Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 14th, 2015
Text: Mark 4:26-34 Revised Standard Version (RSV)
The Parable of the Growing Seed
26 And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, 27 and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. 28 The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”
The Parable of the Mustard Seed
30 And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? 31 It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; 32 yet 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.”
The Use of Parables
33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; 34 he did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
“He did not speak to them without a parable.” Jesus’ teaching was done using parables. Today’s lesson about the mustard seed is probably one of the most well-known.
But what is a parable? One definition I found online puts it this way: “a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson, as told by Jesus in the Gospels.”
OK, so how is a parable different from other types of stories? What makes a story a parable instead of a fable? Aesop’s fables also illustrated moral lessons, but they’re not parables. So what’s the difference?
Fables are useful when you want to give your children some good advice or teach them a good moral or practical lesson. When you want your kids to understand the importance of telling the truth, you might tell them the fable about the boy who cried wolf. Or of you want them to realize that slow and steady effort pays off in the end, you tell them the story about the tortoise and the hare. When our daughters – and our sons, too, for that matter – are in those awkward pre-teen and teenage years when they struggle with their self-image and their self-esteem, we might point them to the Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of the ugly duckling that develops into a beautiful swan. Such stories give us insight into how the world works and how we are to live in it.
But it seems that parables, especially the parables of Jesus, are stories that are meant to impart truths that are often hard – hard to comprehend, hard to digest, hard to believe, and even harder to follow. Parables impart truths that are maybe even unpleasant.
So the way Jesus chose to deliver these truths was kind of sideways, kind of at a slant, in the same way that parents might explain things like lightning to children, as Emily Dickinson writes in her poem “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” –
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –
In other words, it’s not so much what you say as how you say it. I once saw a video of a presentation by Zig Zigler, the motivational speaker, where he illustrated this. “Telling your wife ‘yours is a timeless beauty,’” he quipped, “gets you a much better reaction than saying ‘Honey, your face could stop a clock!’”
Jesus knew this truth long, long before Zig Zigler came on the scene!
But why did Jesus feel it was necessary to teach in parables? What was so offensive, so unpleasant, about the truths he taught that he needed to make such an effort? The lesson we just heard doesn’t seem so offensive, does it?
Well, let’s take a look and see what Jesus is telling us.
The first parable is about a farmer who sows his seed and watches it grow, day by day. So far, so good. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But then we read how that growth happens without the farmer’s intervention – and the farmer in the parable doesn’t even know how it happens.
Jesus points out in this parable the truth of human helplessness. The farmer doesn’t make the seed grow. Even today, with all of our knowledge of genetics and so on, we still don’t know how it all comes to pass. The seed possesses in itself the secret of life and growth. To this very day, no one has ever possessed the secret of life. As close as we are today to unlocking that secret, it still remains just that: A secret.
So the possibly unpleasant truth here that we of this modern age especially hate to hear is that, despite our growing knowledge, despite our technology, despite everything, we are still dependent on the grace of God, and that just as much as those people were who listened to Jesus for the very first time.
But underneath that is also the truth that God’s Kingdom will come when God chooses. We can’t control it; we can’t determine when or where or how it will finally break into our world. God’s Kingdom comes apart from our efforts – we can’t make it happen. God is in charge; we can’t decide who’s in and who’s out.
We can only accept it as the gift it is.
This parable also tells us something else about the Kingdom of God. As David Lose writes: “Jesus describes the coming Kingdom of God in parables because he knows the reality it introduces is unexpected and that his hearers can’t really take it in all at once. Parables, as Eugene Peterson has said, are in this sense like narrative time bombs. You hear them – tick – wonder about them – tick – think maybe you’ve got it – tick – and then as you walk away – tick – or over the course of the next day or so – tick – and all of a sudden the truth Jesus meant to convey strikes home – boom! – almost overwhelming you with its implications…”1
And when that truth does hit, it upends your world, it turns your existence inside out.
It makes you uncomfortable.
We catch glimpses every day of the Kingdom of God stealing into our world, but we don’t – we can’t – fully understand or predict what the world will be like when God’s Kingdom is fully here. But one thing we do know: It will be a massive change!
And change is hard. This past month has just driven home for me the point that I am not the greatest fan of change. It seemed that we got slammed daily with one new challenge after another as we tried to sell our old house and buy the new one. There were a couple moments where I was about ready to say, “Enough! Forget it!” But Katie and I stuck with it, and in the end, it all turned out as we hoped. But there were a lot of changes to my daily routine!
I used to think that I could “roll with the punches,” and I guess I can – but only to a certain limited extent. Some change is fine, if it drops on me a little bit at a time – “one crisis at a time, thank you very much!” – but dropping the whole load on me all at once – well, that just trips the breakers and everything goes dark and stops for a while.
That’s why Jesus talked in parables – he delivered the truth, but he did it in such a way that it only slowly came into focus, like an old Polaroid snapshot; details only became visible gradually, which gave people time to digest them. By the time those who heard the parables had grasped the last detail, they could handle it.
And now we come to the second parable – the one about the mustard seed. What is Jesus telling us here?
First, a little background. In the Palestine of that day, as Professor William Barclay writes, a grain of mustard seed was a common symbol for the smallest possible thing. So “faith the size of a mustard seed” means “the smallest possible amount of faith.” We get that. But the mustard seed really did – and does – grow into something very much like a tree. One traveler in Palestine recounted that he saw a mustard plant which was taller than a horse and its rider – it was a plant that had brown billions of times larger than its original seed. And what Jesus says about birds nesting in the mustard plant are corroborated by others – flocks of birds congregating around a mustard tree was a common sight.
Barclay goes on to say that, in the Old Testament, great empires were described as trees, and all the nations that paid tribute to them were described as birds seeking shelter in their branches.
Very poetic – but what might that mean for us here at St. John’s this morning?
It means that we should never be discouraged by what looks like smallness – small beginnings, small numbers, small abilities, small resources – because these things are illusions that hide the deep and fundamental truth that God is on our side.
A couple weeks ago, I mentioned in the sermon that no act of kindness is “too small.” William Barclay offers an excellent analogy regarding this. He writes: “It may seem that at the moment we can produce only a very small effect; but if that small effect is repeated and repeated it will become very great. There is a scientific experiment to show the effect of dyes. A large vessel of clear water is taken and a little phial of dye. Drop by drop the eye is dropped into the clear water. At first it seems to have no effect at all and the water does not seem to be coloured in the least. Then quite suddenly the water begins to tinge with the colour; bit by bit the colour deepens, until the whole vessel is coloured. It is the repeated drops that produce the effect.
“We often feel that for all that we can do, it is hardly worth while starting a thing at all. But we must remember this – everything must have a beginning. Nothing emerges full-grown. It is our duty to do what we can; and the cumulative effect of all the small efforts can in the end produce an amazing result.” 2
This is what we learn from that lowly, tiny, insignificant mustard seed. When I look around on some Sunday mornings and see holes in the air that used to be filled by people, do I feel a twinge of concern? You better believe I do! Actually, I feel other emotions, too – sadness, sometimes a gnawing despair, but always a huge load of guilt for somehow having caused the loss – we pastors tend to think like that; it’s hardwired into us, I think – but that is not to say that I don’t bear some measure of responsibility, large or small, for the situation.
So that’s why I love this passage – it reminds me to never lose heart. It reminds me to soldier on. It reminds me that God has a plan for St. John’s, for me, for all of us, and that that plan is glorious and even positively audacious in its scope!
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: On October 29th, 1941, in the darkest days of World War II, Winston Churchill gave a speech in which he said the following – “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
Churchill could have been speaking to us. Should we fear the future? NO! Should we continue to drop our little drops of dye into that vast tank of water that is the world, with all its needs, even though we don’t yet see any change of color? YES!
Above all, let us remember that it is God who calls us here every week. And God has nothing but great things in store for us!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
1 Lose, David, “…in the Meantime,” davidlose.net
2 Barclay, William, The Gospel of Mark, Louisville, Kentucky, John Knox Press 2001, p. 127