Christians have always looked for barometers of faith. We want to know: what does a good Christian look like? How can we see if someone is sinning or saved or something else entirely?
We see evidence of this debate happening in the early church in Paul’s letters, which often concern the right ways to live as a Christian. Our reading today is focused primarily on the message that we should be focusing on God over the physical world, while Paul holds up internal confidence in God as a feature of a good Christian.
Several centuries later, the practice of keeping a journal or diary about one’s daily actions and emotions is said to have begun with early Calvinists, who used journaling as a way to examine their lives and try to see if they were among the saved. It was an effort to externalize, though writing, their inner experience and analyze it.
Fast forward to the present, and the prevalence of the prosperity gospel, which teaches that it is physical health and wealth that indicate the strength of someone’s faith.
And though I don’t agree with their conclusions, I think I get it. I can relate to Christians throughout the centuries who have loved God and just wanted reassurance that they are following Jesus the right way.
Christianity is at once incredibly complicated and incredibly simple. Simple, in that God is love and God loves us enough to become flesh and live among us, and to make his death our salvation. Simple, in that only two or three of us need to gather, and He is there with us. But of course every single one of those concepts is a sermon in itself. Not to mention how we got there, to Jesus, and where we go from there. It’s incredibly complicated, and amidst that complication and confusion it’s easy to want to have a stern divine teacher marking our homework in a red pen, telling us “great job!” or “needs improvement.”
That might be the teacher we want, but the teacher we have (and presumably God thinks the teacher we need) is Jesus, who is prone to telling odd stories in response to simple questions, or rejecting the questions entirely and asking his own.
In today’s gospel reading he tells two stories to help us understand and visualize the kingdom of God.
In the first, a person plants seeds and they grow without the person understanding exactly how. They grow day and night, regardless of whether the sower is tending to them. This seems to be a metaphor for the relationship between God and humans as well as the power of God. Human action matters, but it is done together with and supported by the action of God. God is working even when we don’t notice, don’t take part, or cannot understand what God is doing.
In the second parable, Jesus describes how the tiny mustard seed grows into a large plant. The seed here seems to represent Jesus’s work and followers, which grew from a tiny group to, now, a worldwide faith.
It is perhaps notable that the black mustard plant to which he seems to be referring is not something that people in that time and place would have cultivated in neat gardens but would have grown in the wild and perhaps been seen as a weed. I wonder, what does this say about our faith, or call us to?
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Particularly with this second parable, I am struck by how this vision of what faith looks like is not about the individual but about the community. Indeed, the narrative moves us from considering an individual seed to a multitude of branches that birds can live in. A good Christian, then, is perhaps marked not by individual behavior but by our willingness to be but one branch in a mighty shrub.
I am also struck by the use of plants in both parables, and the way it seems to demonstrate Jesus’s deep knowledge of and connection to the natural world.
Plants and gardens are great teachers of the truth of life and death and resurrection. A sprout of new life emerges from the death that is compost and dirt and reminds us that the world can be renewed. Life with God begins in a garden, after all, and new life does too when the resurrected Jesus appears before Mary Magdalene in a garden–and I think it’s notable how easily he was taken for a gardener.
When Paul says that “we regard no one from a human point of view”(2 Cor 5:16) perhaps that is a call not to disembodiment, as I have often heard it interpreted, but to decentering humans as the most important lives in the story. Perhaps it is a call to a broader perspective, to consider what it means that God so loved the world–not just humans–and to view our actions through that lens.
We can’t talk about our Christian faith separate from the environment. And if we’re thinking about what a good Christian life looks like, what does it mean when one of God’s gardens, the planet, is on fire and flooded and wilting all at once? Is that the measure of our faith?
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Here’s another plant story: at my last apartment in St Paul my roommate and I had a supposedly low-maintenance houseplant that had been gifted to us by a more garden-savvy friend. This was the early days of the pandemic and as we were spending more time around the apartment we watched this plant very intently, measuring its growth and talking about it in increasingly human terms. Fast-forward a couple of months when the garden-savvy friend informed us that the plant needed to be trimmed back, and it’s only slightly over-dramatic to say that we were completely devastated.
This plant was life amidst an ever-higher death toll, growth when everything else seemed to be collapsing, green against the gray and the snow. The idea of cutting back our dear friend felt–again, to be only a little bit dramatic–like giving into despair.
I’m sure some of the gardeners here are rolling their eyes because what we took as a crisis is in fact a pretty normal part of keeping a plant or garden. And indeed, when we finally pruned the plant and he grew back bigger and stronger than ever. Like Paul, this plant reminded us that sometimes what looks like growth or prosperity from the outside is not truly good or healthy(2 Cor 5:12b)– excess does not mean success or goodness.
It’s also a reminder that flourishing and decline are neither linear nor assured. A mild summer day does not mean climate change is not happening. A time of doubt does not mean your faith is doomed. Even life and death, Jesus shows us, are more fluid than we might realize.
Life and death–and the interaction between them–were big parts of the Jewish system of ritual purity and impurity that was so important in Jesus’s time. Interaction with death, illness, or disability could be a cause of ritual impurity, and this impurity also functioned in some ways as a sort of temporary (but reversible) death. Many of Jesus’ miracles are miraculous healings of illnesses and disabilities, which some scholars have argued is meant to parallel or foreshadow his resurrection and triumph over death. This whole system is complicated and in many ways doesn’t map neatly onto our contemporary Christian ways of talking about purity, though I do believe the association of disability with death persists to a certain degree in both Christian and secular settings.
So I had all of this in mind a couple of weeks ago when I came across an article that described our depleted soil as dying and as “an invalid.” I’m iffy about that particular invocation of illness and disability, which seems primarily intended to play off of people’s fears of disability or being disabled, but it did get me thinking: what would it mean to understand our changing/changed earth in terms of disability, and to truly engage on that level?
I think sometimes when people talk about healing the Earth they envision a return of the planet and the climate to an ideal, pre-climate change, “abled” function. But as I understand it, we are more realistically looking at a situation where we are supporting a planet living with something like chronic illness or disability–a condition that changes or impairs its function that we may mitigate but not remove.
When I suggest thinking about the Earth amidst climate change in terms of disability, I say that not to say that climate change is not bad or serious or causing serious impairment to the Earth and life on it. Disability is not a good thing, nor a bad thing–though it can certainly be the result of bad or traumatic events. It’s just a thing. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s a thing that needs to be accommodated.
So, we might consider, what kind of accommodations does our changing Earth require? As with accommodations for humans, much of this has to happen on a structural or infrastructural level, but ultimately as individuals we will likely need live much more simply than most of us currently do.
And I say that knowing that living simply is, well, not always that simple. Personally, I’m getting on an airplane to go to Alaska in a month, and I’ve struggled to reconcile that environmentally un-friendly action with the life and work I believe God is calling me to. I think it’s important that we not fall into an environmental message based primarily on stress and shame that doesn’t make space for the complications of our life and the mysteries of our God. Individual action has its limits. It is the whole community, the mustard plants, not just the individual seed, that will mitigate climate change.
I don’t know what God has in store for the climate. Maybe we will see a miracle, like with the people Jesus healed. Maybe we find ways to accommodate the Earth so that we may continue to be in community with it.
I don’t know what God has in store for humans. But I know that the life Jesus calls us to one not of consumption or destruction of natural resources. It is a life focused firmly on the kingdom of heaven that does not seek to forget or separate itself from the lush natural world around us.
I don’t know what God has in store for the church, but I can’t stop thinking that it is deeply intertwined with the environment. Any barometer for a good Christian life that ignores the natural world and the people around us seems, to me, deeply suspect.
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There is a mystical tradition in Judaism that holds that though humans can no longer perceive the Garden of Eden, it must be somewhere along the equator because that is the part of the world that contains the perfect balance of severity and kindness, and Eden must have both.
And maybe it will be through a combination of severity and kindness, in response to climate change, that we find God in a garden, again.
May it be so.