In earlier chapters of my life, if Mother’s Day was about special menus, dining rooms and restaurants, Father’s Day was more about yards, yard work, and cookouts. It might have been a matter of taste and choice or it might have been more a matter of calendar and weather. In any case, that’s how it was!
This year the readings that fall to us for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time and Father’s Day have much to do with yards, planting and cultivating. It makes great sense to me personally, given my history!
Jesus taps into our ability with and our need of the rich world of choosing, planting, cultivating and harvesting. Granted, those who sat with him and heard his parables in real time probably knew more about agriculture than the majority of us who live today. And the particular trees and branches that inhabited the world of Jesus’ Jewish ancestors and his contemporaries are decidedly not available at our local home and garden store. Still, creation lives, breathes, absorbs nutrition, and grows all around us! The power of the parables that Jesus tells have not lost their meaning. At times it is the power to remind us that we are part of a greater whole. At times it is the power to advise us of the difference it makes the kind of soil in which we are planted. At times it is the power to unfold the mystery of how something becomes more than itself only when or after it “lets go” being that which, to our eyes, it so obviously is.
Whether or not Father’s Day finds you in the yard in any way, do enjoy Father’s Day as it is yours to do. And whether or not you could tell a mustard seed from a watermelon seed, please do not fail to attend to all that has been planted within you. Strong, deep roots . tall, broad trunk . wide, welcoming branches . yes, it’s a parable for us, and it’s a parable built of us. For, to the world we must become all that Christ has revealed, not because it is fully within us to be so or to do so. Rather, it is the parable in us and of us that Christ is revealing day by day, year by year, through the mercy and grace of the power that is his!