Luke 21:25-36
“How do you know when the soy is ready to harvest?” I asked Caroline, then ninety and now of blessed memory. “It’s easy pastor,” she responded, “you just have to wait until the plants are the right shade of yellow.” Caroline had been in the business of being a farmer’s wife, and then a farmer’s mother, for quite some time. She knew by instinct the right shade of yellow. To me, however (a newbie to the world of farming and rural life0, the soy didn’t look yellow. It looked dead. Almost a decade has passed since I first started living next to a field that rotates between corn and soy later. I understand now what Caroline meant by “the right shade of yellow.” It takes patience and waiting and enough attention to know just the right time for harvest. Wait too long, and the plants will spoil.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is frequently asked for signs. “…to test him, (they) kept asking for a sign from heaven,” (Luke 11:16). “What sign are you doing that we may see it and believe in you?” (John 6:30). These scenes remind me of the beginning of the film Bruce Almighty, where lead character, Bruce, begs God for a sign or a signal and at the same time misses all of the “caution” signs that God has put in his way.
"...perhaps we expect a sign of great grandeur and miss the smaller signs of the Kingdom as we go about our day, dismissing them as so common that they couldn’t possibly be what we were hoping for."
The thing is, dear ones, the signs of the kingdom of God all around us. They were around the people of Jesus’ time in the words and deeds of Jesus and his followers. As folks who live on this side of Jesus’ death and resurrection, they surround us now. I wonder, then, if we’ve forgotten how to stop and pay attention when these signs appear. Or perhaps we expect a sign of great grandeur and miss the smaller signs of the Kingdom as we go about our day, dismissing them as so common that they couldn’t possibly be what we were hoping for.
When speaking to the necessity for his followers to wait and watch, Jesus points to the trees. Trees are a part of creation that are so ordinary in many parts of the world that we take them for granted. As I write this, we are just past the peak of tree color that comes in the Northern Hemisphere. Having lived in areas where the trees show off their colors every fall, I confess that I have often found myself so caught up distractions and worries that sometimes I forget to stop and consider their beauty, the signs of the kingdom of God that are all around me.
Signs of the kingdom of God are all around us: in the glory of the creation, around tables, in our neighbors, in bread, wine, Word, and water. These signs come in the ordinary ways that God touches our lives with love, mercy, and grace. It takes patience and waiting and practice to see these signs. When we do take the time to pause and look for them, we see glimpses of the abundance of kingdom that is here in our midst now, and glimpses of the kingdom that is still coming.
PASTOR JEN KIEFER serves as an Assistant to the Bishop and Director of Candidacy for the Southeast Michigan Synod, ELCA. Previously, she served as pastor of St. John Lutheran Church in Dundee, MI and as associate pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Lawrence, KS. Pastor Kiefer holds an MDiv from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, where she served as a student assistant to the Dean of the Chapel, and a BA from Kalamazoo College.
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