"Planting Seeds" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday June 9, 2024
Scripture:  John 12:20-28

*** Worship Materials for today, including sermon sparks, were prepared by Rev. Penny Nelson and Rev. Michelle Armstrong and shared with the whole United Church of Canada in recognition of the 99^th anniversary of the denomination. ***


Let me begin with a story.  We heard a section from the Gospel of John read for us this morning.  In the story of Jesus’s life recorded in the Gospel of John, this section comes close to the end.  This is right after Jesus has entered the city of Jerusalem riding on a donkey, accompanied by waving branches and shouts of Hosanna – the parade that we remember and celebrate each year on Palm Sunday.  Only days later, Jesus is going to be nailed to a cross and left there to die; and then two days after that, Jesus will rise from the grave with the Easter Resurrection.

 

Now this passage from John’s gospel is traditionally interpreted to refer to Jesus’s own death and resurrection.  “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”  With Jesus’s death, resurrection and new life become the new reality.

 

But the story that I want to share with you comes from Rev. Penny Nelson, one of the people who prepared and wrote our worship materials for this morning.  She asked her father, a third-generation wheat farmer in Saskatchewan, what he thought about this verse, and this was his answer.

 

He said:  “Farmers know that seeds are only viable for so long. If you don’t plant those seeds within a certain time frame, the seeds actually die and you won’t get any crop from them. So, there’s no point in trying to save your seeds for posterity. If you hoard your seeds and never, ever plant them, they’re worthless.”

 

He goes on to say, “And the same is true with our churches. I see people in pews who are so afraid of the church dying that they can’t see how their fear is actually killing the church. They aren’t willing to take their money and try planting something new; they just hold onto their money, and their congregation dies because they didn’t even try to plant hope with the resources they have. They aren’t willing to try new things because they feel the life of their congregation is so frail, but if they aren’t willing to let go of their fear of dying, they are just going to die anyway. And Jesus doesn’t call his followers to die for the sake of dying. He calls his followers to let go of our resources for the sake of growing hope and life all around us.”

 

There is such wisdom in what he has to say.  We, as the church, have been given so many seeds, so much potential, but if we hang on to them, if we hoard them, like actual wheat seeds, they will eventually lose their potential and become worthless.

 

And so we are called to plant our seeds.

 

We are planting seeds when we build Ida’s cupboard and offer food at no cost and no obligation to hungry people in our community; and then we plant both literal and metaphorical seeds when we plant a harvest garden to supplement the non-perishable food in Ida’s Cupboard with fresh produce.

 

We are planting seeds when we fly rainbow flags in front of our churches and walk in the Saint John Pride Parade; proclaiming that God’s love truly is for all people, even when others try to say otherwise.

 

We are planting seeds when we support Mission and Service, sending money to support programs that help people in need that we will never meet.

 

We are planting seeds when we support Romero House, when we support Coverdale, when we support Avenue B, when we support Hestia House, when we support our local schools. We are scattering seed outward, far beyond the walls of our building.

 

A church that hoards its seeds, a church that is only focused inward instead of looking outward, a church that isn’t carrying out the mission of God in the world – this is a church that is dying, and dying in a way that doesn’t lead to resurrection.

 

But we are a people who gather around the cross.  As the church, we gather around an instrument of death because we know that it is only through death that we can reach resurrection.  We have to let go of the seeds that have been entrusted to us – we have to give up the life that these seeds represent – we have to plant them in the ground, in order for the harvest to become reality.

 

Because God’s timeline is so much bigger than our limited human timeline, we ourselves may never live to see the harvest of the seeds that we are planting, but we trust that future generations will.

 

It’s interesting that this was the scripture that was chosen for that inaugural service of the United Church of Canada 99 years ago – a reading that focuses on death even as they were witnessing the birth of a new denomination.  Our ancestors in faith in 1925 knew that they had to let go of their old ways of doing things in order let the new emerge.  They were planting the seeds of the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, and the Congregationalist Church; and from those seeds that were buried would emerge the first leaves and branches of the United Church of Canada.

 

Just like our ancestors in faith had to do on June 10, 1925, letting go of the way things used to be in order to allow the new thing to grow, we too need to ask ourselves what things we need to let go of, what seeds we need to bury, in order to let the church of the future emerge.  The church of the past is the seed for the church of the future, but in order to get there, we need to release our grip on the past and let God’s future emerge in us.

 

For in following the way of Jesus, we are following the way of the cross, the mysterious way of death that leads to resurrection.

 

What will the United Church of Canada look like 100 years from now?  What will Two Rivers Pastoral Charge look like 100 years from now?  I have no idea, but I strongly suspect that it will look very different than it does today.  But the way of the cross is also the way of hope – even in the middle of death and despair, we trust that death will never have the final word, and that new life will always rise from the tomb.

 

And so today, in 2024, all that we can do is to keep planting seeds.  We can refuse to focus inward, seeing only scarcity and death; but instead, we can look out at the world with courage and scatter seed with abundance, trusting that new life will come from these seeds that we are planting.

 

And may God make it so.  Amen.

 

 

Image Credit:  “Wheat” by Sleepy Claus on flickr

Used with permission.