Canada Fleabane

Our farmer host was explaining how clover seeds are so small and difficult to clean that one of his friends ships them to Manitoba, where they have specialized machines that run through seven different processes to do the job right. One of these machines has velvet rollers that snag the tiny, barbed weed seeds, leaving the tiny, slick clover seeds behind. He went on to explain that one of the weed plants hiding out in the clover (it’s called Canada Fleabane; you know who gets to name these babies!) can put out 230,000 seeds a year. 230,000! They are so tiny that they can ride the wind right into the stratosphere. We’re being invaded from space! It’s a wonder we aren’t smothered yet.

When Jesus compared the Kingdom of heaven to a plant, he chose the mustard seed. That was two thousand years ago, and the mustard seed is still proliferating today. Farmers here in Ontario say they find wild mustard in their fields all the time, though unlike the stately mustard trees that can grow in the Middle East, the mustard plants in Canadian fields today look more like…weeds. Apparently they were also weeds in the time of Jesus, and the rabbis forbade planting them in your garden because they could so easily run away on you and take over the neighbor’s garden. (Driving home today, Robert told me that here in Niagara it’s against the law to let your vineyard go wild because it can host pests that will take over the neighbor’s healthy vineyard, so today’s “rabbis” are still hard at it.)

It’s comforting to realize that Jesus expected the Church—the culture of God, the way he does things, his realm, his kingdom—to spread like a weed, to float to the stratosphere with the wind and come down who knows where and settle comfortably in foreign soil. Sometimes we give the impression in our churches that the kingdom of God has its back against the wall, that it’s just barely surviving. I drive around the Niagara region, and I see churches converted into homes, masonic lodges, community centers, stores, breweries, and historical sites. What are we doing wrong? God’s kingdom should be spreading like a virus, like a plague, like yeast in dough, like the mustard seed. Instead we are closing churches as if Church were going out of fashion like in-door malls. It’s not. Those converted church buildings are misleading.

Jesus compared his kingdom—his church—to plants because it is a living organism whose nature is to grow and reproduce itself after its own kind. It carries within its own DNA the ability to reproduce, or bear fruit, thirty, sixty, or even a hundredfold. Maybe 20,000 fold, for all we know. Although in this culture churches rarely reproduce even once, mostly because the process of church reproduction in this culture is terribly complicated and expensive (kind of like the process of cleaning clover or genetically modifying corn), there are many places in the world where the church reproduces like rabbits, or weeds. It doesn’t need money, or buildings, or professional pastors, or leadership from the outside to reproduce. It multiplies spontaneously, often in the face of great persecution, because the craving for Jesus is sharp, and no one is critiquing the music or comparing the sermon to the “other guy’s.” They’re just glad to see each other and break bread together and know Jesus is there among their “two or three.” What would it take to provoke such hunger in us, in this culture, that we would jump at the chance to gather anywhere, anyhow, even with those people, just to experience the presence of Christ among us that only gathering makes possible? Maybe we have to die first for such rebirth to come to this place. Meanwhile, in other places, it’s already come. I’ve seen it.