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“Like A Mustard Seed”: Meditation 1 - 6/17/2018

Sunday, June 17, 2018

Rev. Debbie Spangler

Sermon Text: Mark 4: 26-34

The Kingdom of God---like a mustard seed—the smallest seed you plant in the ground—and yet it grows to become the largest of all garden plants—with branches that the birds can use to perch in. Like all of Jesus’ parables, there is more to the story than meets the eye!

The mustard bush is an annual that is cultivated in the field and grown for its leaves as well as its grains. The smallest of its seeds was proverbial but Jesus does not compare the kingdom of God to a mustard seed but to what happens to a mustard seed. As God transforms a tiny speck of mustard seed into a six-to-ten foot high shrub, what God will accomplish through the death and resurrection of Jesus will be just as extraordinary. The tiniest of seeds grows into the greatest of shrubs, and how this happens is veiled in mystery. Even a modern scientific knowledge of the DNA structure of the mustard seed does not dispel the mystery of its growth. The seed holds within itself the power to transform itself dramatically into something else. One cannot make a judgment about its potential based on empirical evidence when it is in the seed stage. One could dismiss the microscopic seed as something inconsequential, but it has a power within itself to evolve into something that one cannot ignore and that eventually attracts the birds.

The same thing, Jesus implies, is true of the kingdom of God. During the sowing stage, the beginning of the gospel, one must make a leap of faith that what Jesus says about himself and God’s kingdom is true. The kingdom of God is already present in the work of Jesus but remains concealed and modest. Many would never guess that this inconspicuous presence manifests God’s power and dominion that will reach out to all nations. The religious professionals misjudged it. Even Jesus’ own family missed it. The final stage will reveal a dramatic change from the beginning, but by then it will be too late for those who were unable to see what God was doing all along.

Jesus managed to both claim that he was fulfilling the old prophecies, the old hopes, of Israel and to do so in a way which radically subverted them. The Kingdom of God is here, Jesus seemed to be saying, but it’s not like you thought it was going to be.

The imagery of the parable of the mustard seed should check any triumphalist interpretation. The tiniest of seeds becomes the greatest of all shrubs but a shrub is still a shrub. The parable may be a rebuke of those expecting something grandiose from God, like the mighty cedar of Lebanon. In America, a 3,000 year old giant redwood, three hundred feet high and thirty feet in diameter and still growing would be the proud tree we would be most likely to choose as the best comparison to our image of what the kingdom is like.

But the kingdom will not fit our expectations or specifications. For those who want the tallest cedar, who want something more show-stopping, the kingdom of God as it is manifest in our world will most disappointing. It comes incognito, and up to the very end, one can only trust that Jesus’ movement is God’s work when all things will finally be revealed. The kingdom of God was present with the coming of Jesus. It was hidden but not invisible. Most did not see it. They were looking in all the wrong places for all the wrong things. Times have not changed, because people continue to fix their attention on all the wrong things in their search for God and for meaning in their lives.

The spectacular exercise of power is not always a sign of real strength. God’s reign, as Jesus pictures it, is not some massive juggernaut that mows down everything in its path. The signs pointing to God’s reign appear to be incredibly humble even when it grows large into a shrub and attracts the birds of the air. That is why so many will overlook its presence, underestimate its power, and shrug off its claim on their lives. Like Naaman who could not see dipping himself as instructed into the humble Jordan river to be healed of his leprosy, so we cannot see the incredible work of God in such a humble beginning as we see in Jesus Christ.

Consider this story: Almost 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to find the source of the Missouri River, and from there to discover a relatively easy water route west to the Pacific. Such a waterway, they discovered, didn’t exist. But they did succeed in mapping the Northwest. And 15 months after pushing themselves upstream, they found the headwaters of the mighty Missouri River near the Montana—Idaho border: a tiny little rivulet, which a member of the expedition, Private Hugh McNeal, straddled, thanking God that he had lived to put one foot on either side of the mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River. At its source, the Missouri looks a lot different from the powerful current that flows into the Mississippi River near St. Louis. Likewise, in the kingdom of God, many great things start out small.  [Marshall Shelley, Leadership]

To see and understand the kingdom of God is to walk by faith and not by sight as it tells us in 2 Corinthians 5, our other reading for today. Carl Holladay writes: “One who walks by sight will obviously focus on the visible and thereby will see only what is temporary, whereas the one who walks by faith will see beyond the visible to what is permanent and eternal. The life of faith, then, by definition transcends bodily existence as it draws its sustaining power from the risen Lord whom we know but cannot see, except with the eyes of faith.”

May our eyes of faith see the marvelous workings of the Lord from the smallest of seeds to the grandest of shrubs, hidden and yet visible, seemingly insignificant and yet powerful beyond measure. Amen.