(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.
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