I planted my first garden when I was in the fourth grade, I ruined my brothers set of children’s gardening tools. I went around the neighborhood with my rusty wagon trying to sell the produce.
It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I had my own dirt that I could start cultivating again. A patch of dirt with which I could do whatever I wanted. It was a return from exile.
A patch of bare earth, some seeds and seedlings, sunlight, water, the passing of time and then…an explosion of green, the fruit of the earth.
Now is the time for making pickles.
All the pickling cucumbers are ready to be harvested about every other day now.
That adds up quickly.
What kind of pickles to make next?
Bread and butter this past week.
If you’ve made bread and butter pickles then you know it takes a whole bunch of mustard seed and celery seed.
The week before that it was dill seed for the kosher dills.
Then there are cloves, coriander, pepper corns.
Mustard seed are small, so are dill seed, but celery seed is itty bitty.
All these little small things that become so much more.
That is what God’s kingdom is like, it takes small things and it makes them grow, it turns seed into a harvest, it turns seed into a place of refuge, shade and spice.
The kingdom of God is like dirt, “the earth produces of itself”, transforming the little things that are planted in it.
Where is the earth, the good dirt, that will transform our lives, that will grow our lives?
A nation of exiles longing for their own soil to plant, their own soil to be planted in. Ancient Israel, held captive, in exile, in Babylon.
We hear their longing in the psalm this morning. A displaced people, a people without a country, they came to know that ultimately their home was in God, rather than in any nation, and God was that soil within whom they would grow and plant as a people.
Listen again to verses 11-14:
“The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree, and shall spread abroad like a cedar of Lebanon.
Those who are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God;
They shall bear fruit in old age; they shall be green and succulent;
That they may show how upright the Lord is, my Rock, in whom there is no fault.”
They were a small forgotten people under the thumb of a mighty empire, finding a home away from home, a people defined not by their land, not by their victim hood, not by the empire that surrounded them, but by their God.
And in their God they found the good earth to be fruitful, to become a gift and blessing to all around them, a light to all the nations, that in this soil we find the home where life flourishes.
No empire can survive, they make too many enemies, they spend everything on huge standing armies, that consume the entire harvest of a country, all the institutions and economies that make a country and a people great are devoured feeding the army that protects them, the tax base collapses, and the empire collapses from with in.
Dwight Eisenhower called it the military industrial complex. He feared that his country would be consumed by it. Consumed by an idea really, that we can make a home and protect it forever, that life is found in taking and keeping rather than in growing and giving.
He was a brilliant man, a prophet.
Empire is the soil of famine. Empire trusts in itself. Empires trample down the seeds of life.
Babylon collapsed, like the empire before it, and the empire after it, and Israel went home, but the faithful always knew that those who belong to God will always be exiles.
Where is the soil in which we plant our lives?
Where do we find our home?
Does it produce a harvest to feed many people, does it grow a shady place, a place of refuge, a haven, a place of spice and flavor and zest?
That is what the soil of God’s kingdom produces, out of something little comes a gift, a blessing for others.
Like a whole closet full of pickles, or bushels of tomatoes, and the notorious zucchini and squash, there is suddenly so much that we beg others to please eat of the fruit our lives, given freely out of abundance.
That is the big difference.
God’s abundance compels us to share, to share desperately.
The abundance of Empire, causes us to hoard, and there is never enough, to build walls and fortify boarders, and the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, until the whole pickle just deflates because it is hollow inside. The future is consumed by deficit spending until there is no more future left to spend.
Hollow pickles are very disappointing.
A wonderful gift has been given to us, a place to be at home, to put down deep roots, to be fruitful, to grow and grow until we can’t help but share.
The Kingdom of God.
And in Jesus that kingdom has come near.
All the exiles of empire now have a home.