11^h Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gospel – Mark 4:26-34

One’s, Two’s, Trees!

Heiskell, Tennessee  

I’m sitting on the front porch of our daughter’s home, looking out over a scene of natural wonders- mountains, valleys and hills and all of them filled with an abundance of trees.  Not your ordinary trees!  Not simple 10-foot pines but massive and majestic trees, dozens of feet in height and age measured in decades!  It all looks so perfect!

And yet if you look, you’ll see that just isn’t the case.  Many of the trees have bark peeling off the trunk, bare spots high up, branches broken and twisted, others slowly aging and turning brown.  And yet with all that decay and age, with all that life and the elements that have battered it, the tree still stands!  It still lives!  It still grows toward the sky!

It reminds me a lot of Jesus’ parables in today’s Gospel and how much the elements of nature play a role.  The mustard seed, smallest of all and yet it grows and spreads with great abandon!  The farmer sowing his seeds and then harvesting the crops!  And then the first reading where God take a tender shoot from a cedar tree, plants it on the mountain of Israel where it grows to a majestic height, bears fruit and offers its branches to the birds of the air.

So maybe it’s not just about nature or a mustard seed or a tree.  Maybe Jesus is reminding us of the Kingdom, the Kingdom God is building inside each of us.  Maybe He is reminding us that, in a way, we are all like those trees I saw on the porch.  Maybe we all have imperfections, broken branches.  Maybe we all have bare spots, gouges and cuts in the bark.  Maybe we are imperfect, just like any tree. 

But what we need to remember is this:  we are still standing!  We are all still growing, reaching up to the heavens.  And God is still guiding us, nurturing us and, in spite of all our imperfections, loving us, just like a father loves His children.  Just like that tender shoot in the first reading!

And isn’t that also what we celebrate today – Father’s Day!  So I can’t help but think about my father!

I grew up in Southern Maryland, surrounded by forests and farmland, although no hills or mountains like here in Tennessee, in the family home that still stands, where my 99-year-old mom still lives.  And the only other building in sight was my dad’s little country store!

My Dad began working in that store at the age of 16 and retired from that same store over 50 years later.  It was part gas station, part post office, part ice cream stand, part deli and liquor store, supermarket and local gathering spot.  During all those 50 some years, he ran the store on his own, hardly ever took a vacation, worked roughly from 5 in the morning to 10 at night, at least 6 days a week.  During the school year we basically saw him only at dinnertime for about an hour.  In the last 10 years of the store’s existence, he was also doing double-duty as the postmaster.

And yet in spite of all the hardships, somehow out of that tiny little store, he managed to put all four of us through high school and college.  I have yet to figure out how he managed to accomplish it.

So Happy Father’s Day to all the dads gathered here!  To the fathers and grandfathers, great-grandfathers and stepfathers, to all those father figures in our lives who loved us, nurtured us as little sprouts, and loved us even in the worst of times. 

And lest we forget, Happy Father’s Day to the greatest father of all, Our Father in Heaven!  Amen