Seeds

It's 1am on a Saturday morning and really I should be asleep, or at least reading my book. However I'm also conscious that I'm only at the very early stages of sermon preparation for Sunday. It's been like this a lot recently. Life has overtaken me, or the manse has just been too noisy to study. This week I've taken the opportunity to catch up on some visits.

So here I am thinking about how I'm going to get anything down on paper by Sunday. Tomorrow I have a coffee morning and then lunch with some friends - so hopefully by mid-afternoon/early evening I might return to my desk to put together something. Although it might be nice to spend some time with the family as well.

The Lectionary suggests horticultural themes, and at the very least the planting of seeds and ignoring them.

I'm always relieved in reality what a great gardener the Creator is, because I'm useless. I have no ideas about where things should really be planted in the garden - whether in light or shade. I can't quite get the spacing right, and at the moment various areas of our garden look like a rambling mix of greenery and flowers, rather than the lush oasis of calm I was hoping for. Yet magically throughout the year fruit appears on various, plants, bushes and trees and we eat our fill and marvel at the fresh tasting delight. Flowers appear, and when we visit friends small posies of garden flowers are welcome gifts from children. The grass grows, and an area for play and rest appears below our feet to offer comfort.

Every so often I pretend to make an effort of genuine care for the garden. Weeds get pulled. Bushes pruned. Someone else cuts the grass. I wander about with a hose looking purposeful. Our kitchen waste is carefully recycled to produce bins full of compost. But I know in my heart of hearts that I do very little for the wonders that appear for ear, eye, hand and tongue.

Is that the simplicity of what the parable tells us this week? (Mark 4: 26 - 34) Don't worry about how the seeds of faith are scattered. Don't panic if you don't spend every minute tending those seeds until they come to fruit. All these things are in the hands of the Gardener. We're just the hired hands - the passing birds - the seed cases. We scatter widely. But God tends, waters, prunes, and brings to being the full blown plant.

Mmmm...perhaps a little too simple?

But some notes to get me thinking before the task of writing tomorrow.

Quiet conversations

It's the small conversations that happen in a week that often have the most impact on my preaching, or my journeying through an issue. Over the last few weeks, I've been thankful for small, quick, gentle conversations that have marked my day and reminded me of the strength of call within to serve as a parish minister. Given the numerous words that can be found elsewhere about recent events in the Church of Scotland, it is wonderful to find people who can say so much in so little. So I am thankful for the man who caught me in the corridor after coffee one Sunday and reminded me that all people matter no matter race, gender, age or sexuality. And I'm thankful for the sometime grumpy elder who stunned me by reminding me that we are all afraid of the things we are uncertain of.

Tonight at a meeting I opened with Luke 13: 18 - 21, encountering the little pictures of what God's kingdom is like. And in the small conversations I find that those little pictures are added to, that my (our) understanding of the kingdom might grow.