The Kingdom Begins Small
There are mornings when almost nothing seems to happen.
The coffee is poured. A light comes on in the kitchen. Someone opens a door. A car starts. A child wakes. A man goes to work. Somewhere, someone says a prayer that nobody else hears.
We are inclined to think that important things ought to announce themselves.
But Christ gives us two rather comic images of his Kingdom this morning: a seed you could lose between your fingers, and a little yeast disappearing into a bowl of flour.
God apparently has no objection to beginning unnoticed.
That is worth remembering as we begin another ordinary Tuesday.
Opening Verse
Lord, open my lips.
And my mouth shall declare thy praise.
Invitatory
A mighty God is the Lord: come, let us adore him.
Psalm 94 (95)
Come, let us praise the Lord with joy:
let us joyfully sing to God our saviour.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving;
and make a joyful noise to him with psalms.
For the Lord is a great God,
and a great king above all gods.
For in his hand are all the ends of the earth:
and the heights of the mountains are his.
For the sea is his, and he made it:
and his hands formed the dry land.
Come, let us adore and fall down:
and weep before the Lord that made us.
For he is the Lord our God:
and we are the people of his pasture
and the sheep of his hand.
Today if you shall hear his voice,
harden not your hearts:
As in the provocation,
according to the day of temptation in the wilderness:
Where your fathers tempted me,
they proved me, and saw my works.
Forty years long was I offended with that generation,
and I said: These always err in heart.
And these men have not known my ways:
so I swore in my wrath
that they shall not enter into my rest.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son,
and to the Holy Ghost.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen.
A mighty God is the Lord: come, let us adore him.
Psalmody
Psalm 42 (43)
Send forth thy light and thy truth, O Lord; they have conducted me and brought me unto thy holy hill.
Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy:
deliver me from the unjust and deceitful man.
For thou art God my strength:
why hast thou cast me off?
and why do I go sorrowful whilst the enemy afflicteth me?
Send forth thy light and thy truth:
they have conducted me,
and brought me unto thy holy hill, and into thy tabernacles.
And I will go in to the altar of God:
to God who giveth joy to my youth.
To thee, O God my God, I will give praise upon the harp:
why art thou sad, O my soul?
and why dost thou disquiet me?
Hope in God, for I will still give praise to him:
the salvation of my countenance, and my God.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son,
and to the Holy Ghost.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen.
Send forth thy light and thy truth, O Lord; they have conducted me and brought me unto thy holy hill.
Canticle — Isaiah 38:10–14, 17–20
Lord, save us all the days of our life.
I said: In the midst of my days
I shall go to the gates of hell:
I sought for the residue of my years.
I said: I shall not see the Lord God in the land of the living:
I shall behold man no more,
nor the inhabitant of rest.
My generation is at an end,
and it is rolled away from me, as a shepherd’s tent.
My life is cut off, as by a weaver:
whilst I was yet but beginning, he cut me off:
from morning even to night thou wilt make an end of me.
I hoped till morning,
as a lion so hath he broken all my bones:
from morning even to night thou wilt make an end of me.
I will cry like a young swallow,
I will meditate like a dove:
my eyes are weakened looking upward.
But thou hast delivered my soul that it should not perish:
thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back.
For hell shall not confess to thee,
neither shall death praise thee:
nor shall they that go down into the pit
look for thy truth.
The living, the living, he shall give praise to thee,
as I do this day:
the father shall make thy truth known to the children.
O Lord, save me,
and we will sing our psalms all the days of our life
in the house of the Lord.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son,
and to the Holy Ghost.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen.
Lord, save us all the days of our life.
Psalm 64 (65)
A hymn, O God, becometh thee in Sion.
A hymn, O God, becometh thee in Sion:
and a vow shall be paid to thee in Jerusalem.
O hear my prayer:
all flesh shall come to thee.
The words of the wicked have prevailed over us:
and thou wilt pardon our transgressions.
Blessed is he whom thou hast chosen and taken to thee:
he shall dwell in thy courts.
We shall be filled with the good things of thy house;
holy is thy temple, wonderful in justice.
Hear us, O God our saviour,
who art the hope of all the ends of the earth,
and in the sea afar off.
Thou who preparest the mountains by thy strength,
being girded with power:
Who troublest the depth of the sea,
the noise of its waves.
The Gentiles shall be troubled,
and they that dwell in the uttermost borders shall be afraid at thy signs:
thou shalt make the outgoings of the morning and of the evening to be joyful.
Thou hast visited the earth, and hast plentifully watered it;
thou hast many ways enriched it.
The river of God is filled with water;
thou hast prepared their food:
for so is its preparation.
Fill up plentifully the streams thereof, multiply its fruits;
it shall spring up and rejoice in its showers.
Thou shalt bless the crown of the year of thy goodness:
and thy fields shall be filled with plenty.
The beautiful places of the wilderness shall grow fat:
and the hills shall be girded about with joy.
The rams of the flock are clothed,
and the vales shall abound with corn:
they shall shout, yea they shall sing a hymn.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son,
and to the Holy Ghost.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen.
A hymn, O God, becometh thee in Sion.
Short Reading
1 Thessalonians 5:4–5
But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief.
For all you are the children of light, and children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness.
Short Responsory
Hear my voice, O Lord; in thy word have I hoped.
I rose before the dawn and cried unto thee.
In thy word have I hoped.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.
Hear my voice, O Lord; in thy word have I hoped.
Gospel of the Day
Luke 13:18–21
He said therefore: To what is the kingdom of God like, and whereunto shall I resemble it?
It is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took and cast into his garden; and it grew, and became a great tree, and the birds of the air lodged in the branches thereof.
And again he said: Whereunto shall I esteem the kingdom of God to be like?
It is like to leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.
Benedictus
The Canticle of Zachary — Luke 1:68–79
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, because he hath visited and wrought the redemption of his people.
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel;
because he hath visited and wrought the redemption of his people:
And hath raised up an horn of salvation to us,
in the house of David his servant:
As he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets,
who are from the beginning:
Salvation from our enemies,
and from the hand of all that hate us:
To perform mercy to our fathers,
and to remember his holy testament:
The oath, which he swore to Abraham our father,
that he would grant to us:
That being delivered from the hand of our enemies,
we may serve him without fear,
In holiness and justice before him,
all our days.
And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest:
for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways:
To give knowledge of salvation to his people,
unto the remission of their sins:
Through the bowels of the mercy of our God,
in which the Orient from on high hath visited us:
To enlighten them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death:
to direct our feet into the way of peace.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son,
and to the Holy Ghost.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen.
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, because he hath visited and wrought the redemption of his people.
Intercessions
Christ has called us children of the light and has promised that his Kingdom will grow even from beginnings too small for us to see. Let us place this day in his hands.
Lord, let thy Kingdom grow among us.
For the Church: that her quiet works of prayer, mercy, teaching, sacrifice, and fidelity may bear fruit far beyond what can presently be seen.
Lord, let thy Kingdom grow among us.
For bishops, priests, deacons, religious, missionaries, catechists, and all who hand on the faith: give them patience when their labor appears small and courage when its fruit is hidden.
Lord, let thy Kingdom grow among us.
For our country and our communities: give wisdom to those entrusted with authority, honesty to those who shape public life, and charity among neighbors who disagree.
Lord, let thy Kingdom grow among us.
For our work today: bless the drawing made carefully, the lesson taught patiently, the machine repaired properly, the meal prepared lovingly, the customer served honestly, and every unnoticed task offered to thee.
Lord, let thy Kingdom grow among us.
For husbands and wives, parents and children, and all our homes: teach us the sacrificial love by which ordinary households become schools of holiness.
Lord, let thy Kingdom grow among us.
For those who are sick, lonely, anxious, unemployed, grieving, or afraid: let some small sign of thy providence reach them today.
Lord, let thy Kingdom grow among us.
For those who have died: receive them into the fullness of that Kingdom whose beginnings we see only dimly here.
Lord, let thy Kingdom grow among us.
And for ourselves: keep us from despising small beginnings. Give us grace to do faithfully the next good thing placed before us.
Lord, let thy Kingdom grow among us.
Our Father
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
Amen.
Concluding Prayer
O God, who bringest great things forth from beginnings hidden from the eyes of men, plant thy Kingdom deeply within us. Grant that the small duties we perform, the quiet sacrifices we make, the words of kindness we speak, and the prayers known only to thee may become instruments of thy grace. Make us faithful in little things, patient in hope, and confident that no good thing offered to thee is ever lost.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Blessing
May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life.
Amen.
The Paradox of the Day
The Kingdom becomes great precisely because it is not ashamed to begin small.
Chesterton for the Morning
“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
— G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (1909), “Tremendous Trifles.”
A Chestertonian Meditation
The Kingdom Begins Small
A mustard seed would be very easy to lose.
This is perhaps the first useful fact about a mustard seed.
Put one on a kitchen table beside a coffee cup, a stack of mail, yesterday’s newspaper, a pair of glasses and the keys to the truck, and there is every possibility that it will vanish before breakfast is over.
Nobody would call a family meeting.
Nobody would telephone the authorities.
Nobody would say, “Something of tremendous importance has disappeared.”
Someone would wipe the table and that would probably be the end of it.
And this is the object Christ chooses when he wishes to explain the Kingdom of God.
We might have chosen something more impressive.
An empire, perhaps.
A mountain.
A cathedral.
A thunderstorm.
At the very least, an oak tree.
Christ chooses a seed.
Then he chooses yeast.
This is even worse from the point of view of publicity.
A seed is at least visible. Yeast does its most important work by disappearing.
The woman in Christ’s parable takes the leaven and hides it in the flour. That is the actual image. The Kingdom is compared not merely to something small, but to something hidden.
We have here a rather startling contradiction to nearly everything the modern world teaches us about importance.
We measure importance by visibility.
A successful thing ought to be large. It ought to have numbers attached to it. It ought to trend. It ought to produce a chart that rises encouragingly toward the upper-right corner.
If nobody noticed it, we suspect that nothing happened.
God appears to have a different accounting system.
The mustard seed goes into the earth.
The leaven disappears into the dough.
And the Kingdom advances.
There is a great deal of Christianity in that word hidden.
Most of the important things in a human life happen where there is no audience.
A marriage is sustained by thousands of tiny acts that nobody photographs.
A child is formed by sentences a parent will not remember saying.
A friendship survives because somebody makes a telephone call.
A parish continues because someone unlocks a door, launders an altar cloth, teaches six restless children, puts an envelope in a basket, or kneels in a pew on a Tuesday morning.
A good engineer catches a mistake before anybody knows there was a mistake to catch.
A mechanic tightens the bolt that will therefore never fail.
A mother gets up in the night.
A husband makes the coffee.
Someone forgives something.
Someone decides not to say the cruel sentence that has already formed perfectly in his mind.
Someone prays for another person who never learns of the prayer.
These things are mustard seeds.
We are tempted to call them small because we can see only their beginning.
God sees the tree.
That may be one reason we find Providence so difficult to understand. We are forever walking through God’s beginnings and complaining that we cannot see his endings.
The seed looks nothing like the tree.
This is one of the great jokes of creation.
If you had never seen a tree and someone handed you an acorn, you would have no rational reason from its appearance alone to expect an oak.
The thing is absurdly disproportionate to its destiny.
So are we.
So was Bethlehem.
So was Nazareth.
So were twelve rather improbable men standing around Jesus.
So was the Cross on Good Friday afternoon.
Christianity itself entered history looking remarkably like something that had already failed.
Its founder had been executed.
Its chief apostle had denied him.
One of the Twelve had betrayed him.
Most of the others had run away.
There were no armies, universities, printing presses, broadcasting networks, foundations, publishing houses, political parties, or bank accounts.
There was, by worldly standards, almost nothing there.
A mustard seed.
And yet here we are.
Chesterton understood this peculiar habit of the universe: enormous things keep hiding inside ordinary things.
“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
The problem is seldom that nothing miraculous is happening.
The problem is that we have decided in advance what a miracle ought to look like.
We expect trumpets.
God gives us seeds.
We expect transformation to arrive dramatically from outside.
God puts yeast into the dough.
This changes the way we ought to regard an ordinary Tuesday.
Tuesday suffers from poor public relations.
Friday has the weekend before it. Saturday has freedom. Sunday has bells and breakfast and Mass and family dinner. Monday at least possesses the gloomy distinction of being Monday.
Tuesday is simply Tuesday.
It is the mustard seed of the week.
And therefore it may be precisely the sort of day God likes.
There are probably things before each of us today that seem too small to matter.
An email that should be answered properly rather than hurriedly.
A conversation we have been postponing.
A bit of work that needs to be done well even though nobody is likely to praise it.
A prayer said when we do not particularly feel like praying.
A kindness that will take three minutes.
A dish to wash.
A drawing to correct.
A bill to pay.
A lonely person to telephone.
A spouse to listen to.
A child to encourage.
We would like God to give us a great mission.
He has given us Tuesday.
And Christianity makes the extraordinary claim that the second may contain the first.
There is another curious thing about the mustard seed.
Once planted, it must cease being merely a seed.
It breaks.
The neat little object disappears.
Roots go downward where nobody can see them before anything impressive goes upward where everybody can.
This is not merely growth. It is surrender.
The seed cannot remain safely a seed and also become the tree.
Something similar happens with the leaven. It cannot remain in a tidy little lump separate from the flour. It must be worked into the whole mass.
The Kingdom grows through self-gift.
That makes today’s first Mass reading unexpectedly relevant. Saint Paul speaks about Christian marriage in language that can sound startling to modern ears, but its center is not domination. Its center is Christ:
Christ loved the Church and delivered himself up for it.
That is the measure.
Christian authority, Christian marriage, Christian work, Christian parenthood, Christian vocation — all are ultimately judged against a God who gives himself away.
The seed is buried.
The leaven disappears.
Christ gives himself.
And life increases.
The world tells us that greatness consists in making ourselves larger.
The Gospel presents the strange possibility that greatness begins when we become willing to be spent for something beyond ourselves.
That is not a command to become insignificant.
Quite the opposite.
The mustard seed becomes larger than it was precisely because it gives up remaining what it was.
This also means that we should be careful about declaring our good efforts failures merely because we cannot yet see results.
Parents know this.
Teachers know it.
Priests know it.
Anyone who has tried to build a business, repair a marriage, teach a child, learn a craft, overcome a bad habit, create something beautiful, or pray faithfully knows it.
There are long periods in which nothing appears to be happening.
The seed is underground.
That does not mean it is dead.
Indeed, one of the most dangerous spiritual temptations is the demand for immediate evidence.
We pray and want an answer.
We work and want results.
We love and want gratitude.
We sacrifice and want recognition.
We plant the seed on Monday and dig it up on Tuesday to see whether God has done anything yet.
Then we are disappointed to discover that we have killed it.
Faith sometimes consists simply in leaving the seed in the ground.
There is wonderful reassurance in today’s final psalm of Morning Prayer. Psalm 64 looks out upon watered furrows, softened earth, hills wrapped in rejoicing, flocks covering the fields, and valleys filled with grain.
It is a landscape of abundance.
But every field of grain began invisibly.
Before the valley shouted for joy, someone put something very small into the earth.
Perhaps that is the image worth carrying into this morning.
Not the finished field.
The seed.
Put one good thing into the earth today.
Say the prayer.
Do the work.
Make the call.
Keep the promise.
Forgive the injury.
Teach the child.
Encourage the friend.
Love your family.
Offer the suffering.
Finish the task nobody will notice.
Do not demand that it become a tree before lunchtime.
The Kingdom of God is already at work in ways too small for us to measure and too large for us to imagine.
And somewhere beneath the ordinary soil of this ordinary Tuesday, something may already be growing.
Carry It Into the Day
Do not despise the small good placed in your hands. Plant it. God knows what sort of tree it can become.
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