A Kudzu Gospel: Sermon for Proper 12A

Once when our kids were young and Bill and I were obviously insane, we took a car trip from St. Louis to Disney World. The plan was to drive to the Georgia coast and then skim southward to Walt’s Reclaimed Swamp of Dreams. Even Bill’s meticulous planning did not prevent certain hiccups along the way, like the endless construction in Tennessee near Dollywood, or arriving near the stadium where the Atlanta Braves played right before game time.

Yet on we pushed. And as we approached Savannah and I was regaling my completely bored kids with the fact that we were following the path of Sherman’s March to the Sea we suddenly entered a tunnel of darkness. The cloudy evening sky suddenly winked out and we went from twilight to pitch-black faster than flipping off a light switch. For the life of us, we couldn’t figure out why there would be a tunnel in the middle of a coastal area. Suddenly, just enough light broke through that we realized we were in an area where the kudzu had climbed up the pines we had previously been admiring and the telephone poles and had basically tried to eat the highway. Voila, a kudzu vine tunnel.

This was my family’s introduction to the agricultural bane of the South: kudzu. An incredibly fast-growing weed imported from Asia for the nation’s Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, kudzu had actually been promoted by the federal government during the Great Depression as a useful plant to prevent erosion due to its fast growth and resilience to disease.

And it looooooved the heat and soil of the Southern US. The federal government actually paid Southern farmers 8 bucks an acre to plant it in the 1930s, and ironically launched probably one of the greatest offensives against the former Confederacy since Sherman’s March. Within a few years, kudzu had almost eaten the South.

That mustard tree that Jesus talks about in the first parable we hear this morning was the Middle Eastern equivalent of kudzu. The mustard shrub is not to be confused with the food item called mustard. This common plant was actually probably rarely planted except as a windbreak or to hold down the soil. According to this article I found, they grow in India, Africa, and the Middle east, vary from 6 to 20 feet in height, and spread wide. They tolerate heat and dryness well, and aren’t even fussy about poor soil. Yet as wide as they are, their roots are even more impressive, exploding out in a knotty fan seeking water in those arid climates. Therefore, they should never be planted near wells or cisterns because their roots will seek them out and take over. In a place as dry as Judea, therefore, one can also see why deliberately planting one where fresh water was so hard to come by might be considered crazy.

So Jesus’s listeners probably laughed in disbelief at this image, the same way Southerners nowadays would laugh at the idea of deliberately planting kudzu anywhere. Many commentators have tried to explain away the craziness of this image. They assume gospel writers somehow got Jesus’s story garbled, that Luke just didn’t know what he was talking about, city-slicker as he must have been, rather than considering the possibility that Jesus wanted the crowds to laugh in disbelief at the ludicrous image of deliberately planting a weed in the middle of your good field and letting it stay there just so birds could have a home.

Likening the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed is like saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a patch of clover or an oak tree in the middle of the outfield in Busch Stadium.” That’s a prospect that would make sense to no one, except for maybe the Rally Squirrel that led us to the World Series in 2011.

God plants this weed in the field and urges us to admire it to show us how powerful and how subversive the gospel of Christ really is. But there’s hope in that description too, because we are also led to understand how resilient and enduring Jesus’s gospel is.

We live in a time when for many hope is in short supply. We live in a time when the forces of division and darkness seem to be growing ever stronger, trying to choke out the message of stubborn, persistent love that brings each and every one of us into the embrace of God. This sense of hopelessness is sown so that we will feel alone, isolated, and afraid, and thereby strengthen the powers of darkness and evil that grow whenever we lose sight of the compassion and embodied love that is the foundation of Christian existence. We need the shelter and the power of a kudzu-like gospel to help us remember our own power to deny the sway of hatred, violence, and selfishness over us as children of God. We are nourished by the bread of the gospel that grows by the yeast of love that lifts and strengthens our hearts.

When we feel lost or forsaken, God is there, reminding us of the power of unity and care for each other as signposts of God’s reign. As our psalm reminds us today, “Search for the Lord and his [sic] strength….” God is with us always. And Paul continues in our epistle: “If God is for us, who is against us? Nothing can separate us from the love of God."

Jesus is not our accuser, but our advocate and intercessor. Thus within this reading from Romans chapter 8, we see a description of the working of the Trinity: the Spirit helps us to pray when we are overcome; God the Creator is for us when all else seems to be arrayed against us and everything seems to be conspiring to break our spirits; the Son, Jesus Christ, has died for us and intercedes for us when we cannot intercede for ourselves. When we are suffering, God is with us. When everything tells that hope is foolish, the gospel of Christ stubbornly, resolutely spreads its branches and invites us to rest in its shade until we are strong enough to continue our new life as God’s children and heirs in the kingdom of heaven, a kingdom built on love.

How much more, then, can we trust the promises of God to love and hold us and protect us and comfort us? Family is not a matter of blood. It is a matter of love. And Jesus brings the love that is God into the world and, if we let him, into our hearts. Then we, as children of God, are expected to also carry that love into the world. The only thing that can separate us from the love of Christ is ourselves. Our own lack of faith, our own fears, our own lack of hope, are all that can separate us from the love of Christ, for that love is always present. When we do not feel that love, it is because we have hardened our hearts. God loves us unceasingly, and we will always be assured of this, if only we will allow that Love to rule over us and guide us and protect us.

If we rest on the promises of God's love for us, but do not act on that love toward others, we have nothing.

The only thing that can separate us from the love of Christ is ourselves, if we do not trust that love of Christ enough to understand that it is demanding that we work for the love of others. And by others, I do not just mean our own families, tribes, or nations. That is easy discipleship. That kind of love responds to our own instincts and preferences.

No, we are also called to love those whom the culture of our time despises, for they also are loved by God as surely as we who are more fortunate are. I wish that those in power or seeking power who claim Christian credentials would be asked this one question: If you are a Christian, what have you done for the least of these? What have you done to not just feed the hungry at a photo op but to help the hungry be able to feed themselves, or clothe themselves? What have you done to end poverty, to end disease, to end oppression?

For those who are led by God are the children of God. Those who are led by the love of Christ know that they are Christ's own without making grandstanding claims about belonging to this church or that church. The love of Christ does not gain us membership in an exclusive country club heaven, but enjoins us to build the kingdom of heaven right here on earth, right now,
built
and sustained
and imbued
and animated
by love.

Love that is waiting to be reborn into the world not just as we celebrate on Christmas but that is born into the world every time we comfort someone who is suffering or in sorrow or in want, every time we truly care for another.

Our adoption lays on us responsibilities for loving our neighbors as ourselves as we love the Lord our God. That is why these are the two great commands we subject ourselves to when we open ourselves to the love of God.

"The creation waits in eager anticipation for the children of God to be revealed." And the children of God will be revealed in us and to us and though us by that love.

That tiny little parable about mustard seeds today reminds us that even a little is enough. In the Kingdom of Heaven a tiny bit of faith is enough. A tiny bit of understanding is enough.As we look at church attendance decreasing in the West, we are also assured that the Church started small, like a mustard seed, and yet eventually became big enough to even grant all nations of the earth a place to live, like those “birds of the air.” Resting inside those branches, all divisions and separations fall away, and we become just one family—the family of God.

We are children of God when we realize that all those around us-- every single person from the protester on the streets crying out for freedom to the job-seeker desperate to sustain her family to the person who feels friendless and alone to the ones who love and treasure us no matter what physical ties we have to each other-- are the children of God as well. We have to love those who we feel deserve it as much as those who we tell ourselves don't deserve it, because certainly God loves us when we don't deserve it. It is when we aren't very lovable that we need to be loved most of all. We are "more than conquerors" against all the troubles in the world through the One who loves us as surely as I love my children or my friends or my family.

All we have to do is love. Love is Everything. Love will abide within us if we leave open a space in our hearts, each and every day. It is through our love that each of us are known as a Christian and as a human being. And from that small seed of hope, the beautiful kingdom of heaven is planted in each of us so that love can grow and endure. 

Like a mustard tree. Or yeast. Or kudzu.


Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 online service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO, on July 26, 2020.

Readings:

Genesis 29:15-28
Psalm 105:1-11, 45b
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33,44-52

Images:
1) Mustard Seed Window at the Washington National Cathedral, mine.
2) Kudzu eating a house from Flickr.
3) Mustard Tree in the Middle East from Flickr.
4) Unhoused man and dog in Barcelona, mine.
5) The Mustard Tree, by Juliet Venter.