Scattering with Patience and Hope
June 14, 2009
Ezekiel 17:22-24 and Mark 4:26-34
Preface to reading the text from Mark:
For those of you unfamiliar with the lectionary that frequently determines the texts we use for preaching and worship, it is based on a three year cycle. Each of the three years there is a different gospel that is focused upon. Matthew is year A. Mark is year B. Luke is year C. John is interspersed throughout the three years. This year is year B, so Mark is our main text for the rest of this year. We actually started our focus on Mark back during Advent in December and got through about 3 chapters. But then Lent came, and we have not used Mark since the first week in March.
Mark is the earliest written of the four gospels. It is a bare-bones gospel—no frills, just direct sentences with a frighteningly quick pace. If you remember, there is no birth story of Jesus in Mark. Instead we start with the words of John the Baptist, who was baptizing people and calling for repentance. Today’s passage is from chapter 4.
By this time, Jesus has already healed people who were burdened with sickness and deformity, he has already angered the Pharisees with liberal Sabbath teachings, and he has already called his twelve disciples and is preaching to crowds of folks who follow him around wherever he travels.
In our passage today, Jesus is sitting in a boat on the sea, because so many people had gathered around him to hear his words that he could not longer stand on the shore, but had to climb into a boat. After speaking for a while, Jesus ends his preaching with these two parables of the kingdom of God from Mark: (Mark 4:26-34).
This morning I’d like to look at each of these two parables individually, and then bring them together, hopefully unveiling a word of God for us this morning in the process.
The first parable in Mark is sometimes called the parable of the seed growing secretly. In it, a person scatters seed on the ground. Over days, weeks and months, he watches the seed emerge from the ground, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain. Then, when the fruit of the ground is ready, it is harvested.
The parable seems pretty simple. Seed is scattered and plants grow.
In our modern scientific world, the complexities of seed promulgation seem rather mundane. Today we know how to test the pH of the soil. We know that nitrogen is essential for protein formation which helps plants grow. We know phosphorous helps in flower, root and seed formation. We know which nutrients plants need and how much. We can even genetically engineer plants to grow in climates they weren’t originally found and to develop enormously sized and “perfectly” colored fruits. And it is rare for today’s common backyard gardener to even buy seed for their gardens. Instead it is much easier to pick up a seedling at the garden store and simply transplant it in a pot of soil—no wait, no fuss, and few failures.
But to Mark’s audience, planting was a very different experience. One could plow a field, yes. One could add manure for fertilizer, yes. But that was about it. The daily, difficult toil of plowing, scattering, and farming was frequently a game of waiting and hoping. Hoping that some seeds would take. Hoping that the earth would be kind. Hoping that God would provide enough rain.
And when seeds did produce, we are told in our passage today, it was the earth producing of itself. The Greek word used here is automate from which we get our English word “automatic”. The earth produces a seedling automatically, of itself, without human control on interference. The implication here for the community of Mark is that they can scatter the seeds of the message of Jesus, by talking of their experiences, by living a wholesome and generous life, but they can’t control the outcome of the kingdom of God. We can scatter seeds our seeds of faith, but we can’t control whether or not they take root and grow in the world in which we live. Sometimes the results are good. Sometimes they are not.
I read a rather tragic story this week about a man in the United Kingdom named Frank McGarahan who was visiting his family for the weekend for his niece’s baptism. He was out late with his brother and his cousin the night before the christening and as they left the bar to go home, they saw a group of youths mercilessly beating up a homeless person across the street. When Frank and his brother approached the group to plead on behalf of the victim, the group turned on him and his brother, beating them both senseless, and then running away, leaving Frank to die on the street. Frank had scattered a seed of peace in the midst of violence, but could not control whether or not it would sprout.
The story of Frank’s courageous effort to stop violence only to have it turned on him is one that is heart-wrenching to hear, but, in a sense, it would be one all too familiar to the group of early Christians reading Mark’s gospel. They were only a tiny group of followers and chances are that their early attempts to share the message of Jesus were met with contempt, disagreement, and rejection. Later they were to be persecuted in the Roman Empire, facing death all too frequently. Yet they continued to scatter their seeds of faith, even though few people responded in the early days of Christianity. And Mark may very well have recorded this parable of Jesus as a way to say to the early followers: keep on working, have hope, keep scattering the seeds of your faith. Don’t be discouraged in times of trouble. Eventually, with God’s guiding hand there will be growth.
There is a strong tendency in our American culture to treat faith as a commodity that one owns. We have faith, we are told. We even have Jesus inside our hearts we learn when we are young. And like any commodity there is a strong temptation to keep what we have and not share it with others, to not put it into practice when our lives are scary and we are unsure of ourselves. We want to hold onto our seeds of faith for when the growing season might be a bit better, or when people will be more receptive.
There was a PBS documentary this week about a unique niche community in the United States that has an extreme passion for ferrets. The little furry, energetic weasels are bred for pleasure and company as well as for, get this, competition. One of the special traits of pet ferrets is that they love to gather whatever they can and place it in little piles around the house. They scamper around, hopping and clicking, joyfully carrying socks, trash bags, whatever they like, in their teeth and piling them up in secret places. One of the ferret owners interviewed in the documentary even sang a little song about her love of ferrets and their quirky gathering behavior. It went something like this:
And then with single-mindedness she feathered up her nest,
She lined them with my children’s socks…she really liked them best.
And then she decorated it with bits of treasure found,
Treasure being anything that chanced to hit the ground.
Ferret, Oh ferret, gatherer of stuff,
Ferret, my ferret, when will you have enough.
There is a tendency in our culture to be ferrets of the seeds of faith—to hold on to the teachings of Jesus as something personal, as something in our hearts only, and thus we are not ready to scatter when the time comes. Perhaps when we see someone being taken advantage of we resign ourselves to the fact that it was their own personal choice and there was nothing we could do about it. Perhaps we don’t see how our faith should affect our feelings and attitudes toward international issues, or towards care for the environment, or towards economic and social injustices here at home and around the world.
So perhaps from this first parable today we can learn from Mark that we are called to scatter the seeds of faith wherever we are. We are not to horde them for ourselves, but to share God’s love, God’s righteousness, God’s hope, God’s peace, in easy times and in difficult times, knowing that God’s Good Earth will produce fruits in its own time and way. We are simply and powerfully to be the scatterers of God’s goodness. The rest is up to the Lord.
Now, let’s turn to the second parable where we hear that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. This parable is found not only here in Mark but also in Luke and Matthew and because of that most of us are probably somewhat familiar with it. But with familiarity sometimes comes the tendency to overlook rather obvious things. For instance, we hear that the mustard seed is the smallest of all the seeds, which is not true at all there are other seeds quite smaller than that of a mustard plant.
And what is so special about the mustard plant itself? I had never seen a mustard plant, so I looked them up online this week only to find that they are not all that grand. They only grow 10-15 feet high and many times fields of planted mustard for harvesting are no more than a few feet high. There are other plants in the areas where Jesus lived which were much taller, larger and grander and he could have chosen them as a parable illustration. Maybe there was a mustard plant by the seaside where he was preaching these words and it became handy illustration. Or maybe there was something else…
In the Hebrew Scriptures we find several illustrations strikingly similar to this one:
In Ezekiel 17:23, God tells Ezekiel that he will restore the dominion of David to the Israelites with these words: “I will plant [the cedar], and it shall bear a shoot, and it shall yield fruit and it shall become a great cedar. And every bird shall rest beneath it, and every fowl shall rest under its shadow.”
In Ezekiel 31:6, we hear these words about the Egyptian empire: “In [Pharaoh’s] boughs all the birds of heaven made nests, and under his branches all the beasts of the plain bred, and in his shade all the multitude of the nations dwelt”
And one more time, in Daniel 4:28, where the tree equals King Nebuchadnezzar: “Under [the great tree] the wild beasts lodged, and in its branches the birds of heaven dwelt.”
The mustard bush parable, indeed, has a long tradition and one that is not only Biblical, but is found in many non-Biblical cultures around the world even today. It is yet another version of the cosmic tree of life where God provides leadership and protection for the nations of the world. The birds that dwell in the branches of the mustard tree do not represent individuals Christians as many people presume, but rather are groups of people—nations, cultures, and countries. But God has ultimate control of the tree. It is God who raises up the tree for nations to reside in its branches and it is God who can fell the tree if the nations do not practice justice and righteousness.
Which brings us back to the mustard plant. It is specifically stated in our passage that this is not a tree, but a bush. And we have to keep in mind that the community of Mark was within the confines and control of the massive Roman Empire, a political sequoia or redwood in which the mustard seed of Mark’s community and the larger Jewish community was but a tiny and insigificant part and only one of many nations dwelling in the shadow of Rome. As theologian Ched Myers puts it: “The idea of the smallest of sprigs surviving in the forest, much less overthrowing the mighty Rome, was absurd. Yet the…mustard seed image propses exactly such a mismatch!” Such was Mark’s firm apocalyptic conviction that [God] would ‘bring low the high tree [of Rome] and make high the low tree [of the early Jewish Christian community]’ (Ezek 17:24)”.
And it is not even a tree that God will replace Rome with. Rather it is a simple bush. Surely this is one of the surprises we Christians should come to expect from the teachings of Jesus. It is not the grandiose things of this world that impress God. It is not height, nor breadth, nor weight, nor size, nor property, nor wealth for which God looks, but righteousness and justice, peace and generosity, equality and fairness, hospitality and love.
When we take these two parables this morning there are at least two words, as Ched Myers suggests, that we can grasp: patience and hope.
With patience and with hope, Mark encourages his community and hopefully still inspires us today, in the words of an old Curtis Mayfield song to “keep on keeping on” scattering our seeds of faith and knowing that the good earth provided by God will nurture our labors into the fruits of God’s harvest. We are to keep on scattering righteousness, because righteousness will prevail. We are to keep on scattering justice because justice will grow. We are to keep on scattering love, because love will win. There will be troubles, there will be failures, and there will be hard times and treacherous pathways. But if we keep on keeping on, scattering the goodness of God with patience and with hope, our seeds will take root, they will sprout and grow, and God’s kingdom of love and justice will overflow. Amen.
Mark Hughes, The Independent, accessed on June 11, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/killing-of-a-good-samaritan-1701098.html
