“The Other Side Of The Mustard Seed”
Text:
Mark
© June 18, 2006 by C. Edward Bowen
At
one of the conferences that I recently attended, one of the speakers was
telling about a young married couple that had started attending a particular
church. And one week in the bulletin
they saw that the church was going to have a potluck supper, a dinner where
everyone was invited to bring something to share. And since they liked the church and wanted to
meet more of the people, they decided that they would go.
And
so they showed up the night of potluck supper, with the wife proudly carrying a
jello salad that she had made – one of those jello salads that has pretzels and marshmallows mixed into
it – and on top she had covered the entire jello
salad with a nice thick layer of cool whip.
And when they had walked into the fellowship hall, the wife proceeded to
take her jello salad out to the kitchen and handed it
to the ladies that were organizing the dinner.
About
ten minutes later, the pastor said grace and everyone picked up a plate and
started helping themselves to all the food that people had brought. But as that man and his wife made their way
through the line, they noticed that her jello salad
wasn’t on any of the tables. And so the
woman said, “Oh, I bet they put it in the refrigerator and forget to take it
out.” So she went out into the kitchen
to find it. But as she walked through
the kitchen door, her jaw dropped when she saw the woman in charge of the
dinner standing at the sink, scraping her jello salad
into the garbage disposal. The church
lady looked at the young woman and said, “It’s OK, honey, you’re new here. You’ll learn.
But we don’t eat cool whip at this church – we only use real whipped
cream.” And she continued right on
scraping every last bit of that jello salad down the
drain.[1] As far as that church lady was concerned,
there was one and only one right way to put a topping on a jello
salad – and cool whip wasn’t it.
It’s
sad but true that sometimes we get it in our minds that there is one and only
one right way to do certain things. And
that’s the case not only when it comes to the whipped toppings that we put on
our jello salads, but it’s also the case when it
comes to how we read Jesus’ parables.
When we read these short stories that Jesus frequently used in his
teaching, we often assume that there is one and only one right way to read
those parables, that there is one and only one right way of understanding what
each of those parables is supposed to mean.
But
the truth is that parables don’t have just one simple straightforward lesson. If they did, Jesus probably would have just
told people what the lesson was and skipped the parable. No, Jesus told parables to give people things
to ponder and think about, because the more the we walk around the parables
that Jesus told and look at them from all the different sides, we come to see
that there is much more to Jesus’ parables than we often realize.
For
instance, I remember how devastated I was when I first started preaching, when
I figured that I had preached a whiz-bang sermon about prayer, but then at the
door after the service some of the people shook my hand and said, “Reverend,
that was one of the best sermons on forgiveness that I’ve ever heard.” And I tried to force a smile as they said
that, but I couldn’t help thinking, “Forgiveness? That sermon wasn’t on forgiveness. That sermon was on prayer.”
And
in my early years of preaching, that would happen on a somewhat regular
basis. I would prepare a great sermon on
Subject A, but then some in the congregation would congratulate me for speaking
so eloquently about Subject B, a subject that I didn’t think I had even
mentioned in the sermon. Well, after
that happened several times, I thought to myself, “Either I’m a really rotten
preacher, or these are some of the dumbest people on earth.” And as I gave careful, thoughtful
consideration to what was going on, I ended up figuring that it had to be the
second option – that those people were just too dang dumb to understand my
sermons!
But
as the years went by and that sort of thing continued to happen from time to
time, I eventually realized something.
What I realized was that the problem wasn’t that I was a bad preacher or
that they were a dumb congregation. No,
what I realized was that when I preached and did my best to say, “Look
here! Look, here is the point that God
wants us to see!”, some of the congregation would invariably walk around the
sermon and listen from a different perspective and would end up seeing
something different. But whereas I had
always assumed that seeing something different was bad, that seeing something
different was wrong, I slowly came to understand that the message that God is
trying to speak through a sermon can indeed be understood by different people
in many different ways.
And
what’s true of sermons is true of Jesus’ parables as well. Although we might be tempted at times to
think, “Look! Here is what this parable
means,” it’s entirely possible to walk around a parable and look at it from a
different vantage point and find that Jesus has a whole other message he’s also
trying to get across to us, a message that we would have missed if we had
assumed that there was just one and only one message in the parable.
So
let’s take a look at this parable that we listened to this morning, the parable
commonly known as the Parable of the Mustard Seed. For most people who hear that parable, the
message seems to be rather obvious. The
parable says that the kingdom of God – and we need to understand that “the
kingdom of God” doesn’t just mean heaven, where we go when we die, but “the
kingdom of God” refers to the way that God’s kingdom, God’s rule, is present in
our world today – so the parable says that God’s kingdom is something like a
mustard seed that gets planted, and soon it becomes a magnificent bush, large
enough for all kinds of birds to come and make their nests there.
At
first glance, the parable seems to be telling us something about the way that
God’s kingdom is always growing and expanding in the world. Now, from a pure scientific perspective, the
mustard seed is not in fact the smallest seed in the whole world, but it
certainly is a very small seed. And so
the parable seems to be painting a picture for us, showing us that just as
God’s kingdom started out very small – after all, Jesus at first only had 12
disciples – in time that kingdom of God has grown and flourished so that now,
for instance, there are somewhere around two billion people on earth who call
themselves Christians. And so one of the
messages that Jesus seemed to communicating through this parable is that even
when what we’re doing for God might at first seem to be small and
insignificant, in time God can make it grow into something large and
wonderful. And as most people look at
this parable, that message – or something pretty close to that – is the message
they take away with them. But is that
the one and only message that this parable has for us?
Let’s
see. Let’s take a walk around the
parable and see what it looks like from a slightly different perspective. For instance, what are we to make of the fact
that Jesus compares the
For
example, maybe you have a garden, or you have a neighbor who has a garden. Most gardeners that I’ve come across over the
years take great pride in having neat, orderly rows for their flowers and
vegetables. The lettuce goes here in
this row, the radishes go here in this row, the tomatoes go in this row, and so
on. A place for everything and
everything in its place – everything, that is, in the place where we say it
should be.
But
the problem with the mustard seed is that it refuses to obey the limitations
that the gardener tries to impose on it.
As far as the mustard seed is concerned, it has its mind set on
spreading, and in time the goal of the mustard seed is to take over the whole
garden. So why would Jesus say that the
I
believe Jesus spoke of a mustard seed in his parable because that’s what God’s
kingdom is like. I believe in this
parable one of the things Jesus is trying to get us to see is that once we let
God into our lives, God isn’t going to stay put. God isn’t going to stay confined to that
section of our life where we say God can be.
After all, many people figure, “Hey, God, here’s the deal. I’ll let you into my life on Sunday mornings
from
The
problem, of course, is that God isn’t willing to stay inside the boundaries
that we try to set up. Because the next
thing you know, God is saying, “I don’t want to be a part of your life just on
Sunday morning, I want to be a part of your life Sunday afternoon as well. And I want to be a part of your life on
Monday and on Tuesday and on Wednesday, and on all the days of the week. And I want to be a part of your life not just
when you’re praying, but when you go to work and when you go to school and when
you spend time with your family. I want
to be involved in what you do with your time, I want to be involved in what you
do with your money, I want to be involved in what you do with your whole life.”
I
think a great current-day example of the mustard seed is to be found by looking
at what’s going on in China. You see,
the communist leaders there know all too well that if they allow Christianity
to spread freely, their country would never be the same again – they know that changes
would happen. People would come to see
that there is a God, and that God is a God who brings freedom and hope,
something that millions upon millions of people in China don’t currently have.
And
so if you look at the Chinese constitution, in the bold-face print they say
they have freedom of religion in China.
They say that the state cannot compel citizens to believe in a
particular religion nor can the state compel citizens not to believe in a
particular religion. That’s what it says
in the large bold-face print.
But
when you get down to the fine print in their constitution, you find that while
China is willing to tolerate Christianity to a degree, Christians are only
allowed to engage in religious activities inside the walls of
government-approved church buildings. In
other words, if Christians try to engage in any kind of outreach outside their
church buildings – in the city streets or in city parks – they can expect to be
harassed by officials and perhaps even imprisoned.[2]
But
the “mistake” those communist leaders made was they thought they could control
Christianity and keep it penned up inside the boundaries that they decided,
inside the walls of church buildings that they authorize and that they oversee. But just like with the mustard seed, once
those seeds of Christian faith got started inside the walls of those
government-approved church buildings, that Christian faith didn’t stay
there. And evidence of that is found in
the fact that while about 15 million Chinese people today attend officially
approved Christian churches, experts inside and outside of China agree that
there are probably somewhere around 80 million Christians in China who are worshiping
in unauthorized congregations, congregations that the Chinese government isn’t
able to control because there are so many of them, and new ones keep popping up
all the time.[3]
The
kingdom of God simply refuses to stay put, to stay inside the boundaries that
we at times try to set up. That’s
because God has things that God wants to accomplish in the world and in each of
our lives. So, quit trying to hold God
back. Because the truth is, we can’t
hold God back. Instead, allow that
mustard seed of God’s kingdom to come into your life, and just see what God has
in store.