Is Your Mustard Seed Planted? - Sermon

Is Your Mustard Seed Planted?

Today is Scouting Sunday, while you’re in scouting, you’re on a journey. You don’t know where this journey will bring you, or how this journey will affect you, or how long this journey might take you. The journey you take will not be the same journey that your best friend Sue will take. It will not affect you the same way it affected your buddy Bob. Each journey is different. While you’re on your scouting journey, you may cross paths with your faith journey. They may intersect many times, or maybe they’ll only intersect once.

Every scout has a scouting journey, but everyone has a faith journey. Like I said, a little different for each and every one of us. Now I can’t tell you where your journey is going to take you - - - I don’t even know where mine is taking me, but I found a perfect quote the other day. To give you, me, everyone a little bit of hope. “If you God brings you to it, He’ll help you through it.” This, I believe, is the truth. God knows how strong we are, and he believes in us. We just need to believe in him and ourselves.

Now my faith and scouting journey have intersected many times. Today, I would like to talk about my faith journey, and how it’s affected me and my scouting journey. My faith journey started the Sunday that my parents baptized me in the sanctuary of United Churches of Durham. Once I turned three, I started Sunday School. I would listen, intently, to Mrs. Newton give the children’s message; I would run to class with the other kids; and then I would learn about the Bible and God.

I remember one Sunday, I was probably four, I told my mother, very adamantly, that “I did NOT believe in God!” Thus I wasn’t going to go to church. My mother was less than happy to hear this. Looking back to that day, I don’t even remember why I said it. I probably wanted to stay at home with my father and help him with yard work or wanted a ride on the lawnmower. Clearly my four year old self didn’t know what she was saying, or how God would impact her life later on.

I don’t remember when I started liking church and wanting to go, but it happened. It must have been around the time I started Jr. Choir. What better incentive could there possible be, other than being in a choir?! Or maybe it was Heifer International. I also loved when we did Heifer. We would do Heifer during Lent and use Heifer’s Lenten Calendar, which would tell us to do something every day and put a specific amount of money into the ark if we had the item or did what it said. I would bring the ark home and always try to get the most money in it. My favorite day during the time of Lent would be the day that told me to call my mother. For every time she responded I would put something like 10 cents in, and for every time she didn’t respond I would put 5 cents in. I’m sure my mother’s thoughts on this day are the complete opposite from mine!

As a kid I looked at church just as a place where we went every Sunday, sang a little, prayed a little, learned a little, and talked a lot, well at least Mom did! I never understood how my father was allowed to skip church, because of yard work, but I wouldn’t skip church to help my father! We did a lot of missions with the church, you know, Heifer, The Crop Walk, Operation Christmas Child. I was always enthusiastic for missions, they were fun! In 2002, United Churches of Durham started a new missions trip. They went down to Eastern Kentucky to build low income housing. The most memorable memory about going down to Kentucky was when I had to ask my minister a question. I remember repeating his title in my head as I found him. I looked up to our minister, literally, and went “Mr. Reverend Riggles do you have a hammer?” Just saying Mr. Reverend was almost impossible for the seven year old self, only to be corrected by him “Caelyn, you can call me Elven.” With Elven saying that, it made me close to God, Jesus, and him. If I could call the minister of our church by his first name, then what does that mean I can accomplish with God and Jesus, if I just got to know them a little better? With being able to call Elven, Even, it made me feel a little bit closer to Jesus and God, physically. That whole revelation added to my love of church, religion, and the congregation.

I went to church faithful. Sure there was a Sunday or two when I was camping or playing a sport, but for most of the time I would be sitting in the usual pew in the balcony with my family. It was only recently that I felt bad when I missed church, or couldn’t make it to Senior or Chancel Choir. When I was thirteen, my mother got us into the Bible Study at church. Bible Study was every Thursday morning. We would always talk about whatever we learned, and I would usually sit and just listen, and the next thing you know Elven would be weighing in and saying something about how the beginning of whatever we were talking about dates back to 637 A.D. Anything with Elven will turn into a history lesson! I remember one morning at Bible Study we started talking about Christmas versus Xmas, and how the X takes Christ out of Christmas. Evidently the X in Xmas is the abbreviation for Christos, which is the Greek word for Christ. So we aren’t taking Christ out of Christmas when we write Xmas. Now Elven explained a lot more than I just did, but I was amazed at how much history one small little word, a letter really, could contain.

When I was fourteen, I started confirmation. Within confirmation class, I learned a little bit of everything in Christianity and “my” church, I learned the 66 books of the Bible to the difference of Congregationalist to Methodist to how many organ pipes there are in the sanctuary. If you were wondering, that are 29 organ pipes in the sanctuary of United Churches of Durham, so if you’re ever down in Durham. Stop by and make sure they’re all present and accounted for.

Taking confirmation got me thinking how differently my relationship with God would be, if I started actually putting my heart into praying, and how much more I could understand Biblically if I started reading the Bible every day. Thus I started both. When I pray I think about the whole day and hold a conversation with God. The same conversation you would have with your parents when you got home from school and explain every bit and piece of how the day went. I told God about the good parts and the bad parts. Sure I asked Him for nice weather, or for me to pass the next test in whatever subject it was in. Then I waited for a response. My eyes would still be closed, my hands still folded, my head still bowed. The only sound in my room would be my breathing. Sure I haven’t gotten a response yet, but waiting for a response makes the conversation from a one-way conversation to a two-way conversation.

After confirmation, not only did I believe in God more, but I understood more about church, why we do the things we do. Why we call it a meeting house instead of a sanctuary, and of course the most important thing. How many organ pipes there are. Some days I think of how long my faith journey has been and where it’ taken me, but then I think of where it’s going to take me and the years to come, the years to add onto my relationship with God, and my beliefs.

In scouting they have an award called God and Me. There are four levels of this award, and this award has a different curriculum for each denomination. I’ve gotten two out of the four awards for the Congregationalist religion. This was probably the first time that my two journeys intersected. I was a Junior in Girl Scouts when I got my first God and Me award. I remember standing at the front of the church, with my award in hand, in line with all of the other scouts as Mom took pictures and the congregation applauded all of us.

After the God and Me program, my faith journey and scouting journey intersected many times. When we went down to Kentucky one year I was in the middle of my Miss Fix It badge. When I first looked at all of the requirements for the badge I didn’t know how I was going to get it all done. I knew it was possible, but didn’t know when I would have the time, but that one week in Kentucky allowed me to get the badge, and more!


Another benefit from Kentucky, was I’ve gotten stronger. Whenever I go to an item that is heavy, I’m usually told “Caelyn, that’s pretty heavy, we’ll let a guy take it.” I usually give the person a look and then say “Well, it has it be lighter than a roof truss, right?” and walk away with the item in hand. You can only imagine how many people I confuse with stating that an item is lighter than a roof truss.

I’ve spent countless hours and days with Troop 27 in Durham helping out with leaf clean-up and community dinners at both United Churches of Durham and the Church of Epiphany. Of course I love leaf clean-up, because that means we would have a huge pile of leaves. Much better than any pile of leaves we could make at home. I just couldn’t let a pile like that pass right by me, could I?

Both Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts include our “Duty to God” in their promises. Even though they both do, Girl Scouts puts an asterisk next to the word “God”. In Girl Scouts, you may change the word “God” to whatever you feel most comfortable saying. While in Boy Scouts there is no asterisk next to the word “God” at all! In Connecticut, there is a person who will sit on some Eagle Board of Review and will ask: “Do you believe in God?” If the scout says no, this person will not accept his Eagle, because for at least 10 years of this scout’s life he’s been making a promise that he will be reverent and will do his duty to God. In Boy Scouts, God means the one that we read about in the Bible, the one who gave us Jesus. There is no asterisk in the Boy Scout promise or law.

When I promise to do my duty to God, I often think of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural address. He said: “It’s not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” I think of what I can do for God, instead of what God can do for me. It almost seems that we can so easily ask God to do something for us, but it’s much harder to do something for God. I ask myself why this is, all the time, but I still haven’t come up with an answer. I’ve come to a point in my faith journey, where I want to do something for God. I want to help Him out in a small way somehow, don’t you?

While I was writing this sermon, I asked Mom to look through it a couple time and give me some suggestions and hints on how to make it longer. One of her suggestions were “Would Jesus have been a scout?” Now this got me thinking, because in scouting a lot of our beliefs are based off of Jesus, God, and Christianity. I’m going to say yes, Jesus would have been a scout. Today we strive to be the best person we can be in and out of scouting. We strive to be nice, responsible, reverent, polite, clean, physical fit, and much, much, more. All of these are bits and pieces of how Jesus would have acted. Jesus and Christianity set us a standard of how we should act. A standard that we all strive to meet, so yes, Jesus would have been a scout.

Another great scouting quality Jesus taught us was leadership. I’ve grown as a leader in scouting, when I first started scouting at 5, leadership meant nothing to me, all it was, was another vocab word. But as I grew up in scouting, I also learned what leadership was, and leadership helped me grow. Leadership in scouting started out as being in charge of snack and organizing that, but it has grown into helping out with Sunday School, sitting on a committee at church, and being able to help out with a church service. All of these things have just entered into my life within the past two years. Since coming to this church, I had never preached. Never thought I would preach. I never helped out with Sunday School or sat on a committee, but I do now. My leadership has grown up with me, and if I keep this growing rate up at this speed, you’ll be looking at your next president. My leadership has grown, just like my faith.

I was trying to think of a good way to explain how my faith journey has grown and expanded, and I was stuck until my mom was talking to me about some new idea that she came up with at three in the morning. Her title of this new idea was “The Mongoose and The Mustard Plant.” That was it! I thought. I finally knew how to explain and sum up my faith journey!

My faith journey started out as a mustard seed, for me. As I grew up, I attended church and activities with church. Every time I attended church, an activity, or a missions trip, my seed got some water and some sun. Every time it got some water and some sun, it would grow a little bit. Eventually, when my faith journey stops, my mustard seed will have become a giant mustard tree with deep roots into the ground, showing how much faith I’ve gained within my life. So here’s my last question to you.

Does faith start out with a tabulae rasa, a blank slate, or has God already planted you mustard seed?