The mustard seed store

When I started as your campus minister, I had just two students, one who was a senior about to graduate and one who was so burned out she was about to quit. Now we have almost thirty students in the group chat and the funny task of many weeks trying to fit almost twenty students into the regular sized living room of our ministry house. But I have a little hypothesis that there are between 200 and 400 students at UMW that would enjoy being members of The House. According to our temperament, our theology, the way we make community and share fellowship, and our general vibe. Who doesn't love a button maker! Who doesn't love the pumpkin patch! Who doesn't want to have bible story time while we eat pizza and sit on the floor? There are soooo many students who are not cradle Episcopalians or lifelong Lutherans but who know enough about church or who have a curiosity enough about church or who miss church enough, that I genuinely believe they would make good members for us. We just have to find the right way to reach them at the right moment for, maybe, something to click.

I wonder what the number is for St. George's. How many people in Fredericksburg do you think might like belonging here if they found their way in at the right moment, and in the right way? How many people would a good fit for our temperament, our approach to scripture, for the way that we see and interact with the world at this moment? Think about the fellowship and the friendship you experience here, think about the ways that you have served and how they've been hard but have shaped you, think about the moments in which you have experienced God, or had your heartbroken by the world and had that held by and with these people who are here? Who wouldn't want that?

So I'm asking you to form a little hypothesis of your own: how many people in the Fredericksburg area do you think would make good members of St. George's but have just not found their way here yet? There are more than 25,000 people in the city, there are more than a quarter-million people in the four-county area. So how many do you think? 1000? 2000? 5000? 10000?

Maybe its gauche/uncouth to talk about numbers! But we are an organization that is made out of numbers- budgets, pledging units, average sunday attendance, cost of living adjustments, programmatic line items, number of shoppers at the table, number of neighbors at community dinner, baptisms, confirmations, weddings, funerals. And Jesus wasn't shy about numbers either- he called the first apostles out of their day jobs and has 12 guys [snaps] just like that, he sent out the 72 disciples to do his work, he has crowds following him about for much of his ministry, the number of people he is said to have healed is only called "many", he tells us to forgive wrongdoing 7 times 77 times, he feeds 5000 people at once, on the day of the Pentecost 3000 are said to have been baptized. 72, 7 times 77, 3000, 5000. Jesus says that the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few.

We have to belief that the number of people out there who want to hear a message of good news to the poor, of freedom for the oppressed, of mutual and self-giving and big, public love,

we haveee to believe that the number of people who crave

that message at a time like this is HUGE.

Right??

AND... BUT … the distance between the outside of a faith community can be a big distance, the distance between non membership and membership can be great, you are on the outside of a faith community looking in, it can feel like a big hill to climb to find your way into a community of faith, especially if you have been hurt by another church, or had a negative experience of a different kind of church, or if you simply cannot believe- from personal experience or from popular media- that there exists a type of church built around the dignity of every human being. The harvest is soooo plentiful, but the work is tricky, and the laborers are few. But we, we are the laborers.

The mustard seed is a common image in scripture and shows up again in today's gospel reading; here Jesus says that if you have faith only the size of a mustard seed, you would be able to tell a mulberry tree to be uprooted and put itself down in the sea and it would obey. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells the same story but it is a mountain instead of a Mulberry tree. Earlier in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says "the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds perched in its branches.”

So let me say that I am very happy to be a bird perched in this St. George's mustard tree with all of you here. And, I feel confident that there was a time in all of our lives when the distance between the outside of the church and the inside of it, felt great, or a time when my faith or your faith was not a mustard tree or a mustard shrub but a mustard seed, or perhaps there was a time that we had no mustard seed at all.

I guess the question I have that I will always have is: what happens if you do not have even a mustard seed of faith? Where do you get one? Can you split it like a sourdough starter and borrow it from a friend? Can you go to the mustard seed store and buy one? It is something you make from scratch, with God's help, or with enough desire does God grant one to you? Do you rustle up enough courage to go to church week after week and look down and realize, all of a sudden you've had one for a while?

It is not our work alone to mediate the distance between the outside of the church and the inside of it, God plays the biggest part in it, but I believe that our work in this season as laborers in the vineyard is to become fluent in that gap: the experience of coming from the outside of the church to the inside of it, or the experience of having no mustard seed and finding yourself with a mustard seed. If there are 200 or 400 UMW students or 1000 or 10000 FXBG residents who would make good belongers, what is the distance between the outside and inside and how do you traverse it.

I do not think it is rocket science but I also do not believe the answers can be pulled out of thin air. Rather I think it's a question we can answer from our own lives, individually and together.

Where did your faith come from?

If you ever had a point in your life with no faith,

where did you get your first little mustard seed of it?

If your faith is a great big shrub, what happened in your life that the seed to first split open?

If you spent a while circling this church, or any church, what caused you to land the first time?

I cannot tell you your the answer to these questions. Only you know the answer for yourself, and only you can share the answers you have with one another, and so I am going to give you the opportunity to do that. I will invite you to turn to a neighbor and ask this question of one another:

What is it that keeps bringing you back to St. George's? It could be an experience of friendship, or of service, or of God,, but what brings you back to this church,, or what brought you to St George’s for the first time. I am going to take a lap around the sanctuary and you have until I finish my lap. [4 minute break]

My answer is this: obviously I came here at first because you hired me! And I come back because this is my job but,,, Do you remember that time a few years ago, when Fr Will and I hatched that hare brained scheme for Lent, that series of videos where we had the tiny microphone and we would wander around the church office interviewing people? And there were those funny transitions and funny soundtrack -- that was all video game music by the way. I think we hoped that five people would watch them and find them funny, and big surprise to us, people really enjoyed them and looked forward to them every week.

That was my first experience as a new priest of thinking- maybe I really get to be myself as a priest. It'd been a big hypothesis for me that what it means to be a Christian is, in part, that you get to figure out who God made you to be and then you get to be that person in the world. It was a hypothesis for me, but St. George's was a place where it became true. This church lets me be myself, and you encourage my people to be themselves. And for that, I am grateful, and I thank God. Amen.

7:45am

I cannot tell you the answer to these questions for you. Only you know the answer for yourself. But if you attend this service, at this church, I trust you know the answers for yourself. And for those answers, I thank God. Amen.