07/30/2026
Giving thanks for the life of Patrick Freeling.
The Gospel of Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
"God Watching Over"
Before we turn to God’s word this morning, I need to share some news with you. Friday at 10:25 in the evening, we lost a member of our wider Mendocino Coast family. Patrick Freeling, a California Fish and Game officer, died. He had just turned sixty. He leaves behind his wife Linda and his son Cole, who loved him, and who will grieve him for the rest of their days. He leaves behind all of us who knew him along this coastline, who watched him do his quiet work of protecting the animals, the plants, and the people who call this place home.
I want to tell you something about Patrick, because I think it matters for what we’re about to hear from Matthew’s Gospel.
Some summers ago, on one of those rare warm days here — you know the kind, maybe seventy-five degrees, when the ocean feels almost forgiving — I went swimming at Van Damme State Park without a wetsuit. Normally I know my limits. Thirty, forty minutes, and I come in. But that day was so warm, I felt good. I felt strong. I went out further than I should have. And by the time I turned back to shore I was cold and I knew I was in trouble. By the time I finally dragged myself onto the sand — an hour and ten minutes had gone by — my legs had gone numb underneath me. I couldn’t stand.
And there was Patrick. He had been watching my swim the whole time,
from a distance, without my ever knowing it. He came down and got my legs under me, got me steady, got me safe. He said, “I was watching you at a distance the whole time, making sure you were safe.”
I did not know, that day, that I was being watched over.
I found out only after the danger had passed.
Biblically, when we hear the phrase "at a distance" it is a clue to pay attention...something sacred is at work. That phrase reminds me of the story of the Prodigal Son where the son has basically told the Father that he wishes his dad was dead and takes his inheritance and runs. In this parable, when the Father sees the Son returning "at a distance"...what does the Father do? He runs and embraces his Son who was lost but now found.
Or the women who stood in solidarity with Jesus at the cross. They had walked with Jesus...they had prayed with Jesus...and now as their Teacher is dying on a cross they will not leave him and so we find the woman "standing at a distance" unable to leave.
Consider those moments when you like Patrick or like the Father or the Mother or the woman at the cross...stand at a distance. Those are moments to be paying attention.
Here is another small, strange grace ...a moment of attention....I want to share with you.
When Cole and Linda had to file the paperwork yesterday, the time of death was recorded in military time. Translated, that time — 21:25 — was Patrick’s own radio call sign. 21:25. The number he answered to his whole career, the number that meant I am here, I am on watch — that number came back to mark the hour he went home. I AM.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
I think it’s a kind of assurance, hidden in plain sight, that the God who watched over Patrick’s watching is watching over him still. That he is safe now, the way he made sure I was safe that day on the beach.
Let us hold Linda and Cole in our prayers this week.
And hold this thought too, because it is going to lead us straight into the parables before us today: sometimes the Kingdom of God is hiding inside something so small — a call sign, a mustard seed, a pinch of yeast — that you would walk right past it if you weren’t paying attention.
Cyril of Alexandria, one of the early teachers of the church, said that parables are word pictures — not of visible things, but of things of the mind and the spirit. Jesus is not giving us botany lessons or baking instructions. He’s giving us pictures for the eye of the soul.
The biblical scholar Robert Funk put it another way. He said the Kingdom confronts us through the power of metaphor — that a parable’s job is to strike the imagination, to carry reality inside it, to induce a vision.
So what's your vision for God's world? What do you actually see?
Here is what I see. I see a mustard plant — an herb native to Galilee, not some stately garden tree, but a wild, scrappy, black mustard shrub that can grow to eight feet tall. It is not a tree at all, technically. It’s a w**d. It germinates fast, and once it takes root, you can hardly get rid of it. Its seed — barely a millimeter across — was proverbial in the ancient world for being the smallest thing anyone could name. And from that seed comes an oil...from that seed comes a plant birds will nest in.
The story moves as our lives do: a seed is sown, it grows astoundingly, and birds come to nest in its branches. Three acts. And notice — the parable isn’t really about the farmer. It’s about the seed itself, and what it becomes almost in spite of us.
Isn’t that curious? A roadside w**d becomes the measuring stick for the Kingdom of God. Not the cedar of Lebanon. Not the great oak. A w**d that farmers were probably trying to pull out of their fields. What does that mean? I think it means the Kingdom should burn out our expectations. It refuses to let us picture God’s reign as something grand and impressive from the start.
It insists on beginning small — nearly invisible — and it insists on becoming, in the end, something that shelters creatures nobody expected to shelter.
Think, too, of the leaven. A woman takes yeast — a pinch, hidden — and works it into three measures of flour, more flour than one household could eat in a week. And the whole batch rises. Not because of anything dramatic. Because of what leaven simply is:
a hidden, inevitable, transforming power.
Paul knew this too. Writing to the Galatians, he said, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (Galatians 5:9). He wasn’t talking about bread. He was talking about how a small thing — a belief, a practice, an influence — works its way invisibly through everything it touches until nothing is the same.
Like the mustard seed once it’s sown, the leaven once it’s mixed has an inevitable effect.
You cannot un-mix it.
You cannot ask the dough to go back to being flour and water.
Something has begun that cannot be stopped.
Let us sit under the mustard plant this morning considering what it means for our lives.
The mustard plant grows large enough that birds come to nest in its branches. In Jesus’ world, birds nesting were sometimes a picture for the Gentiles — for the outsiders, the ones not yet gathered in, the ones who don’t belong to “us” in any obvious way. How might we live our faith so that it becomes, quite literally, a place for the birds to rest? A shelter wide enough for people who would never think to walk through our doors?
And the leaven works through the whole loaf until the bread is something a hungry person can actually eat. How might we live our faith so that it becomes bread — a meal that nourishes someone else, not just ourselves?
I think of the poets who understood this.
Wordsworth wrote of small, unremembered acts of kindness and love as the best portion of a good life — not the grand gestures, but the quiet, ongoing ones.
Mary Oliver spent a whole life teaching us to pay attention to small things — a grasshopper, a field, a single loaf of bread rising in a bowl — because she believed attention itself was a form of devotion, almost a form of prayer.
And I think of Patrick Freeling, standing quietly at a distance on a warm afternoon, watching a swimmer he had no obligation to watch, ready to act the moment he was needed. Nobody gave him a medal that day. Nobody even knew he was there — until the moment I needed him most. A small, hidden, watchful presence. A mustard seed of a moment. And it turned out to hold, inside it, someone’s whole life.
That is how the Kingdom of God works here on the Mendocino Coast.
Not with trumpets first. With seeds. With yeast.
With a man on watch who nobody sees until the numbness sets into your legs and you finally understand you were never alone out there.
Amen. Amen.
Let us pray.
Gracious God, we bring you our grief this morning for Patrick, and our comfort for Linda and for Cole, who feel his absence the way a shoreline feels the tide going out. Thank you for a man who watched over your creation — its animals, its plants, its people --quietly, faithfully, for years that most of us never noticed until we needed him.
And Lord, plant us like seeds. Small ones. Nearly invisible ones, if that’s what it takes to begin. Work through us like leaven — hidden, patient, inevitable — until something in the people around us begins, almost without their noticing, to rise.
Make us a shelter for the birds who have nowhere else to rest. Make us bread for the hungry, in whatever quiet way you ask of us. And when our own hour comes, let it be marked, as Patrick’s was, not by fear but by assurance — that the one who watched over us the whole time is bringing us safely home. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen
