SERMON PREACHED BY THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
ON THE SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
14 JUNE 2009
“The Kingdom of God . . . is like a mustard seed.” (Mark 4:30)
On the face of it, Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed seems harmless enough. He likens the mustard seed to the kingdom of God. The mustard seed is tiny, but oh my! --- When it grows, it develops into the largest of shrubs, providing shelter for birds who make nests in its branches. So, we conclude that from humble beginnings, even inadequate faith, the church will grow and prosper, providing a happy home for all who seek out her ministry. End of story. On to the next parable, please. Well, not so fast . . .
First, did you notice my homiletical sleight-of-hand? I said that the mustard seed was likened to the Kingdom of God, but in the next breath, I said that the meaning of the parable is that the church would prosper. Somehow we always translate “Kingdom of God” as “church” without batting an eyelash, because the church is our frame of reference. Have we lost sight about what the Kingdom of God is? The kingdom of God, it can be said, is a movement; but the church is an institution. Inclusive language people don’t use the phrase “kingdom of God” anymore, they say Reign of God, and maybe that’s an improvement. This confusion between kingdom and church is nothing new. At the turn of the 20th century, the French priest and theologian Alfred Loisy wrote, “Jesus annoncait le royaume, mais c’est l’Eglise qui est venue.” (Jesus announced the Kingdom, but the church came instead). Fr Loisy had no problem with the existence of a Christian community, but he criticized the church for its institutional and quasi-governmental structure. As a reward for his thoughts on the church, the church saw fit to excommunicate him. But we digress . . .
What do we know about mustard except for the fact that its seed is so tiny? (Horticulturalists, by the way, tell us that it is not really the smallest of seeds--- the orchid may well have that distinction --- Mark seems to be engaging in a bit of hyperbole.) To best understand the parable, we must think in the way the first hearers of this parable would have heard it. They would find it strange that a bush, a shrub would be used as a symbol of the Kingdom. Well versed in Hebrew Scripture, they know that a sheltering tree has long been interpreted as a symbol of a powerful nation. They would immediately have thought of the story in Ezekiel in today’s Old Testament lesson) in which Yahweh plants a cedar shoot on the mountain heights of Israel. It becomes a majestic tree in which birds of every kind could make their nests. This made sense, a mustard plant did not. Why? Because the mustard was seen as a common garden weed, which didn’t have the status of a great tree.
So what Jesus was saying was that first, the kingdom is home-grown, starts in our own backyard; it doesn’t have to be imported, as the cedars were, whose shoots were brought from Lebanon. The Kingdom of God indigenizes itself, wherever it happens to be. It adjusts to the mores and the ethos of the people. It speaks their language. I remember attending church in remote villages in the Congo, and not knowing a word of Swahili, but I could follow the mass without a hitch.
But the language of the Kingdom differs in another way. I believe the great debates in the church over such matters as the role of women and the question of human sexuality have little to do with who is right and who is wrong, who is enlightened and who are Neanderthals. I believe the issue is that the people of God are at different stages in their faith journeys. I always like to point out that it was at the 1888 Lambeth Conference that an African bishop (the only one in attendance) who asked his colleagues to make polygamy possible for Muslim converts. Forcing a new Christian to give up, say, three of his wives, he argued, would subject those women to penury and ostracism. The bishops, however, were resolute in condemning polygamy as unbiblical and unchristian. But at the Lambeth Conference in 1988, exactly a hundred years later, the bishops rescinded their rule for exactly the same reasons put forward a century before. Moral of the story: If we live a hundred more years, we’ll see that all of the church’s issues will have been put to rest.
The next thing we should know about mustard is that it is a pesky weed. It was impossible to eradicate once it infested a field --- so much so that Jewish law forbade it to be planted in a garden. It was all right to plant mustard in a field, especially at the borders, but in a small garden, it would mingle with other plants, and even encroach on their turf. In other words, the faith held by people in the Kingdom of God is tenacious; once it takes root it is there to stay.
The ruling from Leviticus (Leviticus has laws about everything --- even mustard!) was for the purpose of maintaining order --- read “segregation” in nature. (Indeed, a favorite Biblical argument for segregation was the edict that you shouldn’t plant two different crops in the same field [Lev. 19:19]). But the Kingdom of God, where “all sorts and conditions” of God’s people are welcome, has no such standards. If this sounds familiar, it is because it is the agrarian version of the parable of the dragnet that Jesus told to fishermen, in which he taught that the Kingdom of heaven was like a net containing fish of ever kind [Mt. 13:47-50].
Another factoid: Wild mustard, like all weeds, menaces the cultivated plants in the field. Likewise, the Kingdom of God, when it is proclaimed, almost always poses a threat to the establishment. Jesus was killed because his message upset the Roman establishment. While he was preaching the Kingdom of God, the people were saying “We have no king but Caesar.” He upset the religious establishment by insisting that the Law be tempered with an alien ingredient known as love.
More about the mustard bush: By telling us that that plant provides shelter for the birds of the air, Jesus is telling us that the Reign of God embrace the least, the lost and the last of society who depend on God for their blessings. This parable is Jesus’ symbolic, poetic way of telling us about the tax-collectors, the prostitutes and (no pun intended) garden-variety sinners who will inherit the Kingdom of God before those who believed themselves to be entitled to it.
Now, as you know, I am fond of preaching about things about which I know nothing --- like physics and cooking and mathematics. Today I add gardening to the list. I know nothing about gardening. In fact, owing to Calvary’s success with its gardeners, I have engaged them for our house --- I figured a gardening firm called “Mustard Seed” couldn’t be all bad. The last thing I want to say about the mustard plant is that it is an annual. An annual --- duh ------- is a plant whose life cycle is one year, from seed to blossom to seed. But if left to produce seeds, many annuals reseed themselves. Could not our vision of the Kingdom be like that ---- with periods of blooming, sometimes fading, and then regeneration? Also, unlike perennials which bloom in the same place every year, the annual can flourish in virtually any good soil. Likewise the kingdom of God is not a stable, unchanging entity, but a peripatetic one, going from place to place, planting the message of the Gospel wherever it takes root. The Kingdom of God is always engaged in the act of sowing.
But when all is said and done, the parable of the mustard seed tells us that “small is the new big.” It warns us that we should not be put off by what appears to be unimpressive. Just as the tiny mustard seed grows into a large plant, so the Kingdom is present even if it is hidden or ignored. The Almighty constantly confounds our sense of logic, and always holds up those people, those places, and even those plants which we would not give a second thought to. This comes as a comfort to us when we have doubts about our faith, or how inadequate it is. The parable teaches us that it is not the greatness of our faith that matters; it is the greatness of the object of our faith, Jesus Christ.
Let us pray:
We plant a grain of mustard seed and in our faith we find
The proof of God is love indeed, that blossoms from its kind.
Our actions more than words, define how love’s example feeds
A greater love, for Love divine burst from the smallest seeds. AMEN.
[UCC Hymnal, 540]