Mustard Seeds
The Sermons At Calvary
By The Reverend Rhonda Lee
Proper
6, Year B
Mark 4:26-34
Ezekiel 31:1-6, 10-14
Planting seeds
It's appropriate that our Gospel
reading this morning gives us two parables of seeds. It’s mid-June and summer is well underway here in Kentucky. When our year of Christian formation ended
recently, students and teachers received plants as parting gifts: begonias and
tomato plants that will bear one kind of fruit or another until classes start
again in September. Our church year has
moved into the series of Sundays after Pentecost, the months we call “ordinary
time,” that long green season when we focus on Jesus Christ’s earthly
ministry. Over the last few months
we’ve lived through all the high and low points of our faith story. Now it’s time to get down to the business of
hearing, studying, and reflecting upon what Jesus did while he was walking the
earth with his friends.
Jesus was a born teacher, and like
all teachers he had his favorite ways of getting his message across to
students. For Jesus, one of those
favorite ways was speaking in parables.
Parables are short, vivid stories, often in the form of a metaphor, that
use everyday things to expose a deeper lesson.
Today we’re talking about seeds, but in other parables it’s lost money,
or a bridal party tired out after too much celebrating, or a wayward child –
all things we can still relate to.
Jesus wasn't the first to teach in parables. Many of the prophets who had come before him had used them to
good effect. Think of Nathan: he
confronted King David with the story of the rich man who killed a poor man so
that he could steal the one lamb the poor man owned. That story brought David face-to-face with his own crime of
sending the soldier Uriah to his death so that he could marry Uriah's wife,
Bathsheba. That story also let David
know that he hadn't gotten away with anything: God and God's prophet knew what
he had done.
Most of Jesus' parables are more
ambiguous than that. It's true that in
some ways, the meaning of his parables usually seems pretty clear. Take today's reading: Seed is sown; the
harvest is coming. The tree of God’s
reign may have unimpressive origins, but in the end it will grow bigger and
stronger, and give more shelter, than any of the kingdoms of this world. In spite of this surface clarity, though,
most parables can be interpreted in several different ways. In Mark’s Gospel, just before the parables we
read today, Jesus says, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” That's an invitation and a call to each one
of us. It may not be an accident that
parables can be both startlingly clear and maddeningly ambiguous. It's possible that Jesus wanted to puzzle us
with his words, to push us past being passive listeners, and to challenge us to
decide for ourselves what claim his teachings put on our own individual
lives.
So we begin our contemplation of
Jesus' parables with two stories about seeds.
Our first parable is the story of the seed that grows by itself: “The
kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would
sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, the sower
does not know how.” Christians have
debated long and hard about who the sower in this parable is. Is it God?
Probably, since the sower becomes the harvester in the end: “when the
grain is ripe, at once the sower goes in with his sickle, because the harvest
has come.” If God is the sower, God
seems strangely disinterested and clueless, planting the seed without any idea
of how it's going to grow. But if we
read the parable closely, we see that the sower stays present, sleeping and rising night and day, and probably keeping
an eye on the progress of the seed as it grows. Can it be true that God doesn’t know exactly how the kingdom of
heaven is going to grow? If that is
true, then this parable suggests that a lot depends on us, at least in this
life. Our actions – the seeds of the
kingdom that we plant here and now – really do matter, and not just to us. If God is the sower, this parable seems to
tell us that the ways in which we grow in faith and works do matter to God,
because the sower is there at the end, at harvest time, taking possession of
whatever has grown.
The second parable is the story of
the mustard seed, “the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown
it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs...” Our efforts to live into the life that God
intends for us may seem weak and even futile sometimes, but God’s power will
energize those efforts – those seeds – and make them grow into something bigger
and better than we could ever have imagined.
And we and all our fellow creatures will rest in its shade. The image of the mustard bush is vivid, and
it has brought comfort to many a Christian who has wondered whether her living
has been in vain, whether his efforts have made any difference.
Besides the comfort, there’s also
an undercurrent of warning in both parables.
It’s more obvious in the story of the mustard seed. The warning is easier to hear if we remember
that Jesus was a travelling preacher in the Roman empire, a powerful occupying
nation always on the lookout for troublemakers, for rebels. Jesus’ words about the mustard bush echo
today’s reading from Ezekiel. In it,
the prophet warns the superpowers of his own day about pride. Assyria was once a great nation: like a
great cedar tree, “...it towered high above all the trees of the field...All
the birds of the air made their nests in its boughs; under its branches all the
animals of the field gave birth to their young; and in its shade all great
nations lived.” But that nation started
over-reaching to grasp more and more wealth and power for itself, and so its
fortunes changed and the tall cedar was cut down: “On its fallen trunk settle
all the birds of the air, and among its boughs lodge all the wild
animals.” God always makes a home,
somehow, for the vulnerable ones whom God especially loves: in both Ezekiel and
Jesus’ parables the birds have a place to rest, whatever happens to the tree in
the end. So the same words that gave
comfort to the crowds of poor people, outcasts, and seekers who followed Jesus
around, also contained an implicit challenge not only to individuals who
congratulated themselves on their own achievements, but to governments that
over-reached their authority and tried to keep a lid on political life and
religious affairs. The comfort and
challenge were there for anyone who had ears to hear, and Jesus told them to
listen.
Jesus tells you and me to listen too. Jesus’ parables aren’t just stories from
long ago, whose moral we’ve figured out and can safely ignore. They’re a living word, a word that we
wrestle with to find the comfort and challenge that our teacher offers us
now. Today’s parables encourage us to
plant seeds of God’s kingdom, and they warn us to be concerned about the
harvest those seeds will yield. Whether
it’s the issues being debated right now at our Church’s General Convention, the
investigation of the killings at Haditha in Iraq last November, the Calvary
budget, the federal budget, or our household budget, the Gospel of Jesus Christ
asks us to consider whether the things we do and say contribute more to
building up the reign of God or to tearing it down. There’s a strong chance that people of good faith will disagree
about the answer. After all, the
complexity of Jesus’ parables reflects the complexity of the world we live
in. But the process of discernment,
discussion, and even disagreement is important to a healthy life of faith. And as we move through this green season of
ordinary time, Jesus’ words and our acts of worship will guide us as we
consider which seeds to plant, and how to nurture them into a harvest of the
best we can possibly offer to God.