Daylilies, a Sermon Story

“Daylilies, a Sermon Story”

Romans 8:26-39  Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 12, Year A, July 26, 2020

First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho

Andy Kennaly, Pastor

“…the Spirit helps us in our weakness” recognizes the need for weakness, for often it’s through great pain that we become open to inviting God’s Spirit to work in our lives.

“…for we do not know how to pray as we ought” is telling us a reality by pointing out what is not reality.  “We do not know how to pray” is another way of saying that prayer is “not knowing.”  Prayer is unreasonable because it’s beyond reason and our intellect cannot capture its depth.  “How to pray as we ought” is not done through knowing, through rational thought.  Much like the majority of communication is through body language rather than what’s actually verbalized by words, so too, prayer is mostly silence, subconscious, pre-conceptual as are united, very deeply, with the Divine.

“That very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”  Words cannot express the full spectrum of life and experience, and God is not limited by the restrictive field of words.  Love is a wider field, with deep sighs.  God searches the heart, loves through Divine Spirit, and relational prayer is life.

The Mystic Paul shares about God at work deep in our heart.  And Jesus claims the truth that God’s Heaven is within you.  Again, words are limited, so the best we can do is use analogies and metaphors.  Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” and gives us parables of seeds in the soil, yeast in the dough, treasure buried in a field, treasure worth focusing on, a value that changes everything.  “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a pearl of great value,” inviting singleness of heart and simplicity to receive it, to seek it out.  And like a net thrown into deep water, filling with fish of every kind.  These types of images stir in our soul.

I had an experience this week that explores these themes and I wrote about it.  I’d like to share what I wrote.  It is called, Daylily, and we’ll conclude with this.

Daylily

Andy Kennaly

July 22, 2020

The Daylily caught me out of the corner of my eye.  Walking across my bedroom, I stopped, took a couple steps back, and focused my attention on the grandeur just outside my door.

A year and a half earlier I’d rented a tractor, with a scoop on the front and a backhoe on the rear to do some grading work behind my house.  The ground sloped toward the back of the house, so in wet weather and snowmelt, pools of water would form against the foundation.  I rented the tractor in April of 2019, and started moving soil.  Scooping along the house, changing the grade to gradually slope away from the foundation, lowering the ground level so I could add a French drain and some gravel; the entire hillside was disturbed.

Now, a year and a half later, and it is still an active project, a Do-It-Yourself home improvement.  The French drain was completed first, a perforated pipe removing extra water.  Our sump pump rarely ran this spring, the drain worked so well.  I recently completed the gravel along the house, with a layer of weed barrier underneath.  So far, so good.

But that slope.  The hillside.  The place I moved all that material.  The someday landscaped, terraced, retaining wall zone; it’s still disturbed.  I smoothed it out, pretty much, first using the tractor to give it the rough shape, then hand tools because I needed to get the tractor back to the rental place.  It was a lot of work to rake it out, to get the hillside somewhat refurbished, and it’s not finished yet because there are retaining walls that need to happen, terraces with garden beds holding plants, and flowers of all kinds.  This will help keep the hillside from sliding down toward the house.  The someday project continues, even as it stalls.

For now, that hillside is covered in weeds.  I’ve already trimmed down to the ground once, maybe twice this year.  But they come back.  All sorts of weeds.  My weed trimmer broke so now they grow freely, unencumbered by checks and balances.  Only one is actually planted by me: some Daylily roots which were next to the house.  Before using the tractor there, I carefully dug them out, and set the roots aside.  They laid there for a while until either I or my wife put some in a different part of the yard, a more established zone.  Later on, I was raking out the disturbed hillside a bit more and I found a smaller clump that had been moved by the tractor, so I planted it up higher on the slope, next to a Ponderosa Pine tree.

Today I noticed that this is the day the blooms had chosen to share their life with the world.  Surrounded by weeds, pushing out of rocky soil, living in a disturbed zone that still faces future turmoil before things settle out; this Daylily not only survived the long odds of neglect, but it is sharing loveliness in the heat of the day.

It flashed through my mind that life is a parallel to that disturbed hillside and the miracle of flowers.  Living in a global community facing disruption at many levels, from planetary systems collapse to pandemic viruses and a death toll in the United States six times the global average.  The negative side of extreme individualism, loss of community, confusion in leadership, divisive politics mixing with heightened anxieties, worries, and fears.  Many churches face membership declines, and all institutions in western culture are dealing with losses, except for the military, which continues to gain support.  Family stress, personality clashes, short fuses, all in the context of social unrest, summer heat, and an upsurge of illnesses.  Life is filled with challenges and like a disturbed hillside full of weeds going to seed, it seems a long way off before anything settles out.  Lots of arguments about masks, lots of decisions on when to close or re-open, lots of economic triage at micro and macro scales; more and more people are unemployed, yet the system we perpetuate churns on as Amazon’s stocks gained enough in one day to give Jeff Bezos’ net worth a 13 billion dollar boost.  How is it that so many people are trying to pay the rent or mortgage while one man worth 190 billion dollars gets an extra 9 million dollars a minute for a day?

Life is disturbed.  Life is unbalanced.  Humanity as a social species is teetering.  My life, blessed in many ways, so much to be thankful for, is not immune to these stresses and general anxieties, and even I lose my temper, feeling disrespected, misunderstood, vulnerable, pressured, as plans for a landscaped life dissolve.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like Daylilies planted in disturbed, weed-infested, rocky ground.  One day they catch you, in a passing glance, stopping you in your tracks as beauty waves over you like a strong arm helping you just in time to faint without bumping your head, gently holding you, helping you to the ground.

The Daylilies bloom in the sunshine, claiming a hot July afternoon to remind me what Moses discovered at a bush calling to him: reverence, humility, perspective, and Wisdom as the breath of life sustaining us deep within as God’s Divine Presence calls to itself.

In my bedroom, looking out the screen door, I remembered what James Finley and other mystics suggests when prayer doesn’t work anymore, when scripture doesn’t resonate like it once did, when what worked in life doesn’t fit but something new hasn’t yet emerged in the same, fulfilling way.  He says to bow.  He says, “When all you can do is bow, then bow.”  So barefoot in my bedroom, I turned and allowed the Essence of the flowers to experience themselves through me, and in the midst of a chaotic world, we held each other in and as Christ’s attention, and I bowed.

The Kingdom of Heaven, the Reign of God, exists, because without it I would not have bowed, nor noticed, nor cared, nor ever re-planted those scrawny bulbs.  But in the soil they waited, took root, found just enough to give all they have and the glory of God shines forth for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, and hearts to perceive.

Someday I’ll figure out retaining walls, and rework the ground into garden beds, putting weed barrier down and planting shrubs, flowers, and bulbs.  I’ll be sure to be care-full when honoring the life of these Daylilies who have claimed holy ground until their day comes again.

Thanks be to God for awareness, and an awakened heart, one that shares reminders that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.  And as we claim this Loving Light, may God be glorified, NOW, even as forever.  Amen.