"The Kingdom of God is a weed”

Sermon- Proper 6B/ Pentecost 3/ June 17, 2012

The Cloud of Unknowing, "O God, our great companion, lead us ever more deeply into the mystery of your life and ours, that we may be faithful interpreters of that Life to each other, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

First things, Jesus loved a good story.  He loved to teach using stories.  Stories teach without seeming to teach, and they help us to remember the point.  Katherine Huey writes that: “Parables, however, are more than just a good story, or a simple and useful illustration to make things clearer. If anything, they may have made things more obscure to the hard-hearted and the close-minded. Parables make us think, and think hard.”

So in today’s gospel Jesus tells us two short stories, two brief parables to help us understand his teaching.  “In the first three chapters, Jesus brought God’s healing and wholeness through his miracles. Now it was time to explain what was going on. These are Mark’s first parables, and he grouped together several about things that grow.”Rosalind  Brown

“Let me tell you a story”,  Jesus is saying in chapter 4, “let me tell you what the kingdom of God is like.”

And so Jesus begins telling us how strange and unexpected the kingdom is.  It’s like  a seed, a tiny, unbelievably small seed that is planted deep in the earth-where it grows slowly, gradually, relentlessly –but we, as a rule, don’t like tiny, and slow.  Alyce Mackenzie tells this story: “A friend told me about her young son who was doing a science project in his elementary school class. He planted several seeds and was supposed to monitor how quickly they grew. A problem arose, however. Seeds don't grow when chubby, little hands dig them up every day to see how they're doing.”   What if we dug up the Kingdom of God every day to see how it was growing?  What if you charted your faith every day and ask, “ok, am I more faithful today?  Am I more spiritual?”  Look at a child growing inside of a person, it is so slow, so unpersonlike.  Recently a young woman told me, “the fetus is at 3 months, we can hear a heartbeat-I can tell people now.”  For 3 months the kingdom had been growing before it even had a heartbeat. 

Look at your life.  How is the kingdom growing in you?  Is it taking forever?  Do you wish God would hurry up and get you “there”?  Jesus’ first story is that God is developing his kingdom in us and through us-whether we hear the heartbeat or not.  God is moving, the kingdom is growing .  The heartbeat will come.

The second story is the one we like-the mustard seed.  One writer I read said that Americans love this story because we love underdogs.  This tiny seed becoming a huge shrub would appeal especially to us.  But 1^st century Hebrews listening to Jesus’ parable about the mustard seed would have laughed at the first story.  Why, you ask?  Because they knew their Bible.  The great prophet Ezekiel had a prophecy that when the people of Israel returned from exile Israel would be like a huge majestic Cedar tree, beautiful and noble, where the birds of the earth would nest.  Instead, Jesus tells them, that the kingdom of God would be like a giant wild plant.  They would have been amused that God’s kingdom would be like a weed-the mustard bush.  People stand at the edge of the ocean, or look up at the Redwoods, or stare at the mountains and we talk about how it makes us think of the power and grandeur of God as the creator. “How Great Thou Art!” How many times have you looked at that shrub in front of your house, that ugly, growing, impossible-to- kill-bush and thought about the kingdom of God?

The story of the mustard seed was supposed to make people think-and think hard-about how the kingdom looks-and grows. 

The kingdom of God is that seed that surprises, that seed that seems impossible ever  to become something alive, that tiny unbelievably small germ that takes forever to have a heartbeat-and ne day grows into a living breathing force that cannot be quenched. 

There's a scene in the recent blockbuster film The Hunger Games …President Snow, the totalitarian ruler of futuristic Panem, asks his chief Games-maker -- the one charged with creating a spectacle as entertaining as it is barbaric -- why they must have a winner. The answer? Hope. He wants to give the oppressed people of Panem hope that maybe, just maybe, the odds will be in their favor and they may win the Hunger Games and escape their life of slavery. "Hope," he explains, "is the only thing more powerful than fear." But for that very reason is as perilous for a dictator as it is useful: "A little hope," he explains, "is effective- a lot of hope is dangerous."  A spark is fine-as long as it’s contained.”

The mustard bush, the seed planted deep, a spark that cannot be contained, the kingdom of God growing, is this force, this power developing , budding, emerging and one day you wake up and you hear a heartbeat.  Jesus tells stories to shake our world, to shape our vision, to make us think, and think hard about what we’re expecting, what we’re waiting for, where we believe God is.  The kingdom is small, insignificant, hidden, but it is emerging, it is breaking forth into the world and when we finally see it, hear it, feel it we wonder at it. Martin Luther once said: "If you truly understood a single grain of wheat, you would die of wonder."

Jesus tells stories.  He tells stories to help us understand and to make us think hard.  Today’s stories are about growth and hiddenness and underdogs and breaking expectations. 

One last story about the kingdom of God:

“That's what happened with Mr. Ballantine. The day the elderly man was shoved out of a car and deposited on the doorstep of a homeless shelter, another homeless man named Denver offered to help. In response, the drunken Ballantine spat out curses and racial slurs. Denver helped him anyway.
Even more than he hated people of color, Mr. Ballantine hated Christians...so much so that he would rather have starved than endure chapel sermons to obtain a free meal at the shelter. When Denver went through the serving line, he'd always get a second plate and take it upstairs to Mr. Ballantine.
Denver continued taking meals to Ballantine even after the older man had been moved to a government-run nursing home two miles away. When Ballantine's room was messy and unclean, as it often was, Denver cleaned the room and its occupant. Each time he came to visit, Mr. Ballantine cursed Denver and called him names.
One day a friend went with Denver to visit Mr. Ballantine. He asked the old man if he could get him anything. "Ensure and cigarettes," the man said. Denver and the friend went to a nearby drugstore to purchase the items. The friend sent Denver back to the nursing home alone.
Here's how Denver relates his conversation with Mr. Ballantine in the book titled Same Kind of Different As Me:

When I went back to Mr. Ballantine's room, he asked me who paid for the cigarettes and I told him Mr. Scott. "How am I going to pay him back?" he asked. I said, "You don't." "Why would that man buy me cigarettes when he doesn't even know me?" "Cause he's a Christian." "Well, I still don't understand. And anyway, you know I hate Christians."

I didn't say [anything] for a minute, just sat there in a ole orange plastic chair and watched Mr. Ballantine lyin there in his bed. Then I said to him, "I'm a Christian."
I wish you coulda seen the look on his face. It didn't take but a minute for him to start apologizing for cussin Christians all the time I'd knowed him. Then I guess it hit him that while I'd been takin care of him--it was about three years by then--he'd still been callin' me names. "Denver, I'm sorry for all those times I called you [names]," he said. "That's okay."
Then I took a chance and told Mr. Ballantine that I'd been takin care of him all that time, 'cause I [knew] God loved him. "God's got a special place prepared for you if you just confess your sins and accept the love of Jesus."
I ain't gon' kid you, he was skeptical. Same time, though, he said he didn't think I'd lie to him. "But even if you aren't lying," he said, "I've lived too long and sinned too much for God to forgive me."
He laid there in that bed and lit up one a Mr. Scott's cigarettes, starin' up at the ceiling, smoking and thinking. I just kept quiet. Then all of a sudden he piped up again. "On the other hand, I'm too...old for much more sinning. Maybe that'll count for something!"
Well, Mr. Ballantine stopped callin me [names] that day. And wadn't too long after that I wheeled him through the doors at McKinney Bible Church...We sat together on the back row, and it was the first time Mr. Ballantine had ever set foot in a church. He was 85 years old. After the service, he looked at me and smiled. "Real nice," he said. (Ron Hall and Denver Moore, Same Kind of Different As Me. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006, 162-3.)”

The kingdom of God is like a young woman who finally hears a heartbeat. or an 85 year old man who finally hears the voice.  The kingdom of God is like a weed that crawls into our lives and grows, develops,  and changes until it is our lives   It may take  3 months or 85 years but that heartbeat, that call will one day be a living breathing spark, that will not be contained.  And that is the story of the kingdom of God.

v           The Kingdom of God is a weed”