The passage from Mark we read today was like that for me. I sat and stared at it for hours waiting for the meaning, or even a clue, would pop out and catch my attention. So, finally, I did what any first year preaching instructor would tell you to do, and I read the context in which this was written. This comes at the end of a long dissertation by Jesus on the kingdom of God. The disciples didn't get what he was saying, so Jesus would explain them. These verses were written in the context of us not understanding what Jesus meant. I think Jesus was telling us that even if we don't get it, the Kingdom of God will do extraordinary, unbelievable things.

Jesus tells us that a farmer does nothing to prepare the ground, fertilize, weed or anything else other than throwing seed around. We would expect that nothing would grow, yet there's a full crop. The farmer doesn't know how this happened, but it doesn't stop him from harvesting the grain.

Jesus also tells of mustard seeds sprouting and growing into a mighty bush which holds birds. That's not going to happen unless there's some divine intervention. I've seen mustard grow. It doesn't get very big. Even the giant mustards of the Mediterranean Basin wouldn't support a sparrow, let alone a nest.

See, the Kingdom of God is something we don't have to understand, and probably can't understand. Yet it is a reality. Whether we work for it or not. Whether logic supports it or not. The Kingdom of God is here.

I think one of the problems the church has had since its earliest days is the human need to understand. To explain everything in terms of what we know about most things. Take our Nicene Creed. It came out of a struggle to define who Jesus Christ was in relation to God the Father. It uses Aristotelian physics to explain this spiritual relationship.

There is a long tradition of assigning names to the characters in Jesus parables. The rich man that lies in Hell with Abraham holding Lazarus is identified as Dives. It is a parable. It's made up. Why do we need to believe that it really happened. It's a parable. That's what parables are. Jesus never intended us to think that the story of the Good Samaritan really happened. It's a parable about the kingdom of God.

There is much about God we will never understand, at least until we are made complete in the nearest presence of God. I know, that drives some of us compulsive types crazy. We want everything, even God to fit in nice neat Tupperware containers, clearly labeled and stored in alphabetical order.

But God is messy. Creation is messy. Jesus made mud by spitting in the dirt. People touched each other's feet. Goats wandered the streets. I really believe that once order started to show itself in the church, we started to die. Or maybe I should say that our picture of God started to die. What I mean is that as we try to put God in a box, we trim off the fuzzy edges. We stifle the creativeness, the unexpectedness of God. We tend to think that things that surprise us or cause chaos are necessarily of the devil. Why? Why would that have to be?

I had the joy of watching our kids in the Vacation Bible School create. What a mess. What chaos. What really bad bread. See, in one station, the kids made bread dough and put any combination of ingredients they wanted right in the dough. One creation was flavored with apple and grape jelly, garlic and horseradish.

The kids also made clay figures of Jesus. Some branched out into the snake making business. Another mess. Tie-dyed shirts. Mosaic boxes. The creativeness of these kids was phenomenal. So was the chaos.

I think we've lost sight of the God of playfulness. The God of imagination. The God of discovery. Nope, God demands order. God demands rules. God demands obedience. Yeah, he does, but not in lock step. And God certainly knows that we can't know everything he does.

It really is arrogance to try to stuff God into one set of "one-size-fits-all" cover-alls. It just doesn't work. We're not that smart. And, God doesn't really care about what we know. God cares about who we know.

I don't know how the Virgin Birth came about, but I know the baby. I don't know how Jesus turned water into wine, but I know the bridegroom. I don't know how Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, but I know the one who is resurrection and life. And so do you.

We're all on different parts of our journey of truly knowing Jesus Christ, but yet we all know him. We talk to him. We eat with him. We've all bathed with him. We've invited him into our relationships. And some day, we'll walk hand in hand with him from our door to the door of His Father's Palace.

Coming to know, to experience Jesus happens in untold different ways. We all learn and assimilate knowledge in different ways. We express our feelings for Jesus differently. We come to know him and deepen our relationship with him in different ways.

On the feast of Pentecost, at the 10:00 service, we had an interpretive performance of the coming of the spirit. It was beautiful with a representation of the Holy Spirit's fire circling the altar and drawing people out to spread the gospel. I never thought I'd like that sort of thing, but you know what? It was wonderful and I could sense God's presence.

A couple of weeks ago, Jan van Otterloo played her final postlude, Duryfley's Toccata. There is nothing overtly spiritual about that piece, but I know many of us felt the presence of God in our midst.

Finding God in music? In dance? In art? How right brain is that? Yes, these three art forms can be orderly and structured, but I find God in the moments of inspiration and imagination.

Yes, it's good to know about God. It's good to listen to the church's accumulated wisdom. But to stop there, I think is to limit our access to the incredible unknowability of God. God is so big that no book could hold all the wonders of his love and grace. God is so diverse that it would take everyone on the earth, living and dead before we could represent, accurately, his true image.

The farmer scattered his seed and left it alone. He didn't worry about it. He didn't plot out projected growth patterns. He didn't plough straight lines, he didn't plough at all. He simply let the seed do what seed does.

I don't know what God's will is for me, for you, for the church. O, I can say that his ultimate will is for all the world to be reconciled to himself through Jesus Christ, but that doesn't really clear much up.

That's OK. I know that God loves me. I know that when I need Him, Jesus is only a tear away. I know that I find strength and comfort in the midst of my faith community. I know that God's love drives me into the world. And I know that God has brought us together so that we can throw seed to the wind and, when the time comes, to go together into the harvest.