Seeds
As Jesus likens the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed, we are called to watch what is growing in our lives. What are we consciously planting and what grew while we weren’t paying attention? How do we cultivate what we’ve inherited and how do we pass it on?
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Transcript
In the name of the Father,
and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Just a few thoughts this morning.
I want to start this morning by inviting you into a different type of space. I invite you to sit, feel your feet on the floor. Feel your feet on the floor, your back against a pew, and close your eyes for just a moment. Just a moment to close your eyes. And I invite you to bring to mind, to bring to awareness, two things in your life that need attention paid to them. Notice what comes up. Notice what you become aware of. It could be an area in your life that needs some spiritual realignment, some concern that you’ve been carrying, some opportunity that you’ve been given. Perhaps it’s a door that is open for you, or it’s a door that you wish would do so.
Bring to mind those two things, hold them in your awareness, and then open your eyes.
I was with an elder friend this past week talking to trees, and he said he used to lead a formation group. And he would start every session that they had by asking them to bring to mind three things. I let you off the hook. I made it easy for you to just have two. But to bring to mind three things, and when someone challenged him and said, “Why are we doing this?” he said, “Why are you here? Why are you here if you’re not bringing to mind something in your life that needs attention paid to it?” Why are we here if we’re not bringing all of ourselves with us when we come into this space to worship, to pray, to sing hymns, to focus our attention, to open our hearts to the transforming presence of the Spirit? Why are we here if we’re not cultivating a willingness to actually have the Spirit change something in our lives that needs to be changed, that needs to be made better, that needs to be healed?
That’s the work that we’re all called to do every moment of our lives, but it becomes more heightened, I think, in days where we find ourselves where so much feels uncertain and stressful.
So, having done that now, let’s look at what Jesus does this morning because the brilliance of Jesus’s teaching is that the way that he engages this is with parables—those fascinating spiritual technologies or practices, if you will.
So, you may know this: the word parable—here’s your nerdy lesson of the day—the word parable comes from a Greek word, of course. It’s made of two words or two parts of a word: para, which means “alongside,” and balle from ballein, which means “to cast” or “to throw.” So a parable is a story that is cast alongside the story of our life.
So think about it this way: we live our lives mostly unconsciously, and go back in time and picture what Jesus was doing. Encountering groups of people who were going about their lives the way they had always gone about their lives, and they asked Jesus or had some moment with Jesus trying to receive something. And instead of giving them a clear answer, Jesus cast a story, cast an image alongside their lives as they were living it. And the encounter between those two is a catalyst.
That’s the work that a parable does. It’s energy work on that deepest level, because here we go in the trajectory, the movement of our lives, and all of a sudden we hear a story about a mustard seed.
We, of course, when we think of a parable, we often think of a riddle that has one answer. That’s not what a parable is. If we have that particular point of view that there is one answer to it, it sounds like this: “The parable of the Good Samaritan means…” and we think there is a meaning to that. If we can just figure out the meaning to it, then somehow we have accomplished what we need to accomplish. But as we’ve seen over these past few weeks looking at these texts, sometimes, as Emily Dickinson would say, we tell the truth, but we tell it at a slant. And something will catch us off guard and surprise us, and we will see a story the way we’ve never seen a story. And we’ll see some part of our life that we’ve never noticed, something we have not paid attention to, on one hand, or we’ve done our darnedest to shove down and ignore—get out of the way—so that we can continue going through and living the scripts that we’ve always lived.
That’s how parables work. That’s the brilliance of them, is that they are catalysts of spiritual imagination. And they are meant to provoke us, to make us uncomfortable in the sense that they’re meant to break the mindless patterns that we fall into in our lives, and we’re left open, cracked open, with real work to do. So coming into this space and asking ourselves, “What are two areas in my life that I actually need to work on?” immediately puts us in the posture to receive that catalyzing effect that a parable will offer us.
So I want to do an experiment with you and tell you three short stories of ways in the past few weeks, sitting with this parable, things that have opened up in me. With the hopes that by sharing what’s opened up in me, it’ll continue to ripple and do its own work in you. So here’s the first one, story number one. They’re each only 30 minutes long, it’s fine.
Story number one: I am very proud of my compost that I have made. I think if you make compost, you should be very proud of it. And I’ve been very proud of my compost. I have guarded it over the past several months. I have a double bin system where you work on one side and then you let it go, and then you add to the other, and then this side gets done. And you reach a point and it looks like chocolate cake, which is what it should look like, and you empty it out, and you’re so proud of it and you can’t wait to spread it.
So I have guarded mine because at our last house where we lived in Marietta, as Lisa and Evelyn remember, I did not pay close attention to what I put into my compost bin and I put an entire pumpkin in it one year. Well, I know that now. When it broke down and I spread the compost into every single flower bed around our house come spring, we soon realized that every single flower bed in our house was filled with pumpkin vines. And we watched them grow and spread.
So I learned my lesson. So this compost round, I pulled every seed out of the bell pepper stems. I made sure anything that I think had a seed in it—even those little potato eyes—didn’t put those, because I’ve also had a bad encounter with those. They sprouted up in some flower pots one time, and we had potatoes all over the place. So I really paid attention, I thought, to what was going into my compost bin.
I emptied it out, and three days later, this appeared. I brought it because I don’t know what it is.
So, I don’t know what this is. This is what bloomed. This is what sprouted three days later.
So I thought I was paying very close attention to what went into my compost. Obviously, I was not.
What did I learn? I learned a few things. I learned sometimes you plant seeds and you’re not even aware that you’re planting them. Sometimes you think you’re paying attention to what you need to pay attention to, but it turns out you’re just going through your own rote scripts that you’ve always gone through, and then suddenly something blooms or sprouts in your life and you have no idea where in the world it came from.
So then, once something sprouts that you weren’t even aware was going to sprout, once something catches you off guard and you get this—whatever this is—and no, it’s not marijuana for those who asked. Someone at the early service, and Jack was like, “Darn!” It would be picked clean by the end of the service.
Once something sprouts, you’re left with some options. You can either rip it up entirely and get rid of it, or you can be curious—which should make another parable sing, the wheat and the tares—you can be curious, and then pay attention to it and wonder what it might exactly grow into being.
So the AI man, whoever he is, doesn’t know what this is. When it first sprouted, I thought it was indigo, because Julia Cromartie gave me some seeds and I actually planted those that I added the compost to, but it’s not that. Then it said it was oregano; it’s clearly not oregano. Then it said it was lemon basil; it’s not, believe me, it smells nothing like lemon basil. Then lately, it has said it was something called amaranth or pigweed. The people at the early service, a whole group gathered around it and said that they think it’s sesame. I have no idea where that would have come from.
So, it makes that part of my life vibrate a little bit. I thought I was paying attention, turns out I wasn’t. Something sprouted in my life that I didn’t expect to be there, so I’m left wondering. Lesson one.
Lesson two: When we were back to visit my grandparents a few months ago, my grandmother took me back in the kitchen to open up the freezer and show me a jar full of okra seeds that she keeps in the freezer. And she loves to tell me each time that she shows me this, “These are my dad’s okra.” So she has been keeping okra seeds in her freezer for 50 years that were her father’s. And she said, “The next time you come home over Thanksgiving, I’ll give you some and you can take them back to your house and put them in your garden, and you can grow some of your great-grandfather’s okra, and then our daughter can take some to grow some of her great-great-grandfather’s okra seeds.”
What do I learn? Here’s what I learned. Those actually aren’t the original seeds. They’re something different. They’re the propagation and embodiment of my grandmother’s care through five decades. Because what she does, of course, each year when she plants those seeds, she lets them grow, and she keeps some of the pods back. And she lets those pods go to seed and lets them dry, and she puts those seeds in the freezer each year. So they’re not the original seed; they’re something else that’s even more important to me. They’re her care. And it’s an example of how she has carried and cared for those seeds through decades to make sure that it, one, didn’t stay static, that it continued to grow and bear fruit, and that there was a way to honor where it came from.
That’s lesson two.
Lesson three. Lesson three is kind of weird. There are physical seeds, and then there are, if you will, metaphysical seeds that are planted in our lives. This happened to me when I was in Kildare visiting St. Brigid’s shrine, sitting with Sister Rita in their meditation room with the sacred flame that the Sisters of St. Brigid keep and tend. And sitting in that space, something was planted in me around fire. A spark was planted, a seed. And over the weeks since I’ve been back from that place, I’ve felt my center of gravity shift in some ways. How I engage with, how I encounter different situations is different. I respond from a different place rather than reacting, hopefully.
There’s something going on around fire, tending fire, the fire of my own heart, the fire of my own soul, and recognizing that indwelling presence of the Spirit that burns within each one of us. And I need to tend that, pay attention to that.
Three lessons about seeds, different types of seeds, all sparked or all rooted, if you will, in that wonderful, short, quirky little parable about a mustard seed. Jesus says it’s the smallest of seeds. It seems insignificant, but when it’s tended, it grows and it becomes a shrub and it becomes a tree, and creatures take shelter in it, and they have their lives to fulfill in each of their own ways.
So to complete the circle, I invite you to close your eyes again now.
And having said all of that, with mustard seeds, unidentifiable seeds from a compost bin, my grandmother’s okra seeds, and those seeds of fire, sparks of a living presence—what now comes to you? Because this is how it works. What’s rising within you in these places that you’re being called to pay attention in your life? Things that you are noticing, things that are demanding your attention, seeds that have been planted.
Let us pray.
We give you thanks, O God, for spaces to pay attention. We give you thanks for opportunities to tend to the seeds that you have planted. We give you thanks for things that sprout that surprise us and break us out of our routines, out of the narratives, the stories that we may hold on to. We give you thanks for times to be curious, times to risk, times to let things grow. We don’t ask you to be with us, because where else could you be? What we ask for are eyes to pay attention, hearts that are open to receive you as we are called to pay attention more deeply.
So we thank you for your presence. We thank you for the opportunities always to stretch and grow, and to live more fully into your dream for us
Amen.
I’ll leave this here at the end of the service, and if you want to add on to those who are helping to identify this mysterious plant, you are welcome to.
Rev. Dr. Stuart Higginbotham
August 30, 2026