On Sunday I preached about the mustard seed, and by Monday morning I was kneeling in the dirt behind the rectory, which is church-speak for the house where they let the priest live. This is roughly how my faith works. I say something hopeful out loud on Sunday, and then I spend the week looking for evidence.
Jesus said the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, the smallest seed in the packet, which grows into a shrub so generous that birds build nests in its branches. I have held mustard seeds in my palm. One good sneeze and you would lose the whole harvest. That, Jesus says, is what God’s work looks like at the start. Not a cathedral. A speck.
I mention this because I know how faith can feel at eleven o’clock at night, when the house has gone quiet and the day’s worries line up for review. It can feel too small to count. Too tired, too distracted, too full of questions. Somewhere along the way we picked up the idea that real faith is supposed to be spectacular certainty, a blaze you could see clear across the lake. Most days mine is not. Most days it is a seed I can barely find in my coat pocket.
But here is what a good many years of parish ministry have taught me: the kingdom mostly arrives in casserole form. It looks like the ride to the doctor’s office offered before anyone had to ask. The name remembered at coffee hour, and the relief on the face of the person whose name it was. The extra chair pulled up at the first-Sunday community meal, where supper is free and nobody checks your reasons. None of it is spectacular. All of it is faith.
Evidence from the garden
Nothing in my garden grows because I am certain about it. The zinnias do not require my confidence. They require water, most mornings, in small unglamorous amounts, and they require me to come back after the mornings I forget. Faith works the same way, as best I can tell. It is less a possession than a practice: small acts, repeated, in soil you cannot see into. You water what has not yet appeared, and then one ordinary Tuesday there is green where there was only dirt.
Faith the size of a seed is still faith. It is not a lesser kind. It is the only size faith comes in.
So if your faith feels small this week, take heart. Small is how the kingdom starts; it may be the only way it starts. The casserole counts. The ride counts. The prayer you can only manage half of counts. Doubt can ride along too; my colleague Dr. Webb preached a whole sermon this spring about doubt showing up to dinner and being welcomed like a guest.
And if you would like company while your seed does its slow underground work, the red doors at 100 Lakeshore Lane are open. The bell rings before our ten o’clock service on Sunday mornings, and there is a place for you, questions and all. Bring nothing but yourself. The birds, I am told, are already building nests.
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