Growing Like Weeds
“Growing Like Weeds” Ezekiel 17:22-24; Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17; Mark 4:26-34
The word of God came to the prophet Ezekiel in exile: “Thus says the Lord God. I myself will take a sprig from the top of a lofty cedar and plant it on the mountain of Israel, and it will become a noble cedar, and under it every kind of bird shall live. I the Lord have spoken. I will accomplish it.”
You may remember that the prophet Ezekiel was a priest in the original Temple of Jerusalem at the time of the exile to Babylon. The Babylonians invaded Jerusalem, took captive the king and many of the educated Jerusalem elite, including Ezekiel, and hauled them off to Babylon. Ten years later, war broke out again, and this time the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, burned the Temple to the ground, and sent the rest of the people into an exile that lasted two generations.
During this past year, when so much of our own lives have been disrupted in countless ways, I have found myself drawn to the Old Testament texts that come from the time of exile. As faithful people like Ezekiel and Jeremiah found themselves uprooted from everything that they had taken for granted, everything familiar and stable about their lives, we see them – in real time – struggling to understand how God was still present in a time of loss and confusion, trying to imagine how God could still be at work in a world turned upside down.
Prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah were deeply aware that Israel had mostly failed to live up to the covenant that God had made with them after rescuing them from slavery in Egypt. That the people had not turned away from worshiping idols and human power in place of the one true God, that the people had continued to practice cruelty and injustice and replicated Pharoah’s Egypt instead of building a community that valued and uplifted everyone. So when prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah saw that things were going in a bad direction, they saw it as God’s just judgment on the failures of Israel.
But prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah were also convinced that, even if Israel had failed, God had not failed. That God would not abandon humanity to violence and injustice, that God would not abandon the project of gathering a people to be God’s own. That even if kingdoms fall and Temples disappear, even if everything that seems stable and certain falls apart, God will still be working and God’s mission of bringing salvation and healing and justice will somehow continue.
It is from this place of exile and brokenness that Ezekiel announces the good news: God will plant a new tree in Israel. God will take a twig from the top of a mighty cedar and plant it on the mountain of the Temple, and it will grow into a noble cedar tree, and every kind of bird will find rest under its shadow. Ezekiel says: You can be confident of this, because God has promised it.
Now, if I were inclined to be pedantic, I might feel obliged to point out that, in fact, you cannot plant a tree by cutting off a twig from its topmost branch and sticking it in the ground. That’s not where trees come from. Trees grow from seeds, not from twigs. The cedars of Lebanon, like other evergreen trees, produce cones, and inside the cones are seeds, and planting a twig in the ground isn’t going to work. Ezekiel was an educated man and even 26 centuries ago people knew that trees grow from seeds and not from twigs. So why does Ezekiel say that God will clip off a twig from a cedar tree and plant it to become a new and mighty cedar tree in Israel where every kind of bird will find shelter and shade?
Well, on one level, it’s not for me to tell God what God can and cannot do. If you or I planted a cedar seed a tree would grow, and if you or I planted a cedar twig a tree would not grow – but who are we to say what God can do? If God wants to plant a twig in the ground and make it grow into a tree, I suppose God can do whatever God wants and it’s not my place, really, to complain about it.
Now, I should say that, while it’s true that God can do whatever God wants, one can take that kind of thinking too far. It would be too easy to say that if God wanted to prevent a child from dying or to cure my cancer, God could do it – and then when God doesn’t do it, we set ourselves up to be disappointed and angry. Or to think that God must have wanted this suffering, since God could have stopped it and didn’t. A simple, unqualified affirmation that God can do whatever God wants can lead us to some very dark places.
But for someone like Ezekiel, speaking to his fellow exiles in Babylon as they watched disaster fall on their homeland and their people, it must have been reassuring to hear Ezekiel speak the word of the Lord: Do you feel like a twig that’s been snapped off of the tree, cut off from your roots, cut off from the source of life, unable to produce cones and seeds, doomed to dry up and die? Well, God isn’t finished with you yet. God will plant you and you will become a noble cedar and you will bear fruit and do good, you’ll provide a safe shelter for all kinds of birds and flying creatures, for eagles and hawks, for sparrows and cicadas. And before you get all pedantic on me and tell me a twig can’t produce those things – don’t tell me what God can’t do. God has promised that God has a future for you. Even if you don’t see how God could possibly pull it off – God has promised: “I the Lord have spoken. I will accomplish it.” And you can take that to the bank.
Jesus, like Ezekiel, told a lot of parables about seeds and plants and birds. Jesus, like Ezekiel, told parables that may not make a whole lot of sense to botanists and professors of agriculture, but that’s because neither Ezekiel nor Jesus was really trying to tell us about seeds or plants or birds – Ezekiel and Jesus are trying to tell us about the kingdom of God, how God works in the world, how God is present to us in our actual, everyday lives.
So, Jesus says, you don’t understand how God is working in the world. Do farmers really understand what happens after they plant the seed – how the seed sprouts and grows, how it produces first the stalk, and then the head, and then the full grain in the head? Now, if you wanted to be pedantic, you could say that scientists actually know a lot about that process – even 2000 years ago educated people understood it pretty well. But even if the farmer doesn’t understand the process, it happens anyway.
So, Jesus says, you remember how Ezekiel compared the kingdom of God to a noble cedar tree atop a high mountain, providing shelter to every kind of bird? Maybe, Jesus says, the kingdom of God can be compared to a mustard plant – which, in first-century Palestine, was basically a weed. Something that grew whether you wanted it to grow or not, like dandelions in your lawn. And if you were a farmer trying to grow crops worth selling, you probably didn’t want a mustard plant in the middle of your field. It would become large and unruly and choke off the stuff you were actually trying to grow. And worst of all, the birds would come and make a nest, right there in the middle of your farm! Where they will probably eat all your crops.
Perhaps, Jesus says, the kingdom of God is like that – something that sprouts up like a weed, whether anybody really wanted it there or not. If you think you know what you want to plant and what to harvest, a mustard plant appearing in the middle of your farm is a great annoyance – yet for the birds, for some of God’s most beautiful and fragile creatures, the mustard plant provides a safe place them to make a home. And so it is with the kingdom of God. So it is with God’s work in the world – without our knowledge or approval, God is present and at work in our lives, in our families, in our communities, in our world. Without our permission and – especially if we had a lot of plans otherwise – often to our annoyance. Not necessarily conforming to our ideas about the kinds of vegetation that are noble and beautiful and profitable. But providing shelter and shade to the fragile and the vulnerable
And if we, as a congregation of God’s people today, experiencing our own time of exile, wondering if God is still present among us, unable to see clearly how God could possibly be at work among us as we gather in this building and around computer screens, feeling sometimes more like a scraggly weed than a noble cedar, then the word of Ezekiel and the word of Jesus is for us: God will fulfill God’s promises, God will provide growth for the plant and shelter for the birds, God will remain faithful. We don’t need to see it or understand it or approve of it; God has said it and God will do it. And what else do we really need?