One of the humbling experiences of being a preacher is trying to preach on Jesus’ sermons. Jesus spends a lot of times in the Gospel preaching, and I find it a great to try and say something about Jesus’ words. Give me a healing story or a miraculous feeding or a boat trip any day, but no thank you to sermons about sermons. After all, if Jesus couldn’t make it clear, what hope do I possibly have?
This is doubly true for preaching on parables. That parables are unclear is actually intentional on Jesus part. We often think of parables in the same way we think of fables, as stories to teach a moral lesson. Like the tortoise and the hare, we look in the parables for which character we’re supposed to emulate and which one we’re not, and we try to line them up neat and tidy to draw out a nice, clean, straightforward lesson on how to live.
The problem with this method is Jesus doesn’t use parables to teach lessons. Jesus uses parables to approach truths, truths that are too big to understand in a straight lesson. And often, more than just being complex, the truths Jesus is getting at in parables are too challenging for us to want to understand. Jesus uses parables to confront us, to move us out of our comfort zones, and to see the world in a different light. To put it straight, parables are challenging to understand because they are meant to challenge our understanding.
I tell you all this as an introduction to this sermon on parables, but also as a bit of a confession. Because despite knowing all about how Jesus used parables, the very first thing I did when I read the text for this morning was to try and figure out who we are in the story. I wanted the parable to tell me, to tell us, how to act. And here’s what I came up with. So in the parable of the growing seed, “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, and he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” So first I thought, maybe we’re the sower, and the seed is faith, and the harvest is good works or people coming to faith or something like that. So we sow seeds of faith in ourselves and in each other, and that faith grows, and we don’t really know how, but God does it, and then at the right time we harvest that faith and use it for the world. And that was a pretty good understanding, and I kind of liked it, but it felt short. Seemed a bit to ambitious to claim the role of the “someone” in the parable. So then I thought, maybe we’re the soil. Maybe, God does the sowing and the growing, and our job to be just the very best soil for God that we can possibly be. To fertilize with scripture or eating healthy food or being nice to each other or whatever, and to just be really really great at being soil. And that felt like a really great point, and it also felt like I totally missed the point. Because see, the temptation I fell into in both my attempts was to focus on what I was supposed to do, how I was supposed to bring about the kingdom of God by my sowing or by my being great at taking care of myself or something. And here’s my experience with me, and maybe it’s your experience with you, I am great about thinking about what I am supposed to do, and not so great about doing it. I’m great about thinking about sowing seeds of faith in myself and in others, and not so great about actually doing it. And I’m super great about thinking of all the things I should do to take care of myself and learn and grow and be great soil for God to use, but all those shoulds in my life so often just end up with me paralyzed by feeling bad about how much I have failed at those things. How I have not gotten enough sleep or asked for help when I needed it or prayed enough or whatever. So if this parable is about what I’m supposed to do, then I’m left with nothing.
But remember what I said about parables earlier, they’re not metaphors. Somebody asked me recently how we tell what parts of the bible are metaphors. Whoever it was, here’s an answer for you, parables are not metaphors. I can’t break this down into a straight up comparison, this is this and that is that, despite my very faithful attempts to do that this week and wrap it up all nice and neat and hand it to you in a delightful sermon package. So here’s what I did come up with this week. Let’s call the remainder of this sermon some not metaphoric, but still sounding a bit like metaphors, wonderings about the nature of the kingdom of God.
In this first parable of the growing seed, Jesus said that the kingdom of God is someone, maybe God, maybe us, maybe someone else, scattering seed on the ground, and then somehow, the seed sprouts and grows and no one knows how it happened. Here’s what I don’t like about this. One) This someone could be anyone. The open-endedness of Jesus parable forces me to be open to the possibility that the someone scattering seed may not be me or Jesus. It may be someone I don’t like very much. Two) the kingdom of God is entirely out of my control. It says it right there in the parable, verse twenty-seven, the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. Friends, I want to know how the kingdom of God grows. I want to do my part, to be good soil, to scatter seed, to tend it well. Jesus parable says this kingdom of God thing is entirely out of our hands.
But here’s what I love about reading the parable this way. The kingdom of God is entirely out of my hands. Remember when I talked earlier about the anxiety all the shoulds bring me. About how hard I try to be good soil and how much it seems like I just can’t measure up. The kingdom of God does not depend on my ability to tend it. I find incredible freedom in that. It means I can scatter seeds, I can water crops, I can nurture and tend and harvest, and do my work with abundance, precisely because I am confident in the knowledge that because the work itself does not depend on me, I can’t screw it up! I don’t know about you, but for me, that really takes the pressure off! The kingdom of God does not depend on me. I get to be a part of it, yes. We know that from all the other things Jesus said about making disciples, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, bringing justice to the oppressed. We participate in the kingdom, this isn’t a stand back and watch pass. But we do those things knowing that in the end whether the mission succeeds or fails is not on us. And not even that the mission may succeed, but that the mission has succeeded, that the kingdom of God has won, past tense. Jesus already brought the kingdom of God through his death and resurrection, so what we are doing is participating in the unveiling of the already present kingdom of God.
And then there’s this second parable. Again, I thought about metaphors and how the tiny little mustard seed becomes this great plant that keeps the birds safe. And how my tiny little kernel of faith, when nurtured, becomes this towering fortress of God that, I don’t know what it does, hides birds. The metaphor breaks down here for me. But I was reading a blog by a theologian named David Lose, and he pointed out that mustard plant is not like a nice, tame shrub that sort of stays where we want it, like for example the bushes on the edge of the parking lot. They’ve gotten a little rangey with age, but for the most part they haven’t taken over the back lot. No, mustard plant is much more like the ivy in the front of the building. You maybe noticed this morning that the ivy is gone. We had the ivy removed because over the years it had worked its way into the wood and even into the bricks, and it was literally trying to pull down the building around us. And let me tell you what, the ivy did not want to come out. A group from the Burmese community were here all afternoon on Tuesday pulling and hacking at the stuff, and Doug and John went over it again with a Roto-tiller, and still I’m not convinced we’ve seen the last of the ivy. The kingdom of God is like that. It comes into the world and takes over, pulling down all that would keep us from God. Except that no matter how hard we try, how much roto-tilling and pulling and digging, there is nothing we can do to root the kingdom of God out of our lives, out of our world. If Jesus is making any analogy at all here, it is this one. The kingdom of God should probably come with a warning label, because when the kingdom of God gets into the world, it is invasive. And it will stop at nothing and it will not be stopped until it has accomplished its purpose, until all the world is drawn up into the love and the grace and the glorious reign of God.
And the bird sheltering thing. Where the mustard seed becomes a plant that shelters birds. Dr. Lose had a great point about that. We think about this as a cute woodland scene, with the birds all safely nestled in the tree. The problem with that is in most parables, the role of birds is to eat the seeds. The birds are not the good guys usually in the parables, the birds are the ones that come and sweep up the seeds and carry them away. They are the ones the parables warn us to watch out for. And yet, Jesus is talking about how the kingdom of God is like a destructive invasive species that offers grace and protection for even its enemies.
Friends, I think the point Jesus is making in these parables here is that the kingdom of God is crazy and out of control and out of our hands, and it will change us. It has changed us. The kingdom of God is like a handful of women who have next to nothing gathering around a kitchen table and realizing that together they have enough. The kingdom of God is like a little congregation without much money or many people realizing that they have an abundance of space and inviting that handful of women to set up shop in their Sunday school classrooms, and that handful of women becomes one of the most well-regarded non-profits in the community and hundreds of families lives are changed. And the little congregation sits back and wonders, wow, how did that happen! The kingdom of God is six Burmese young adults ripping out ivy to say thank you for the gift of a little water and soil, space to do the thing they love, space to grow the plants they remember from Burma, to fellowship, and to provide for their families. A gift that seemed so small, just the back lot we’re not using, but the kingdom of God transformed into more than we could possibly have given. The kingdom of God is showing up here every week, breaking bread together, drinking wine, hearing the word, praying and singing and experiencing God together.
The kingdom of God is up to something in this place, in this soil, in these seeds, with us. I don’t know what the harvest will look like, I don’t even know what’s planted or who’s doing the planting. But here’s what I know, here’s what I believe. The kingdom of God is loose in this place, it has changed us, it is changing us, and it will change us. Some days I like that, and some days, let’s be honest, I don’t. Some days that’s exciting, most days it’s downright terrifying. But I know that like the mustard growing into a shrub vast enough to shelter even the birds that would have devoured it, the kingdom of God always ends up bigger than my expectations. And we, thanks be to God, are along for the ride. Amen.
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