With what can we compare the kingdom of God? It is like a mustard seed, which when it is sown is the smallest of all the seeds on earth.
One Sunday morning in April, as the sun came up, I stepped outside with the puppy. Birdsong filled the cold, damp air. Their calls and chorus surrounded us. Our trees were busy with cardinals, robins, chickadees, and other birds I couldn’t see, but I could hear. Somewhere there was a woodpecker nearby. Two mallard ducks wandered around the corner of the house and flew off when Kona lunged at them.
As we drove to church, we could clearly see that green April haze spreading over the landscape. The trees were beginning to wake. Tiny clusters of new leaves clung to the branches. Our grass was greening up. Spring hung delicately in the air.
Our Minnesota church has many young children. That particular Sunday, we squeezed into pew in the middle of families bouncing babies and passing toddlers back and forth, while older siblings colored with crayons and rummaged in bags. As we waited for our turn to go up to the table, the pews near me were as loud and busy as the trees in my front yard earlier that morning. I smiled as I watched and listened.
Yet, when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes that “friendship is a sheltering tree.” Jesus says that if we pay attention and look around us, we find the kingdom of heaven growing among us. He encourages us to receive it like children. A few Sundays ago, while receiving the “body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” a four-year-old looked at our pastor and said bluntly, “I wanted more!” He smiled and pinched off a bigger piece. How can you possibly say “no” to more of Jesus?
How will we know if we’ve found the kingdom of God?
We will recognize it because it looks like a tree sheltering birds. It will be full of chatter, of life waking up, and the people gathered will look at the bread of heaven and enthusiastically say, “I want more of that!”
The lively hum from the children around me in church was as beautiful as the sounds of the birds waking up my street at dawn.
And I saw it! I saw the kingdom of God bustling, building, and breaking in all around me. In the shelter of our church, all of us — young and old — gathered together around the table, singing, praying, raising our hands together and saying “Alleluia!”
I hope not a single parent went home worried about a loud whisper, a dropped cup, or the occasional protest from a two-year-old.
All that chatter simply woke us up to the truth that “the dawn from on high” has broken upon us with its beautiful light. May every pew in every church become a sheltering tree.