This is my preantepenultimate sermon with you all at Peace Covenant. PRE ANTE PEN ULTIMATE.

In case your Latin is a little rusty, that means “fourth-from-last.” In two weeks, I’ll preach my antepenultimate sermon, then the penultimate sermon, then, on October 1, the ultimate sermon. Watch out for that one. 

In these last few sermons with you, I wanted to share some of what I’ve learned over nearly 8 years as your pastor. We have been through a lot together in eight years, y’all. It has been full and rich and juicy, as Aubrey likes to say. It has been beautiful.

The first lesson I’ve learned from y’all is that tiny is mighty. I don’t mean that small things CAN be good, I mean that small IS good. I arrived here in 2015 from a job at a large, programmatic, multi-staff church with a budget that was approximately ten times the size of this congregation’s. On the first Sunday, I made sure to arrive extra early – a full thirty minutes before the service – to make sure I was prepared and ready. I don’t think I had keys, yet, and no one else was here. I sat in the parking lot, and then I sat a while longer. Finally, Dave and Lynette arrived and let me in, maybe 12 minutes before 11am.

Even before I came, y’all had recognized and embraced the tininess of Peace Covenant. This building is a part of that story of actively choosing smallness and appreciating its power. And in my interviews for this job, you all told me that you had gone through a season of discernment and decided that God was not calling this congregation to start or found NEW ministries, but rather to be a sturdy, energetic support of all the good work that was already happening right here in the neighborhood. That clarity of vision and action was a huge gift to me and, I think, to us as a community.

Not tiny BUT mighty; tiny AND mighty. Peace Covenant has taught me the power of being intentionally small.

That’s biblical, too, you know?

Last fall, we shared a study of Jesus’ parables, and this story about the mustard seed was one of them. 

“The kingdom of heaven,” Jesus says, “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.”

Jesus is always throwing out these one-liners about the kingdom. The kingdom is like this, the kingdom is like that…and they’re usually about weird and unexpected things. This one – the kingdom is like a mustard seed – seems on its face to be kind of simple: a tiny thing grows into something big.

Except it’s not actually that simple. Someone goes out and SOWS a mustard seed in their field. They did it on purpose. This is not a story about kudzu, an unwanted weed taking over where it isn’t planned, although I have heard that interpretation before. Matthew is very careful to tell us that this mustard seed was planted on purpose.

And, it doesn’t grow into a giant tree – mustard actually doesn’t do that. Here, Jesus says that the seed grows into “the greatest of shrubs.” 

I don’t know how prestigious that title – the greatest of shrubs – is. But I have, recently, been paying attention to one particular shrub outside my building. It’s pretty nondescript, clearly planted as a decoy to hide away the ugly HVAC units needed to heat and cool the twenty apartments in my building. It is not a centerpiece of any kind of landscaping; it’s not very pretty or noteworthy. It’s just a shrub. It hides the machines.

But in the summer, this boring old shrub grows these tiny little white flowers – they bloom from April all the way through September. And lately, I’ve been noticing just how many pollinators LOVE this shrub. There are always a couple dozen bees buzzing around, drinking nectar from the tiny little white flowers. But a couple of weeks ago, the butterflies also started hanging around, sometimes drowsy with the spoils of those flowers. And the other day, there were even DRAGONFLIES flitting up and down the length of this boring old shrub. This shrub, completely unremarkable in its color, size or generally existence, turns out to be very important to the pollinator population at my house. It’s providing a home.

The artist Kelly Latimore writes modern icons – you should follow him online if you don’t aready. Last week, he shared a new icon: from the parable of the mustard seed. Here it is:

Kelly says about this icon: 

All of the birds in this icon are native to the Holy Land. Birds in the icon: Palestine Sunbird, Scrub Warbler, Common Rosefinch, Laughing dove, Barn Swallow, House Sparrow, Fire-Fronted Serin, Red- Rumped Swallow, Rufous-tailed Scrub Robin, Woodchat Shrike, European Greenfinch, Tree Pipit, Nubian Nightjar, Northern Wheatear, Green Bee Eater, Eurasian Golden Oriole, European Roller, Eurasian Jay, Great Tit, Hooded Crow, Eurasian Blackbird, Common Chiffchaff, Rock Bunting, Crested Lark, and White Spectacled Bulbul. 

The parables, like the sermon on the mount, have always been crucial for the church to imagine the kind of community it is called to be. We discover again and again that Jesus’ parables significance points to everyday life. The parables are meant to be lived.¹

Our good friend from last year’s parables study, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, has some insightful wisdom about this particular parable, helping us imagine the kind of community we are called to be. She says that explaining this parable as a story of something small growing into something big is fine and technically correct but also BORING: “To speak of the parable as demonstrating that great outcomes arrive from small beginnings is correct, but it is banal. To note WHAT outcomes might occur provides better provocation.”²

The parable of the mustard seed doesn’t tell us that the kingdom is like something small growing into something big; that’s kind of routine. This parable – which is helping us imagine the kind of community the church is called to be – is telling us that even a tiny seed grows into a great shrub that provides a home for all kinds of creatures.

Which is part of what I’ve learned from you, tiny, mighty Peace Covenant. In the eight years that I’ve been your pastor, we have not grown into a great, tall Cedar of Lebanon, or even a Longleaf Pine of North Carolina. We are still tiny.

And you know what? I think that’s great. Our tininess has been a great advantage in these last few years: it gave us the agility to shift worship practices during Covid, it allows us to experiment with new ways of being together, and our tininess has meant that we have been able to provide a home for a lot of beloved people.

I’ve been thinking about some of those people this week, imagining what the birds in an icon of Peace Covenant’s great shrub might look like.

There would be Z and J birds – the young couple who found us and the Brethren tradition during their time here at seminary, discovered that their faith and worldview and call to ministry was in THIS kind of community. Z and J got ordained in the Church of the Brethren last Sunday – a commitment that signals just how deeply their sense of home in our tradition is.

There would be K and H birds – who moved to town during the height of a pandemic and needed a community to hold them and celebrate them, who found a home where they were welcome not only as they were but also where they were welcome to become who they were meant to be.

There would be an A bird – someone with a strong, clear call to ministry but whose previous congregations couldn’t support her well in that call, who found not only a supportive congregation for that ordination journey but a home for her family and herself to continue to be deeply connected to her Brethren roots even as she works far and wide, ecumenically and with folks from all different faiths. 

There would be T and P birds – a couple finding their footing together after seasons of big life changes, who showed up at coffee with me before they committed themselves to joining our congregation to make sure that we were people who loved, respected and included people of all gender expressions and sexualities, who kept finding home with us even after they moved in the midst of the pandemic.

There would be G and R birds – who found a home here not only for themselves but for their tiny chihuahua Peggy, too, who showed up to worship in her Sunday best, friends who continued calling this congregation their home on Zoom, sharing jokes and music all through a pandemic.

There would be an M bird – someone with deep, lifelong faith who felt God calling her to be a part of our tiny congregation in order to be a part of hard, intimate conversations around race and relationship, who found a home with us despite differences and lived the last season of her life as part of this congregation.

There would be birds that looked like each of you – some who’ve been here all their lives, some who swooped in just this season to see what all the commotion was about, some who’ve made this place their home for the long-term and others who are welcomed in for the season in which they really needed somewhere to belong.

And there would be a Dana bird, too, because Peace Covenant has been my home since 2015, where I have found faithful community, deep relationships, and people ready to meet challenges and engage hard conversations together, where you have allowed me to teach and preach and show up in some very vulnerable moments of your lives. 

Our great shrub is FILLED with birds. From a tiny seed, a mighty refuge. The kingdom of heaven is like that. The kingdom of heaven is like THIS. Because that is the other thing the parables teach us: God’s kingdom is not far away, pie in the sky by and by: it is as close as single coin, a barnyard animal, a boring shrub in the front yard.

The kingdom of God is HERE, and it is NOW. We have been living in it together, all this time. Thanks be to God.

1https://kellylatimoreicons.com/blogs/news/the-parable-of-the-mustard-seed

2Short Stories by Jesus, 166.