Ezekiel 17.22-24, Mark 4.26-34
The Second Sunday after Trinity, 13 June 2021
Austwick, Keasden
It’s a noxious and invasive weed, say gardeners and agriculturalists. Whilst farmers complain that it upsets their livestock’s stomachs. Herbalists though, speak of its medicinal use for relieving headaches and painful joints, reducing inflammation and clearing sinus congestion. And what kitchen would be without it as a spicy relish in so many meals? The jury is out on wild mustard. Which Jesus compared to the kingdom of God.
Pliny the Elder in around AD 78, saw it both ways. “Mustard," he wrote, “is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”
Not good news, then, for those who like to keep their gardens well-ordered or their fields under control. Wild mustard. I’ve heard it recently described as “the single most pestilential invasive plant in the entire country.”
So why would anyone dream of sowing it? When they tell this story, Matthew and Luke write of ‘a grain of mustard which someone took and sowed’. But Mark's version doesn’t suggest any human involvement: the mustard seed here may well be simply sowing itself, falling to the ground, scattered on the wind or even helped along by a friendly bird. And if that's the case, then this parable points beyond the human activities of ploughing and sowing, planting and tending - human efforts to make the ecosystem work for us. This parable takes us into the heart of the wild workings of the more-than-human ecosystem itself. [2]
Now that’s a fascinating point to take. For whenever we hear Jesus saying that the kingdom of God is like ‘something or other’ we automatically assume he’s using that ‘something or other’ as a metaphor for us - in our arrogance and self-absorption we assume that his parables of the kingdom must always be about the human world, that they are lessons about the way we interact with each other or with God. We assume that, because we think the world revolves around us; to use a fancy phrase, it’s an anthropocentric point of view.
So… what if this passage about the mustard seed is not a parable about human behaviour at all - but instead is a pretty straight telling of how God works in nature? If it is then it should humble us.
For, as permaculturalist Toby Hemenway explains, human agency plays its part in wild mustard's story. He says that ‘opportunistic' plants like mustard ‘crave disturbance, love sunlit edges, churned-up ground, and often, poor soil’. The likes of mustard thrive best in ‘disrupted ecosystems, fragmented and degraded by grazing, logging, dams, road building, pollution, and other human activity. When humans make a clearing, nature leaps in, working furiously to rebuild an intact humus and fungal layer, harvest energy, and reconstruct all the cycles and connections that have been severed. A thicket of fast-growing pioneer plants, packing a lot of biomass into a small space, is a very effective way to do this.’ [3]
Mustard might be an 'invader', if we have to call it that, but this 'invasion' is one way in which other-than-human creatures bring healing and stability to habitats that humans have disturbed, renewing the fertility of soils that humans have farmed-out and overgrazed. Mustard and its kindred seeds are driving green life back into the open through the cracks in the concrete. [4]
Is Jesus really saying that the kingdom of heaven is like a pioneering plant which starts the process by which nature recreates itself after humans have disturbed it? When Jesus suggests that the mustard seed grows into 'the greatest of all shrubs' with 'large branches' it sounds like hyperbole, until we learn how this ecology works: how an 'invaded' ecosystem eventually finds a new equilibrium, and invaders like mustard are then kept in check, as the relatively stable, diverse, habitat that they have helped form, in time matures. [5]
Might this cause us to pause before we next condemn wild mustard as a noxious and invasive weed?
Might this make us stop to reflect on the effects of our obsession with controlling nature, forcing our own agendas onto it, whether they be clearing greenbelt land for industrial development or hacking back a corner of our garden to give it a tidier look?
Might the parable of the mustard seed suggest that the kingdom of heaven is intimately involved in what contemporary scientists call the Wood Wide Web, the deeply interconnected web of organisms through which trees share nutrients, heal their sick, and communicate warnings to each other? Can we allow the parable of the mustard seed to interrupt our idea that the world and everything in it is all for us, that the teachings of Jesus and the way of God are all about us?
Can we pause on the suggestion that rather than our seeking the kingdom of God, we might adjust to the idea that we are part of the kin-dom of God? For kingdoms are human-focussed institutions, brutal in their interaction with a world they perceive as being outside themselves, whilst the kin-dom of God - the kin-dom, that’s ‘kingdom’ without the ‘g’ - opens up the suggestion that being ‘in God’ puts us humans in a deeper-than-ever-imagined relationship with the more-than-human ecosystem which makes up life on earth in all its fullness. It’s the ‘expansive idea of how we - human and other-than-human creatures - might discover transformed ways of relating to each other as ‘kin’. [6]
What are the ‘opportunistic’ mustard-like ‘weeds’ in our part of the world? What kind of healing and renewal might they be bringing with them? Is there a way we can serve them in their task? [7]
Let's contemplate these things next time we’re tempted to curse and pull a so-called ‘weed’ from a crack in our concrete.
Notes
[1] The substance of this sermon is based on Chapter 11, ‘Interrupting’ in Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church's Mission from the Outside, In, p.121-122.
[2] Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted (p.121) quoting Jim Perkinson, Political Spirituality in an Age of Eco-Apocalypsc: Communication and Struggle Across Species, Cultures, and Religions.
[3] Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted (p.121) quoting Toby Hemenway, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd edition.
[4] A reference to the Michael Leunig cartoon, The crack in the concrete.
[5] Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted, p.122.
[6] Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted, p.5.
[7] Al Barrett and Ruth Harley: Being Interrupted, p.122.
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