Kudzu Kingdom

Matthew 13:31-35

If you have ever traveled in the South, you have seen the plant called kudzu. If you have ever lived in the South, and attempted to landscape, you have battled it.

Kudzu is not native to the United States. It was introduced to the U.S. by Japan in 1876 at the Centennial Expo in Philadelphia. American gardeners were attracted to the large leaves and sweet-smelling blooms of kudzu and began using it for ornamentation. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corp put hundreds of men to work planting kudzu throughout the Southeast because it helped in erosion control.

Apparently few people foresaw the problem of kudzu—its rate of growth. During the summer months kudzu can grow a foot per day. It climbs; it trails; it covers stone walls and fences and telephone poles and trees and you if you’ll stand still for a few minutes. It does provide an alternative to looking for shapes in the clouds. You can look for shapes in the kudzu. There was one near my church that looked like a rabbit on its hind legs.

Now imagine that we live, say, in Georgia, and you grew up seeing the invasive power of kudzu. Then you come to church and Jesus is there— he shows up frequently at church in Georgia— and says,“The kingdom of heaven is like kudzu that someone took and planted in his garden.” What? Why would anybody plant kudzu in their garden? Doesn’t Jesus know it’s invasive? Doesn’t he know it will take over the place? Doesn’t he know you don’t plant kudzu—you try to exterminate it?

Well, the mustard seed was not quite that bad in ancient Israel, but it was close. It was definitely a seed that took over. If you planted it, it was there to stay. And nobody planted it anywhere near anything else.

And this is what the kingdom of heaven is like—an invasive plant, perhaps even a weed. It’s an odd comparison. When I think of heaven, I do not think of kudzu. Of course, when Jesus used the phrase kingdom of heaven, he wasn’t referring to an afterlife. Jesus was referring to the realm of God, and said, “The kingdom of God is within you.” At first glance, that doesn’t make it any better, does it? Now the realm of God within you is an invasive weed. Tell me again how this is good news? It is good news because we could use an invasion . . .an invasion of growth, an invasion of grace. When we are bound by shame, we need grace to be planted. When we are limited by hopelessness, we need joy to take root. When we are constrained by our lack of vision, we need wisdom to spring forth. We need an invasion. When life knocks us down, when the dream job turns into a nightmare, when the relationship we thought was for life, turns lifeless, when our kids rebel and our parents fade, we need an invasion. We need an invasion of grace. We need God’s love to break through the hard soil of our hearts. We need God’s love to sneak in when we are too stubborn to invite it.    We need the realm of God to withstand the heat and the floods of our lives. So the kingdom of God can’t be an African violet or an Orchid, which fail if the conditions aren’t perfect. The realm of God is tougher than that. We need the realm of God to be tougher than that. We need it to be invasive, to be hard to get rid of. We need the mustard plant. We need the kudzu.

When you look at it this way, isn’t this a nice parable? . . . except I’ve left out an important piece of this theological puzzle. To Jesus’ audience, this parable was anything but nice. To suggest planting mustard in one’s field, Jesus was promoting a breaking of the law —the law of diverse kinds.[1] The law of diverse kinds prohibited mixing unlike things. The Book of Leviticus is very clear about what things shouldn’t be mixed. The people were not allowed to let animals cross-breed; they were not allowed to wear a garment made of two different materials; and they were not allowed to sow their fields with two kinds of seed. This also meant they couldn’t rotate crops because they couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t get volunteer growth from the previous year’s seed. Since the mustard plant was invasive, it couldn’t be planted like that. When Jesus compared the kingdom of God to a mustard seed that a man planted in his field, it was an abomination.

Jesus was saying that the realm of God brings chaos. It turns the expected order of things upside down. It takes things you hold dear and says, “That’s not sacred anymore.” It says “You don’t get to determine who is in and who is out. It says “You thought you knew how things should be ordered? We don’t need order. We need growth.”

God is in the business of turning things upside down and doing strange things like messing up rows of crops with a weed that will not follow the lines. God is in the habit of doing things like speaking into an open heart and saying “I’m going to put this seed in you—this little tiny seed— that has the power to challenge you and annoy you and transform you so that in three years you’ll hardly recognize yourself.” The choice is ours: whether to let that seed take root and let it grow and let it ultimately disrupt our lives, or we can take that seed and dig it up or block the sun from getting to it so it dies still a seed of an idea with no hope of transforming the soil around it, much less the world above it.

I’m not a big fan of chaos, in spite of what you may think if you see my desk. I like order. I like structure. I like knowing where things fit and why. I like having a plan, a direction, a blueprint to what I’m building or a map to where I’m going. I would much prefer an orderly God who behaves in predictable ways so that I know my place in the plan, my role in the grand scheme, where I fit and what I’m called to do. But that is not the God we serve. That may be the god we have created in our own image, but it is not the God who created us. We need some mustard seed. We need some kudzu.

A clergy colleague of mine told a story on Facebook last week about a recent baptism she performed at a nearby lake. There were two children to be baptized. They were cousins, and their mothers wanted them to be baptized together. One was 13 months old, and the other was a five-year-old child with special needs. The five-year-old, the pastor said, “is sweet and loving and trusting but wisely cautious and as I spoke with him about what was going to happen he decided flatly and resolutely that he was NOT going to get baptized in the lake at all.” The pastor and the young boy came to a compromise to make him feel safe.

He wanted to baptize the pastor first, and then she could baptize him the same way. At first she wasn’t too sure—this isn’t how baptisms are done.It’s not the proper way. It might send the wrong idea, theologically. But at last she agreed.

In her words to the two children and to the community of believers gathered there, she talked about Timothy in the New Testament, and about the legacy of faith. The children’s grandfather had died a few weeks earlier and the pastor said that, through the water and the word and the communion they would share together, that they were surrounded by the saints— those who are with us now and those who had died before. Suddenly the 5-year-old said, “You mean Papa is here with us now . . . ’cuz of the water of Jesus?” The pastor said, “Well, yes, because we remember him and he is with Jesus.” Then the boy ripped off his shirt and ran into the lake, grabbing the pastor’s hand as he went, and said, “Put my Jesus water all over me now!” “And so I did,” the pastor wrote. “Again and again. . . . And he said over and over, ‘Jesus knows I love my papa, he does! . . . And he loves me, too!”

What a joyous event would have been missed if the pastor had said, “That’s not the way we do things.” It was God’s mustard seed at work. God’s kudzu kingdom.

God plants mustard seeds in us as individuals, and God plants mustard seeds in us as the church. I cannot say what God is calling this church to in the coming years.

I don’t come to you with some grand vision to instill. Vision is born within, not placed upon. But I can tell you that you are headed for change. You have just recently said goodbye to a beloved pastor of over twenty-three years— from everything I can tell, a wonderful man and a fabulous pastor whom I would be honored to follow. Any new pastor is going to bring change simply because she or he is not John McCall. But that’s actually not the kind of change I’m talking about. The changes God has in store for us as “the church” are bigger than personnel.

We are living in a time of great flux . . . a period of time that will make much more sense 150 years from now than it does today. We can’t see clearly now because we’re in the middle of it. But the world is going through major changes, and so is the church. The church world of the 1950s and 1960s, with its packed pews and crowded classrooms, is gone, and it’s not coming back. The church is no longer the center of the community and no longer the center of life.Your own newspaper highlighted that a couple of weeks ago, with an article about the closing of a United Methodist congregation. Some church experts warn us that in 100 years, 50% of our churches will have closed their doors. Recent surveys show that only 16% of 16 to 29 year-olds have a favorable view of the church.Now why do we care what 16-29 year-olds think, when they aren’t the ones in the pews? Because in twenty years, if they’re not in the pews, who will be? But here are the reasons young people dislike the church:

64% say it is not accepting of people of other faiths.

70% say it is insensitive to those who are different.

75% say it is too involved in conservative politics.

87% say it is too judgmental.

91% think it is antigay.

 

In my very first correspondence with the search committee, I told them that I believed the First Congregational United Church of Christ of South Portland, Maine was uniquely gifted to counteract the decline of churches in America because you aren’t those things. The reasons people dislike the church are not true of this church. That is good news!

This church has been through times of great change in the past, and in the middle of that change, it didn’t always feel like good news. It may have felt like kudzu being planted in your garden. But it was God at work, the realm of God on full display, leading and guiding through the chaos.

Now, I’m not saying that everything disorderly is from God. Some disruptions are simply distractions; but some disruptions are new directions. We can’t say “This is too messy” when it comes to the kingdom of God. We must be open to God’s new thing, God’s mustard seed, God’s kudzu kingdom.

I don’t know what God has in store for you, for me, for us— either in the local or the global sense, for regardless of what happens at a vote in a few minutes, I am forever bound to this congregation because of the love I have for ten members of it. But listen to that scripture again:

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

I don’t know what God has in store. Maybe we will be called to give shelter in new ways. Maybe we will be called to create space for different birds to nest. Maybe we will be called to sow wild weed seeds in the fields of the status quo.

But we cannot stop here. Yes, God’s kudzu kingdom is within us as individuals, and within us as a church. But it is also our job to create the realm of God in the world around us. The scriptures are clear— we are called to care for the widow and the orphan, the stranger without kin, those on the margins unable to care for themselves. But creating the realm of God does not require only charity but also justice. The realm of God requires that we feed the hungry and find out why there are so many hungry to feed; that we rescue those drowning in the river, and go upstream to prevent them from falling in.

And here’s the best part: we have what the world needs. Take a quick look again at this mustard seed metaphor. The mustard seed can be pounded into powder and “applied with vinegar to the bites of serpents and scorpion stings. It counteracts the poisons of fungi” and it treats everything from toothaches to stomach troubles.”[2] Even kudzu is finding its place in the field of medicine—as an anti-inflammatory, for treating migraines, and for easing the pain of a hangover. It is being studied as a way to prevent cravings for alcohol and shows promise in the treatment of Alzheimer’s.[3]

Yes, this weed of God’s “not only wreaks havoc on the order of creation . . . It is also invaluable in curing many of the ills that beset us as mortal beings.”[4] It can cure us from the bites and stings of inequality. It can heal us of the pain of swollen egos and greed. It can alleviate our cravings for that which does not satisfy the soul. And it can keep us in our right minds, so we don’t forget. This is the realm of God. It may not be neat and tidy. But it will bring growth.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Amen.

-Cindy Maddox, Guest Preacher and Candidate for Senior Minister

 

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