In more and more neighbourhoods now you will see a small sign at the edge of a lawn or a community garden: “Pollinator habitat — please do not mow.”

Around the sign grow dandelions and clover and a dozen other plants we were taught to call weeds. We used to pull them, spray them, apologize for them when guests came. Then we learned that these plants feed bees and shelter small creatures, and something shifted. The plants did not change. Our seeing changed.

What we called a weed turns out to belong to a living community. What looked useless turns out to be life-giving. What seemed out of place turns out to be necessary for the flourishing of the whole garden.

Jesus’ parables work like that little sign. They do not hand us information about God. They change the way we see. They unsettle what we have already decided is valuable, respectable, clean, powerful, worthy. They ask us to look again at the people and the places we have written off.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,” Jesus says. And then: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour.”

We usually hear these as parables of growth — something very small becomes something very large. That is there. But Jesus is saying something stranger than that, and more disturbing. The word “disturbing” is a key word in this parable.

Jesus’ listeners longed for the kingdom of God because they were living in the kingdom of Caesar. Rome announced itself through armies and taxes, monuments and public executions. In the coins inscribed “the son of God.” It kept peace by fear and order by violence.

The kingdom of God named another world altogether — a world where God’s justice, mercy, and wholeness became real. Not chiefly a place the faithful go after they die. A way of living here, now, as though God and not Caesar were sovereign.

I also use the word “kin-dom” in my writings and classes. Not to erase the biblical word, but to say what God’s reign makes. God’s reign turns strangers into neighbours and neighbours into kin, meaning family. It puts relationships right — with God, with one another, with the earth.
So why, then, a mustard plant?

Scripture knows how to picture an empire. It pictures a magnificent tree: branches reaching toward heaven, birds of every nation nesting in its shade. Jesus’ listeners would have recognized that royal image at once.

And Jesus does not reach for the cedar. He reaches for mustard — a common plant, quick to spread, hard to keep inside the rows where you planted it. Matthew even calls the grown mustard a tree, which is very close to a joke, because mustard is a shrub. The empire’s cedar has been traded for a weed.

The kin-dom of God does not arrive towering above us. It begins near the ground, in something easy to miss. And still the mustard grows. Birds come; birds nest. The plant the careful gardener did not want becomes a shelter.

Which raises the question I cannot get around this morning: whom have we been calling a weed?

Whose presence do we find inconvenient? Whose voice do we quietly discount — because of an accent, because of a wheelchair, because of an address, because of who they love? Who has been told, in a hundred small ways, that they do not really belong in this garden?

Again and again Scripture shows God beginning among the people who have been pushed to the edge. The stranger becomes the teacher. The one at the margin shows us where the centre of the gospel actually is. The community that looks weakest is carrying gifts the whole church needs in order to be healed.

Then Jesus hands us the second parable: “like yeast that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until all of it was leavened.”

Yeast was not an obviously holy image. Elsewhere in Scripture yeast is what corruption looks like — something small working its way through a whole community. Jesus takes that suspect image and puts it into the hands of a woman doing ordinary kitchen work.

Her work happens out of sight. No one builds a monument to her. No one stands and watches yeast. But inside the dough, something has already begun.

And notice the quantity. Three measures of flour is close to fifty pounds — bread for a hundred people or more. This woman is not baking a loaf for herself. She is baking for a village. The kin-dom is hidden inside ordinary human labour, but where it is headed is abundance: a table with enough for everyone who comes.

Rise, dough.

The seed changes a field. The yeast changes the dough. God’s kin-dom does not rule life from above; it transforms life from within.

That matters for us. We are used to measuring ourselves by numbers — attendance, membership, budget, building, programs. I know. I know, Those things are real, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But Jesus hands us different questions. Are the birds finding somewhere to nest? Is the hungry neighbour being fed? Are the people who were once silenced now sharing power? Is the dough of this community actually being changed by justice and mercy and love?

We live in a wounded world — war, forced migration, a heating planet, racism, polarization, a loneliness that goes very deep. Set against all of that, what we can do looks impossibly small. One congregation. One conversation. One meal. One prayer.

Jesus’ answer is: remember the seed. Remember the yeast.

Someone speaks up when a racist remark is made at the table. A congregation listens to Indigenous truth without rushing to defend itself. A newcomer is welcomed, not as someone who needs our help, but as someone whose wisdom may change us. People from different cultures share leadership instead of everyone conforming to one tradition. A lonely person discovers that somebody will walk beside them.

Small actions. And the hidden life of God’s kin-dom is in them.

But let us not romanticize smallness. A mustard seed does not stay a seed. Yeast does not leave the dough as it found it. A multicultural song without shared power is not enough. A kind gesture that leaves an unjust structure standing is not enough. God’s love does not change only individual hearts; it seeks to transform the whole community—our relationships, our church, and the structures of society. God’s love does not change only individual hearts; it seeks to transform the whole community—our relationships, our church, and the structures of society.

This is why ministry cannot only be service offered by the strong to the weak. It has to become companionship — walking beside one another, sharing bread, receiving as much as we give, and letting ourselves be changed by the people we meet.

We are not called to become the great tree of empire. We are called into God’s unruly garden: to make room for the birds, to welcome the gifts that come from the margins, to trust the Spirit’s slow work.

We will not always see it. Yeast works in hiddenness. Seeds grow in the dark beneath the soil. There are seasons when nothing at all appears to be happening. But the kin-dom has its own life. It comes up in places no one planted it. It grows through people the world overlooks. And it cannot finally be controlled by prejudice, or fear, or empire — or even by the church.

So when you see what looks like a weed, look again. When your faithfulness feels too small to matter, remember the mustard seed. When you cannot see any change at all, remember the yeast hidden in the dough.

And when the wounds of the world tempt you toward despair, trust that God is already at work — in kitchens and gardens, around shared tables, among strangers becoming companions, wherever people find the courage to practise justice and love.

Rise, dough. Rise quietly, rise stubbornly, rise beyond anyone’s control. And through our companionship, our courage, and our life together, may the kin-dom of God rise among us.

Amen.