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“On Trusting God”
“I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” (I Corinthians 3.6)
It’s been a quiet week at the Lake Wobegon Presbyterian Church. This was one of those weeks when, on Wednesday morning Pastor Graybill’s sermon wrote itself amidst the Memorial Garden’s shifting speckle of shade and sun, of stately pines and fragile seedlings, of garden quiet and bird’s songs, of bright blue sky and of ruseet-tinged dogwood leaves whose spring buds were setting for next spring’s burst of white. It was a day a part of him wished, with a combination of how large God is and how small he is, he could bottle and preserve on some shelf somewhere to take out some slushy, muddy day in winter as a reminder of the beauty of this earth and of life. But mostly he was just grateful for those who planted, those who watered, and God who gave the growth.
Jesus, the Gospels declare, came preaching the
When you read it carefully, it becomes obvious real soon
that Jesus’ parable isn’t literally just about mustard seeds. And even though
for them the mustard seed stood for the smallest possible thing, the parable is
not just about tiny beginnings that lead to big results. It’s about the
Now, this is something that I suspect we all already
know—and have known for some time. That the
In the first lesson this morning, in a context completely
different from the one in which Jesus spoke, the Apostle Paul says virtually
the same thing. There in
Paul takes them to task for doing this. Because, he said, when you do this, you’re acting like ordinary men who must be given something. And you’re treating us as though we were extraordinary men, who had something to give. And both are wrong, because each omits the one essential element of the Kingdom—and that’s God. True, he says, “I planted, Apollos watered But we haven’t given you anything. Rather, in Christ, God has given you everything. “So, neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything—but only God who gives the growth.”
Again, none of this is really new. At the same time it can be very hard for us to hear. Because there’s a tendency in every one of us to look at spiritual realities through the filters of our physical experience—where, in fact, there is a more direct relationship between cause and effect, effort and results.
Parents can, for instance, feed and house and clothe and love dearly their child. And this effort will in time lead to some rather predictable results in terms of a child’s physical growth into adulthood. And yet all these efforts need have no necessary correlation to the kind of adult this child becomes. Because maturity and insight and sensitivity and values and commitments, move us over into the realm of the Spirit. And this is far more in God’s hands than in ours. We can plant, and we can water—but it’s God who gives the kind of growth that shapes the person our child becomes.
Of course, we already know this, too, in our heads: how we parents are to give our children, as they grow, roots and wings. But being a parent in these parts is so very hard, so very tough in Fairfield Country, where the value of being parents is so often measured in terms of children and the value of being a child is so often measured in terms of curriculum tracks, standardized test scores, extra-curricular awards, community service, and summer or vacation experiences that even from an early age, all feed into a resume and, oh by the way, “What colleges are you applying to?”
But what if our sons and daughters choose some other road than college-prep or just tune out or drop out of this county’s rules of the road to success (whatever that is)? Do we then slip into seeing our children as hearts and minds to be tested, as behavioral problems to be solved?
What if we parents so root our children in the path of our—or our world’s-- expectations of them that we lose sight of the most important water we give them as children trying their best, in fits and starts, with sporadic ups and crushing downs to find themselves and their place in this complex world?
What if we forget the most important gift we can ever give to our children--our nurture of them as people with their own responsibilities to values like truth and compassion and justice and their own rights to suffer the consequences of their own choices or the unfairness of the world?
Of course, we parents worry about our children as our children test us! That’s their job, you know: to test us. Which usually means to test the limits of our love.
And how does a parent turn love off, even/especially when our children talk or behave so unloveably? They do do such things, you know…just like, I might add, we did to our parents. We parents love them. We agonizingly love them. Just like we were loved by our parents. I wonder how my parents loved me when I behaved like a jerk and was in one of my “ungrateful wretch” moods? I wonder how many phone calls they made to school teachers and administrators without my ever knowing it? I wonder how many days they spent with red eyes fighting back the swell of tears? How might nights they couldn’t—and didn’t—sleep?
It’s hard being a parent, being a kid, in
Not that this trust, at a gut level, is all that new to us. Just remember what it was like for so many of us to get married. Not just in some adolescent romantic ideal but in some very specific and personal reality—like to this one man, to this one woman! If there is any experience that drives us straight back to God, it has to be this one. Most couples come for premarital counseling saying they are in love. Which of course they are. But first, fresh love usually involves some naïve reasoning, some history of lustful groping, and a desperate human need to belong, to matter to someone else. And, for sure, God ultimately and mercifully uses such reasoning and groping and desperate needs to set us up for a relationship with God.
One thing marriage strips us of is the luxury of hiding who we really are. In marriage we can no longer hide from ourselves, from God, or from another human being. Of course, especially in a marriage’s first years, the urge to withdraw and hide, the push and pull of intimacy, the wanting to be close but not that close, the needing to be near but not so near, praying for companionship but not wanting constant company. To be married is to live stark naked before another human being; and I’m not just talking the body being naked but the mind, the heart, and the soul as well. It’s living completely shorn, unadorned, wide open, and deprived of all the penny-ante excuses we’ve relied upon in the part to excuse our behavior. The kind of nakedness that daily leaves one defenseless and scared out of our minds.
What if…in getting married we risked that we wouldn’t laugh at each other’s nakedness? What if…we risked that when the truth about us came out, we wouldn’t despise each other.
What if…we risked that even if we were disappointed and angry that the other was not what we’d imagined, we would not walk away from the truth. In the face of such, is there any husband or wife who has not found themselves scurrying their way back to God because they know they need a power greater than their own to stay in their marriage?
If, if, if… A few months or maybe a few years or maybe even a few decades into the marriage we’d already broken those vows a hundred times. But yet we keep coming back to each other, remarkably, mysteriously, wondrously, begging each other’s forgiveness, sheepishly, desperately, disremembering what it was that first drove us away, pledging again to talk before giving in to the urge to walk away. We keep coming back to each other. For to keep a vow is not to keep from breaking it as much as it is to keep trying to discover its meaning. If nothing else, we husbands and wives know that, while it takes only a few moments to say the vow it takes a life-time to live it. Before our wedding ceremony I staggered to believe that I would be giving myself away. Now this very same “I” gives himself away daily, repeatedly, to the woman I can hardly imagine living without.
It was on some television game show earlier this week that Drew Carey asked a contestant a question that went something like: How many married people have seriously contemplated divorce? Both Susan and I thought the percent would be well over 50%. The answer, I think, was 24%. (Personally, we think most people filling out that survey were lying.) But whatever the true percentage, it is the nature of marriage to marry and remarry this one person again and again, to renegotiate the marriage in light of changes in each, to adjust in light of circumstances beyond their control, and to marry each other all over again.
But talk is cheap and people are fickle. Which is why marriage needs vows. Of course, vows don’t keep people together if they don’t want to be kept together. But we men and women want them to. Vows succeed in keeping a wife and husband lying down and waking up next to each other, passing the salt to each other, confessing their successes and failures, and trying as best each and both can to love their children through the dark and stormy times. And in the case of their children, even through separations and after divorces. My own hunch is that few would ever get married, let alone beget children, if we really knew what awaited us around the corner, down the way, or at the bend in the road. Better, I suppose, that we don’t know. The better to trust God with the growth of such human relationships that really matter. We husband and wives plant and water our marriages and friendships as best we can, but it is God who gives our deepest and most enduring of our human relationships their growth.
The point of this Gospel lesson is that our most important relationships--with those we love the most dearly, who are closest to our hearts, to our joys and to our tears—are, in some wonderfully strange sense, not ultimately about us. They are about God and the growth he gives to partners and friends and to children. Indeed, if at the outset I thought I was going to be held responsible for the eventual results—that they were solely in my hands rather than God’s—I might never have been willing to take the risk of becoming involved with others at all. Because too much of my own security, my own ego would then have been at stake.
I suppose it’s God’s common sense as well as God’s grace that leads God to say, ‘The Kingdom’s growth is my business. Your business is imply to be faithful in terms of whatever you’re able to do.”
And frankly, this sounds pretty good to me. Because this is the kind of arrangement that even I can manage. In fact, this makes our God a remarkably fine sort of God to be working for. Because there’s not a person here that can’t live faithfully at least at the level of mustards seeds—and plant and water, and then trust God to give the growth.