mustard seeds, phytoplankton, hope

I'm on vacation! So here's what I shared in church on Sunday night.

Matthew 13:31-33

Jesus put before the crowds another parable: “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.” 

He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened...”

As many of you know, last week our youth pastor and I took fifteen of our highschool students to the Duke Marine Labs in Beaufort to learn about marine life and ocean conservation. I planned this trip because I love the ocean, and because I think the coast is a natural place for teenagers to connect with the transcendent, and because I knew that the climate crisis was coming for us, and I wanted to help us deepen our connections with the rest of creation.

But what I didn’t know, nine months ago, as I began organizing this trip, is that we would find ourselves traveling in what news outlets began reporting as the hottest month in recorded history, that headlines this week would talk about the hot-tub-level temperatures in the waters off Florida.

I didn’t know that oceans absorb 90% of the excess heat of global warming, or that at the very moment we were learning about the death of coral reefs in the last few decades, 

researchers would find that a coral reef restoration site off South Florida had "100% coral mortality" due to July’s temperatures; in other words, it got so hot that the experiment in restoration ended in total death.

I wish that the trip had not been quite as relevant as it ended up being.

While we were in Beaufort I learned that the ocean provides the oxygen for at least half of the breaths we take, 

and that the heat the ocean is absorbing is fatal for some of the ecosystems that create that oxygen. The warming oceans mean that half the marine species in the world could face extinction by the year 2100. 

Most of the time, I try not to think about the reality that the rising temperatures means rising sea levels, which is a threat to around 680 million people who live in low-lying coastal areas; and a threat to the almost 2 billion who live in the world’s megacities that are coastal; and a threat to nearly half of the world’s population (3.3 billion) that depends on fish for protein.

I try not to think about these things because they are so overwhelming, and I can begin to despair.

At the end of our trip, after participating in beach clean up, studying invertebrates under the microscope, writing postcards to our elected officials, working on art projects and poems, watching dolphins and wild horses, we had a beach day – just a lazy day for swimming and sunning – and as I was laying there relaxing, a friend texted me out of the blue:

How are you caring for yourself amidst the climate grief?

The truth is, the whole trip was a way of caring for myself amidst climate grief; rather than despairing at what’s been lost 

or what might happen, 

I am trying to believe in looking with clear eyes at our world, and then engaging in active hope, hope that practices learning and loving, connecting and acting – hope that locates itself in the reality that our outcomes are not set.

I texted my friend some things about active hope,

And then she said, being part of a community of faith, do you feel like you’re connected to a collective pursuit of this kind of hope?

I told her about how we’ve started composting, and our creation care committee’s commitment to planting native species and pollinators, and our becoming beloved community’s plan to read Braiding Sweetgrass together this fall – a book that is all about rethinking our relationship to the rest of creation –

And then I told her that (in the face of all kinds of situations that feel impossible) Scripture gives me hope.

In part because Jesus says 

the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. It’s almost invisible, and then suddenly it’s ten feet tall, making a home for the birds. Salvation comes in surprising ways.

Mustard was not something that farmers or gardeners among Jesus’ original audience would have planted. Mustard was a weed. So when Jesus said that the kingdom of God was like a mustard seed, growing to enormous heights, this might have been a puzzling comparison. No one wanted mustard growing that large. Mustard was something to uproot. 

Mustard would disrupt the careful plantings of the farmers, the system, the ways things were. 

And maybe that’s the point:

If any of Jesus’ listeners were farmers, they were probably tenant farmers, growing crops for the government on land they didn’t own. Seeding some invisible mustard in among the empire’s crops might have been a subversive move.

The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed: it quietly disrupts the way things are, the systems that have been built to benefit a few and wreak havoc on the rest.

The kingdom of God grows as fast as a weed, and doesn’t provide anything to feed the wealthy, but does provide a place for the birds to nest. 

In the kingdom of God, the birds are as important as anyone else.

And the kingdom of God is like yeast hidden in flour. Invisible, but changing the very structure of the dough. Slow, but transformative. The kingdom of God is like a woman mixing yeast into three measures of flour – three measures, that’s not dinner for her family, that’s bread for a whole community. That’s bread for a wedding feast. The kingdom of God expands to feed all who are hungry.

If we knead the dough

If we sow the seed

We participate in the coming of the kingdom that is promised, the “stunning slow incremental undramatic transformation” that is happening all around us.¹

That’s where I find hope in moments of grief. As we read in Romans last Sunday, the creation waits with eager longing for its freedom from bondage to decay, and we groan along with it. But in hope we were saved. And hope that is seen is no hope at all. 

Our hope is like the phytoplankton I learned about this week, invisible to our eyes, but creating oxygen for half the breaths we take.

Our hope is like the mushrooms that emerge after a rainstorm, which are the fruiting of a vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. 

Our hope is like a mustard seed,

 like a little yeast hidden in the flour:

More is happening than what we can see. But we can knead the dough. And we can sow the seeds. As we do, our hope can take root and grow.

And who knows what will happen next?

---

Three Things:

• I’ve been most influenced in my convictions about the nature of hope by Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark (“Hope “locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act... Hope is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and when it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.”) and (though it’s been a while!) NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope.
  

• I drove a long while yesterday, and part of what helped pass the time was the new Serial podcast The Retrievals. I would say more, but I think it’s best to go in not knowing anything about it…
  

• My favorite summer breakfast dates back to cafes in Southeast Asia… frozen yogurt. Buy the tubes and freeze them. Or just spoon (plain, whole milk, with lots of live active cultures, and sometimes a little maple syrup or fruit or jam stirred in) yogurt into popsicle molds. It’s usually all I can bear to eat in the morning in August.

I have a few more long drives coming up this week! Do you have podcast recommendations? I would especially love something narrative and compelling that the kids (12 and 14) and I could listen to together.

Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold. My first book, Dangerous Territory, has a second edition coming this fall; sign up for the Bracket newsletter to learn more.

1. words from Rebecca Solnit, somewhere, maybe here