We are the seeds
In today’s lesson from Mark’s gospel we see Jesus teaching the gathered people about the kindom of God. (1 & 2) The first parable compares the kindom of God to a seed, which someone has scattered on the ground, and after several days notices that the seed has sprouted and seems to grow more every day. The one who scatters the seed has no idea how this seed is transforming. It would seem the earth herself is producing the stalk, then the grain, and then the full grain head. With time, the grain becomes ripe and is harvested.
The second parable compares the kindom of God to a mustard seed, which when scattered on the ground grows somewhere between 6-20 feet tall, and with branches stretching as wide as 20 feet.(3) How incredible that such a tiny seed could grow into such a massive plant, as well as become a habitat for area birds.
So what is Jesus getting at with all this talk of seeds?
It would seem he is trying to tell the gathered people, and all of us, that--
We are the seeds.
We are the seeds who grow in the soil of God’s abundant and abiding love. We are the plants who mature in faith, and eventually disperse our own seeds in acts of self-giving and self-emptying love of God and neighbor. In time, as agents of God’s love, we plant more seeds.
We can take much from these parables.
At first glance, they remind us how much we can grow in our faith when we are nurtured by the love of God’s fertile soil. Often our faith begins with a glimmer of the holy, an experience of radical love that breaks us open; or an experience of the mystical and sacred, which can transform our entire understanding of creation. It can be a spark of faith, as tiny as a mustard seed, and when nurtured, will grow, mature, evolve, deepen, and expand--just like that tall and wide mustard plant.
The parables also remind us when we grow in faith, we scatter seeds, often not knowing the ways we influence those around us. As a young person in the church, I came across a saying that remains central to my own faith. Live your life in such a way that those who know you, but don’t know God, will come to know God because they know you. Or in other words, our actions speak louder than our words. When we embody God’s love in our actions, others experience God’s love through us.
Upon a second glance, if we are willing to dig into the soil, there is even more we might take from these parables. First- a bit of context.
We know that our experiences as children and young adults often have a profound impact on who we become. This was certainly true for Jesus. When Jesus was an infant, Rome’s appointed leader for Judea-- Herod the Great, led the Massacre of the Innocents, where he ordered all male children two years of age or younger to be killed.(4) Warned in a dream, Mary and Joseph had taken their son to Egypt, where they lived as refugees until Herod died.(5)
When the family returned to Judea, Jesus would have quickly noticed the Jewish people were a minority. It wasn’t always this way, but decades before the Roman Empire had conquered Judea, and now occupied the region. All residents were forced to live by the empire’s rules. There was tolerance of Judaism, but the majority of Jewish folks living in Judea would not have been citizens, which meant they had no real rights. Jesus would have grown up seeing his friends and family, and eventually experienced firsthand, what it means to be part of a minority group, pushed to the margins of society; a tolerated people in what was once their own land.(6)
Howard Thurman writes about how this formative experience influences Jesus in his book, Jesus and the Disinherited. (6)
He writes:
“The solution which Jesus found for himself and for Israel, as they faced the hostility of the Greco-Roman world, becomes the word and the work of redemption for all the cast-down people in every generation and in every age. I mean this quite literally...Christianity, as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus.” (6)
In other words, Jesus’ WHY for public ministry, was ultimately the response of his profound experience of growing up as a refugee and as a member of an oppressed minority. He developed “a technique of survival”; a Way of Love, as we might say. (6) He grounded us in God’s dream to transform this world from the nightmare it is to so many, into the dream God created it to be, as our Presiding Bishop likes to say.
The message that Jesus was born to deliver is that the kindom of God is in us. (6) The kindom of God is in each and every beautiful, beloved, and broken child of God.
Which means these parables comparing the kindom of God are also about what is possible in each of us, in our communities, and in creation. The parables are a word of hope, a word of love, for those who need it most. The experience of oppression and living on the margins can leave a people feeling desolation and despair. And here comes this young rabbi, proclaiming a near impossible to believe word of hope and love. Jesus tells us that if we let the seeds of our faith be planted, the fertile soil of our loving, liberating, and life giving God will nurture and shape us for the work of transforming this world from the living nightmare it is to so many into the absolute dream God has been carrying for creation since the very beginning.
Think of the most inspiring, life changing message of hope you have ever experienced. One you can go back to again and again and it gives you courage and strength to keep going. It was this kind of message that Jesus was delivering in these parables to the gathered crowd.
As Jesus tells parable after parable, his goal is help each and everyone of his followers to look within. To recognize they are made in the image and likeness of God, that they were part of something much bigger than the Roman Empire. Through the Way of Love, each person the movement touches is empowered to discover there is always hope when Love is the Way that guides us.
In his book, Love is the Way, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry writes:
“I’ve come to see that the call of God, the love that bids us welcome, is always a call to become the true you. Not a doormat. The true you. Not an imitation of someone else. The true you: someone made in the image of God, deserving of and receiving love...The ability to love yourself is intimately related to your capacity to love others.” (7)
As we join Jesus in the Way of Love, we must remember who we are, to know and love our true self. In his book, Bishop Curry reminds us of a Jewish proverb, “Before every person there marches an angel proclaiming, ‘Behold, the image of God.’” (7)
In other words, loving ourselves is loving God.
Loving ourselves is the first step to loving our neighbors.
Loving ourselves is how we will spread Jesus’ word of hope.
As we prepare to head back into the world later this morning, I want to invite each of us to do some reflecting. First, let us each identify one action that we can take this week, maybe even today, to truly love ourselves. Then, consider how this one action positions us to scatter seeds of hope. Amen.
Please note:
This sermon is focused on Mark 4:26-34.
If you want to learn more about the shift in language from Kingdom to Kindom, check out this article: https://eewc.com/kingdom-kindom-beyond/
If you want to grow your very own mustard bush, here is some information on how to grow them: https://homeguides.sfgate.com/size-mustard-bush-100618.html
Matthew 2:16–18
Matthew 2:13-15
Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, pg. 23, 18.
Bishop Michael Curry, Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times, pg 95-96
Comments
Post a Comment