"A Mighty Shrub"

(Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mskiki/2117154936/)

June 17, 2012

GOSPEL READING:  MARK 4:26-34

²⁶Jesus also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, ²⁷and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. ²⁸The earth produces of itself first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. ²⁹But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”

³⁰He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? ³¹It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; ³²yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

³³With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; ³⁴he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

SERMON: “A Mighty Shrub”

If Jesus had a favorite subject to speak about, it might just have been the kingdom of God.  If he had a favorite way of talking about it, that would be parable.  And here we have perhaps the most well-known of them all: the parable of the mustard seed.

God’s kingdom creeps in like this teeny seed, smaller than any other, but when it grows it spreads its branches wide and becomes the greatest of all…shrubs.  Wait a minute.  That can’t be right.  Surely the kingdom of God grows into a mighty cedar of Lebanon or an oak of righteousness like described in Isaiah.  In Matthew and Luke’s telling of this parable, it does magically transform into a great tree.  We often like to assume that the point of this parable is what huge things God can grow from a tiny seed of faith. 

But here in Mark, all we get is a mighty shrub.  I have to say, I’ve never really stared at the blueberry bush in my backyard and exclaimed, “Ah, so this is what God’s kingdom looks like!”  Apparently God’s kingdom starts small and stays relatively small.  But maybe all this “small talk” is no accident on Jesus’ part.  Perhaps we learn something of how God chooses to work in this world.

God prefers to work through the diminutive and tiny (and no I am not tooting my own horn at this point, y’all!): one little word was spoken into the chaos of darkness—“light”—and so all was made.  The people of Israel were led to freedom by one tired man and his walking stick.  Vertically-challenged David was chosen to be King of Israel over his much more impressive brothers.  Ruth the young powerless widow refused to leave her mother-in-law and so they survived and ultimately became a part of Jesus’ bloodline.  Jesus was born in a lowly, dirty barn to a scared teenage mom and an older dad.  He chose only twelve disciples to create the movement that would change the world forever.  He fed huge crowds with one little loaf of bread and two fish.  And as one little word began creation, Jesus uttered three little last words from the cross to re-create this world: it is finished.  And it was.  All the power of sin and death, all of the separation between humanity and God and each other was finished, once and for all. 

This parable reminds us that, while the kingdoms of our world strive for bigger and bigger and more and more, God’s kingdom does not work that way.  It comes in the whisper of loving words, in the small action of really seeing those around us, in the single choice made every day to live for something and Someone greater than ourselves. 

While God can command all the powers of the universe to usher in a triumphant, mighty kingdom that will never end, God instead weaves the kingdom into seemingly-ordinary lives like yours, and mine.  Because God’s kingdom is deeply personal, revealed through every detail of our lives with no moment too insignificant or difficult for God to break in.

But smallness is not all we see of God’s kingdom in this parable.  This kingdom is like a mustard shrub that gives shade for the birds of the air, and spreads its branches wide enough for wandering creatures to rest there.  It is a nesting place.  Like I spoke of last week, it is home.

And as a shrub, it won’t hold as many birds as a mighty oak.  But perhaps lots of kingdom shrubs are what God is after: so that our faith doesn’t become anonymous, so that we don’t just become another number headed to heaven but so that we have the depth of relationship that can only be found in a small community.

There’s something else to this shrub kingdom: a cedar of Lebanon looks impressive stretching many feet into the sky, but a shrub never loses its closeness to the ground.  God’s kingdom is much closer to the ground than to the sky: not wanting to be a far-off concept dwelling in the clouds of heaven, God’s kingdom brings a little bit of heaven here, onto this dry, weary earth.  Closeness to the ground makes that kingdom a little more fragile, more exposed to illness and danger, but God would not have it any other way. 

We never really think of God’s kingdom as a vulnerable thing, but if God was willing to come to earth as a helpless baby, should we be surprised that God’s kingdom takes on that same incarnate risk?  The God who makes a kingdom like a shrub chooses vulnerability, because God would rather be intensely connected with this earth and thus open to its pain and abuse than safe and contained in a perfect heaven, separated from us. 

To sum it up, we learn from Jesus’ story of the mustard seed in Mark that God's kingdom is intentionally and subversively small, is willingly vulnerable, intimately connected with the joys and pains of this earth and provides a nesting place of authentic community.  We have that kingdom all figured out, don’t we?  Well, not really.  This story is a parable: that tricky teaching tool of Jesus that helps us see a small part of the picture more clearly, while recognizing that we will never understand the whole of it. 

In other words, parables remind us that we are not God, and call us to let go of that which is beyond our control.  Our parable this morning began with mystery: “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, ²⁷and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. ²⁸The earth produces of itself…”

And so try as we might to define God’s kingdom fully in this parable of the mustard seed, it will always in some ways be beyond us, while popping up in surprising moments of our lives to startle us with grace.   Barbara Brown Taylor captures this mysterious growth of God’s kingdom, saying,

“At my house there is a gardener and there is a worrier. The gardener is a pretty easy-going fellow. Every May or June he comes through the door with a brown paper sack full of seed packets and a couple of evenings later he can be found puttering around the yard, emptying the packages into shallow furrows, heaping the dirt into little mounds and curling pieces of fence around them.

Several weeks later, plants appear in the strangest places. He has been known to plant green peppers between the azalea bushes and broccoli by the mailbox. For the second year in row a stand of asparagus is pushing up through the roots of the crepe myrtle trees and sweet pea vines are winding through the branches of the weeping cherry. In a few weeks, string beans will overtake the back deck of the house, covering everything in sight.

All of this drives the worrier crazy. She knows how gardens are supposed to be and this is not it. You are supposed to begin by buying a book, for one thing, with illustrations on how to arrange plants according to size, height, and drainage requirements. First you must test the soil; then you must fertilize, mulch, weed, and water; above all you must worry, or else how will your garden grow?

To her eternal dismay and amazement, there comes a day every summer when the gardener proclaims that the vegetables are ready. He goes out to collect them from all over the burgeoning yard and a little while later the worrier sits down to a table heaped with manna. Against her will and better judgment she has to admit that he has done all right, in spite of his refusal to worry. This year there are even two dill plants that appeared out of nowhere, gifts from the earth itself.”

The earth produces of itself, the powerful, peaceful kingdom of God comes like a blueberry bush in the backyard, all the while calling us to rejoice in what we can see and trust in what we cannot: that a kingdom is coming, and that in some ways it is already here.   Worrying will not hasten the full sprouting of that kingdom…but loving, even a little, just might.  Amen.