeds are what matters. He was pretty explicit about how you start to live in this kingdom. The kingdom of heaven is where the poor count more than the powerful, where you have to give things away as fast as you get them, where love guides what we decide about everything. Not results, but love.
If we lived our lives as if that were true, it might stop us from being cynical about how possible it was to actually help someone, or help us take a risk when some decision we need to make about our lives seems too risky. It might also help us when we’re a little unsatisfied with the results of all our labors, whatever they are; maybe our planting has been too focused on something with immediate results rather than this kingdom of God, which seems to grow only if you give up all your preconceived notions about how it grows and where. One phone call, one law changed, one relationship patched up again at least for a while, one deserving or undeserving person who gets one more offer of help, all seeds.
There’s an Irish storyteller I once heard who told this story that stuck in my mind for some reason: A man was at a county fair and saw a booth that said “God’s Fruit Stand.” So he loved fruit, and went up to the counter and said, This is the chance of a lifetime, I want a dozen perfect peaches, and three perfect apples. And the woman behind the counter said, Sorry, all we sell here are seeds. There is no perfection in this life. There are only seeds.
It’s hard to live this way. But St. Paul says in that second reading We are always confident, he says, not because he can see the tree and we can’t, but because, as he also says, in this life we walk by faith and not by sight. We want the mustard tree, and all God is saying is, so plant the seeds already, and God will amaze us with where it takes us.