Scriptures:
I Samuel 15:34-16:13 Ezekiel
17:22-24
2 Corinthians 5:6-17 Mark 4:26-34
I don’t know whether you’ve noticed or not, but the mulberry
bushes along the cemetery wall are gone.
During my first few years here, I tried to keep them within manageable
proportions, taking an old, dull hand saw to cut off the branches from time to
time. Not the most effective way to deal
with them, but I did what I could with the tools I had at hand. But Michael and John saw that the roots were
breaking up part of the wall, and so they dug them up by the roots and put new
cement in the places where it had broken up.
If, for some reason, I wanted to break up a wall or a concrete sidewalk,
I’d need a sledgehammer and a fair amount of strength and endurance. But over time, a plant can do that, just by growing.
Plants have power! Today
we have what could be called two seedy stories, two stories in which the power
of God is compared to the power of…plants.
These parables are, of course, Jesus’ parable of the seed growing
secretly and Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed. Both of these parables speak of the
unstoppable power of God in establishing God’s kingdom in a hostile world.
The first of the two stories is a seemingly unremarkable
story – a man scatters seed, the seed does its thing, and the man harvests the
grain - something that happens every growing season. Perhaps one thing Jesus is pointing to is
exactly that, while the farmer is involved in deciding where the seed is
planted and is involved in reaping the harvest – and, truth to tell, is also
involved in weeding and tending, though that part didn’t make its way into
Jesus’ parable – the real work is done by the seed and the earth – as Jesus
says, “the earth produces of itself”. The farmer could weed and tend a plot of
ground all he wanted, but without the seed and without the earth, there’s no
planting and no reaping. And Jesus is
comparing the reign of God to….this.
The second of Jesus’ two stories is actually a parody of a
story that would have been well-known to Jesus’ listeners. That story is the one we read this morning
from Ezekiel. Israel is compared to a twig
from the very top of a cedar tree that is broken off and planted on a high and
lofty mountain, where it grows into a noble, mighty cedar, which produces fruit
and provides shelter for all manner of birds.
The story from Ezekiel is God’s parable of the people of
Israel. Jesus’ parable of the kingdom of
God is a bit more down to earth, literally – instead of a twig from a cedar, a
tiny mustard seed; instead of a mighty cedar, a really big shrub. One thing remains, and that’s the birds.
The thing we may miss is that the mustard seed of which
Jesus speaks isn’t a plant anyone would have wanted in their garden – it was an
invasive weed; therefore not only a big shrub, but an obnoxious shrub. Once it takes hold, you couldn’t get rid of
it. Kind of like the pokeweed and sumac in our
cemetery, try as you might, you can’t kill it; it just keeps coming back. So
Jesus’ parable isn’t so much about a heroic little seed standing its ground
against all the big plants surrounding
it, so much as a story illustrating the phrase, “Give it an inch and it’ll take
a mile.” And Jesus compares the reign of
God to that.
So from Jesus’ parables we learn that the kingdom of God has
vitality, has power – and yet a very different kind of power than that of the
world. The world’s power is top down,
and is used to contain, to limit. But
the power of which Jesus speaks is from the ground up, starts small but
expands, and in its growth, indeed, in its very existence,
is subversive of the powers that be, kind of like the roots of our mulberry
bushes breaking up our wall.
This is, indeed, how the followers of the way of Jesus, what
would become the Christian church, began.
Last Sunday after church, during the study of the Sermon on the Mount in
Matthew’s Gospel, one of those with us remembered a lyric from the musical
Jesus Christ Superstar, regarding when Jesus came to walk among us: “Why’d you pick such a backward time in such
a strange land?” After all, at the time
Jesus came, Israel was just a territory on the far-flung fringes of the Roman
empire, and Galilee, where Jesus grew up and did most of his ministry, was on
the fringe of the fringe, in the middle of nowhere. Why not a place more at the center of things
– say, Washington, DC in the 1950’s. But, as the saying goes, “That’s how God
rolls” – starting on the margins, and starting small, and working in such a way
that confounds human expectations at every step.
And, if we think about it, our congregation started out as a
small seed in 1861, with 34 recent German immigrants and, at one point, all of
$9 in the treasury. During the period in
which the church was organizing, the group was served by pastors in the
Lutheran and German Methodist traditions, but felt a strong commitment to the
German Reformed faith. Bridesburg would ultimately become predominantly Irish
and Polish – and therefore mostly Roman Catholic – but the small seed called
Emanuel Church took root and continues to the present day.
I’d like to go back to my story about the mulberry bushes
breaking up the cemetery wall. Our world
is like a garden that God created, but that the forces of evil paved over –
kind of like in the song “they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.” And our hearts and our spirits can feel like
the land under the parking lot –fertile with possibilities, yet paved over with
concrete or asphalt –cut off from the sun by circumstances that seem as
permanent as a sheet of concrete. But if
we trust in the power of God, the seeds of hope planted by God in our lives can
grow and crack through the concrete barriers that separate us from the lives
God would have us live.
Jesus said, "With what can we compare
the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard
seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on
earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and
puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its
shade.” May God continue to
bring growth to the small seed of faith called Emanuel Church, that we can
plant seeds of faith, hope and love in the lives of those around us. Amen.
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